#tumblr has automatically picked up on my tags and just has them ready by default

[dorklyelectric]

More stuff I made for pride month, but this time, they kiss, and also I painted water. Water is oddly very fun to paint. Text vs no text versions!

[alecjmarsh]

How I Make Story Mood Boards

Written by request!

First, here are some mood boards that I have made. I’m linking them so I can refer to them and give specific examples--I would advise having them open while you read. 

Loud the Waves Roar   |   Winter Song   |   Yellow Rose   |   Tirsa

Before You Start

As soon as I start developing a story, I come up with a tag for it on tumblr. Sometimes it’s the name of the story, but if I don’t have a name, I call it “project—keyword.” That way I can save anything that might be relevant until I have enough of an idea about the story to start an aesthetic. Sometimes by the time I’m ready, there are some real gems there.

Finding images

This is really difficult and usually takes me a couple hours. I start by simply searching for anything that might be vaguely relevant to the story. For Yellow Rose, some of the terms I googled included: woman, 1930s film star, witch, witchcraft, dustbowl, storm, 1930s, cabin, gardening, farmer, field, vintage car, wolf, werewolf, guitar, musician, folk music, Bonnie & Clyde. Be creative with your terms, and scroll through a few pages of results.

Google tends to return a lot of stock photos, so I also use tumblr a lot, and should use pinterest more, but sometimes google image is good enough

Find actors who resemble your characters. Bonus points if the actors have been in movies set in a similar time period.

Remember that images can be cropped and filtered. If you only need a hands, try looking with terms like “gentleman” or “teacup” or “praying” or “shirt cuffs” or something that might have a hand doing something interesting in it.

Sometimes, finding the right image is a lot of work. The guitar image in Yellow Rose is one I found, cropped, and then put through like 6 Photoshop filters before I thought it looked sufficiently vintage (and I still don’t love it.)

Save everything you might use in a folder. You’ll be surprised what you end up keeping at the end. Each of the mood boards I linked has 25-30 images saved in the desktop folder.

Words (optional)

I like to put words on my aesthetics! For Yellow Rose, I took lyrics from a Laura Marling song. The album Semper Femina is basically the soundtrack for that story. I think for the Winter Song words, I searched “relationship” or “romance” on tumblr and scrolled until I found something I liked. I pick out words fairly early in the process because I need to know how much space they’ll take up.

While doing the layout, I also decide if the words should go over an existing image or on a solid colored background, which can take up space if you don’t have a lot of images, or put emphasis on the words if that’s what you want. That’s what I did in Tirsa’s mood board, since those words are so indicative of her journey.  

Layout

I look at the images and pick out a couple that I know I have to have. That helps me decide how to arrange the other pieces, and then the other images usually get picked to fill in the gaps. You can see from my linked boards that I like playing with shapes.

There is nothing wrong with a standard set up! It’s non-distracting and lets you focus on the images instead.

Some classics are a 3x3 grid of square images or a 2x4 table of images that are wider than they are tall. Both are going to be automatically balanced and easy to read.

On tumblr, images placed side by side get automatically cropped into the same dimensions. This keeps things balanced along a vertical symmetry line (the same on the left and right). If you’re working in Canva, photoshop, or another photo processing app, you’ll have more options

Yellow Rose: For this I started with the concept of a 3x3 grid. The wolf and the herb pictures were square, and the photo of the girl was nearly square, so it made sense to crop everything else that way. Instead of doing a perfect grid, I decided to put the wide image in the middle because it really captured the feeling of the wide sky being swallowed up by dust clouds. It went in the middle to keep the top and bottom balanced. The top row is Florence, and the bottom row is Rosa, so each of the girls get the same amount of images.

Winter Song: Winter Song is primarily a romance, set against a political backdrop. I knew that Irina, as the POV character, had to be more prominent than Viktor in the layout, so I put her up top. I loved that image of Emmy Rossum and knew I had to have it, so I found two images with similar proportions to go on either side of it. This mood board also tells a story as it goes down. The top row is Irina as she arrives in St. Karlsburg. The words show the change in her life that catalyzes the story—meeting Viktor. Then there are two images to show the political unrest in the city. One is a riot of peasants and one is a marching army, but both show crowds in mirror images of each other. (It’s possible I flipped one of the images to create this effect). The bottom row shows her personal life—her writing, her lover, and the long conversations they have together over tea.

Cohesion

Now for all the fiddly bits that really make the post come together. To make it look like a single art piece and not some images pulled together from google, they need to look like they came from the same source. The first thing I do is crop the images super carefully. I do the cropping first because sometimes it turns out an image won’t fit in with the others once it is cropped.

I build my aesthetic posts directly in tumblr, which is kind of janky so I have to be careful. You don’t have to do this, but I like being able to click on each image and look at it separately.

Next is color. I think it’s important that every image have a similar color feel, or that certain images are intentionally bright for emphasis. I do this by playing with saturation sliders and filters in the default photo editing software on my PC.

Part of color cohesion should be in your mind from the beginning, so you pick images with lots of blues and greens (as in the case of Loud the Waves Roar) or something like that. It makes your life easier later.

Yellow Rose: Sometimes a color choice is genre motivated. Yellow Rose is entirely sepia toned because (1) it’s set during the dustbowl and (2) it’s a metaphor for Florence’s state of mind.

LTWR: Sometimes color is setting motivated. Loud the Waves Roar is much brighter than my usual mood boards, but medieval courts were just Like That, and also it is set in a country that is tied to the sea, and blues and greens help emphasize that.

Winter Song: Sometimes color is more symbolic. All of Winter Song is slightly desaturated because it’s set in a fantasy world based on the 1910s, but there is more variety. I desaturated the city street to make it sit right with the other two images in the top row—if it was too bright, it would draw the eye and look like the most important image. The pictures of the crowds are intentionally sepia toned to look like vintage photographs or newspaper clippings (Irina is a journalist). The bottom row, Viktor’s row, is more brightly colored both the draw the eye and to show that that is the main focus of the story.

Tirsa: Tirsa’s mood board is mostly reds (her hair/blood) and green (gives a botanical/medical feeling), so I desaturated the blue sky so as not to unbalance the rest of it.

I love mood boards that are mostly desaturated except for two images in similar color that create a balance and draw the eye. Not every image should be equally important, because that exhausts the eye. Pops of color, or text to break up the images, keeps the eye interested. There’s also some color theory that goes into this, as too many different colors can look garish or cluttered, so picking a couple complementary ones and desaturating the rest can be helpful. Go with what looks right.

Once everything is laid out, I try to walk away for a little bit and come back to it with fresh eyes. Do the pieces still fit together? Do the right images draw my eye? Do I understand the essence of the story? Do I like it?

If the answers to all these questions are yes, it’s time to post.

OH AND PLEASE CITE YOUR SOURCES!!!!