Story Building & Writing Drafts

As I mentioned in my last free inquiry post, the picture book, The Name Jar was a big reason for why I chose to do this picture book project. Throughout my time in elementary school and high school, I never encountered The Name Jar, by Yangsook Choi, but I really wish I had. The story follows a young girl from South Korea who is deciding on a new name for her new life in North America. Ultimately she chooses to keep her Korean name, Unhei. It’s a meaningful story that I and many others can relate to or learn from.

I did a lot of story brainstorming and came to a relatively simple story about learning. I want to include the ideas of learning from mistakes, learning in a variety of ways, and overall send the message that learning is a challenge, but a fun one that can take time and effort.

My Progress: Above, I have my writing drafts for 12 spreads! I struggled with how to end the story and I did figure something out, but I’m still not sure if it’s the right way to end it. All of it is really rough and I haven’t gotten anyone else to give me feedback yet so I’ll most likely change a lot of things around during the illustration process, and until the end. Below, I have more illustration experimenting, which is also my website’s main home image.

This coming week, my plan is to continue experimenting and to start working on storyboarding the illustrations on my iPad, which is the exciting part for me!