Polly - Growing Up

Characters & Art

In the beginning, our team wanted to create an adult storybook in a dark way and we set our target audience on 16-year-old teenagers. When we created Polly (our leading character), we thought Polly should look like the average person but should have an unusual aspect to her behaviour. For these reasons, I created Polly whose expression was without youth.

Since the end of our story was too sorrowful to be accepted by teachers, all the teachers in the class suggested us dropping the age of our audiences, and made the ending more hopeful. After a long discussion, we took the teachers’ suggestion and reset our target audience to 10-year-old children.

Here came a problem, I had no idea how to create a cute but elfish Polly. One of the teachers suggested that I search foreign children on websites, and she told me that a lot of foreign children dressed in a spectacular way. Fortunately, I found a black girl with curly hair, and I knew immediately that she was what I wanted.

The 1st Draft & The 2nd Draft


There were a lot of problems in the first draft and the second draft：

1. We wanted to present too many things in one picture, and that would make readers confused.
2. Imagination in those pictures was not enough, and some teachers thought there was more imagination in words than in pictures.
3. I didn’t have any idea about the conception of 3D space; therefore, the composition of this storybook looked planiform and boring.
4. Some of compositions in the storybook would not be used in on-line storybook, and we had to take such problems into consideration.

The 3rd Dreft

I referred to some storybooks, such as “Millions of Cats” of Gag Wanda, “Journal Secret du Petit Poucet” and “Les Princesses” of Rebecca Dautremer, and “Jo Singe Garçon Autrement Jeunesse” of Alemagna Beatrice for improving those compositions in the storybook. Moreover, I took a teacher’s suggestion that we should connect each page and create compositions in streamline. I picked color-river as connection between each scene so that the transformation in each scene looked more smooth.

The Story

The story tells about an elfish girl named Polly who has a great imagination in her daily life. Unfortunately, no one likes mischievous Polly. Polly gets hurt badly, and she tries hard to become a normal girl. Nevertheless, she still fails and hides herself in her own imaginary world. Finally, she finds imagination can not fulfill all of her needs. She constrains herself from imagination in the end. 

Semi-Finished Story

This storybook is still a semi-finished one. There are 3 more months for switching the storybook into an online storybook. Before the switching process, the storytelling still has to achieve great improvements.

Title Polly – Growing up | Description Storybook, Jan., 2012/Story by Team of Polly/Illustration by Yan, Chu-Chun | Method Pencil, Painter | Size 28cm (W)*19cm (H), 32 Pages | Purpose This is a work of a program, ”Character Development and Storytelling for Electronic Illustrated books ”, which I’ve taken in 2011.