Part of my desire to paint these illustrations by hand is nothing more than nostalgia. I enjoy seeing original illustration art. I love visiting other illustrators’ studios and seeing walls and file cabinets filled with paintings and drawings. I like being able to hold the illustration and see the physical record of how they made the illustration.

This children’s book is my chance to continue that tradition. Without the weight of an impending deadline I’m allowed to slow down and actually paint.

But because I don’t paint very much, I am very slow. I am slow due to inexperience and hesitation. But mostly I am slow because I procrastinate.

I mentally panic in front of the blank illustration board. I look for other things to do: clean house, laundry, reading, checking email.  Periodically I walk back in and look at my easel, but it can take me several hours to get up the nerve to actually fill a glass with water and set up to paint.

Yesterday afternoon I started to paint. I traced the camel drawing onto illustration board with blue transfer paper. Then I started blocking in the background with gouache.

At least it’s a start.

I like making preliminary sketches on tracing paper because it lets me experiment with the drawings. I can move and try new body parts, alter expressions and shift compositions. And because part of the idea for this book is to show cut-away views of the animal costumes, it lets me draw the animal, lay another sheet of paper on top and draw the people inside of the animal.

When I drew the initial sketch I wasn’t sure what type of animal they were trying to be. Also the shape of the animal’s body is created by draping a sheet over the people. I hadn’t decided if I wanted the costumes to look handmade or if I wanted them to look like actual animals (or at least possible animals).

Initial camel sketch

In the second sketch I’ve refined the figures and added a head to the animal. In this sketch I imagined the head was some sort of sculptural object that the front figured carried above him.

second camel sketch

I decided that it would be more fun to have some kids stacked on top of each other to extend and control the animals head and neck. I also experimented with giving the animal some antlers.  On the left side of the sketch are some thumbnails for the pacing of the book. Right now I’m thinking that the pages will alternate with an external view of the animals and people watch them and then when the reader turns the page they get the internal view.

camel sketch 3

In this sketch I decided to rely on some of my visual research and make the animal more specifically a camel.

camel sketch 4

I then scan the drawing into the computer and trace it in Adobe Illustrator and experiment with the colors.

camel digital painting

I am still debating whether I should do the illustrations digitally or if I want to actually produce physical paintings. I’m going to take this illustration and rework it as a painting. Producing digital illustrations is much faster. But it loses some of the hand drawn touch. We’ll see. I’ll scan the finished painting when I’m done.

My favorite animals I saw at the zoo: The camels, hippopotami and orangutans

Yesterday morning I went to the St. Louis Zoo to make notes and take reference photos. It was chilly and overcast, so I had the place to myself. I enjoyed watching the animals but I had to keep reminding myself about the premise for the book: There are no animals at the Azoloma Zoo, only people and puppets.

I watched the animals and created word lists of what they were doing. This worked great for the primates: producing a long list of active words. It worked less well for slow, grazing animals like the antelope. I focused on the animals and watched how they moved.

I thought about the size of the animals and how many people would be needed to make the animal come to life. Some animals, like the primates, are easy fits. But other animals will be a greater challenge. How can I put someone in an Ostrich suit? In some illustrations I think the action of the animals will be emphasized. In others I think the focus will be on the ingenuity of the animal costume.

I took hundreds of photos of animals and their habitats. Because the zoo was empty, I was less self-conscious about taking photos of empty cages and exhibits. But I’ll probably need to go back when it’s crowded with kids to shoot reference photos of people at the zoo.

Idea one: There are no animals in the zoo

I’ve been toying with this idea for about a year. It’s based on a series of sketchbook drawings of people inside of increasingly elaborate animal costumes.

When the animals escape from a small family-run zoo, the family must dress up in elaborate home-made costumes and pretend to be the animals.

The initial attempts at the story were written in prose form and centered on one of the daughters in the family. But as I worked on the story, it became increasingly bogged down by the logistics of building this kind of zoo. If some of the costumes require multiple people, how many people are in this family? This would have to be an enormous extended family. I started adding cousins, aunt and uncles. Well fine, I decided: I’ll just add as many family members as I need. But then how do I refer to those family members? By name? By relation? And how much time would it take to build these animal costumes? And what were all of these family members doing before the animals escaped?

I realized that by the time I could answer all of these questions, I’d only have a few pages to really focus on the animals. Which is why I was drawn to this book in the first place: The chance to make fun and fantastic animals with people inside of them.

So yesterday I recast the story from an outside perspective: The skeptical child who is convinced that there are people inside of the animals. He walks the reader into the zoo and then goes from animal to animal. We see the external view of the animal. We turn the page and we see the x-ray view of the animal. This version of the story doesn’t require tremendous  exposition. There is no back story. It focuses on the funny people inside of the animals. And in simplifying the story, I switched the writing from prose to rhyming verse.

I’m nervous about rhyming. I know that there are a lot of aspiring writers doing bad impersonations of Dr. Seuss. I know that some editors could be turned off by another rhyming children’s book. And I know that I must be disciplined and avoid forcing words to rhyme (anyone have any suggestions for a word that rhymes with puppets?)

Idea two: Dance daddy! Dance!

The dad comes home from work exhausted. But when his daughter crawls in his lap, he lights up and dances with her around the house. They waltz and they two step. They tango and break dance.

I had this idea last week in the middle of the night. I woke up, grabbed my iPhone and sent the first draft of it to myself at 4 a.m.

I’m attracted to this story because of A) my own tendency to crank up the music and dance around the house and B) recent youTube videos of my 3-year-old niece dancing at a concert. The entire story arc is there. Plus I think it’ll be fun drawing people dancing.

It’s written in prose form. But when I switched the Zoo story to verse it made me conscious of the cadence of this story. For a story about dancing it seems like I need to be particularly aware of the rhythms being used. At the extreme perhaps the story changes rhythms depending on what is being danced. Maybe I only use that in parts. But regardless, I need to be incredibly aware of how it sounds as it is being read aloud.

Idea three: A fable on the Sun and the Moon

Tomorrow my brother and sister-in-law are having their second child, my second niece. Their oldest daughter’s middle name is Luna. And the second daughter’s middle name will be Soleil.

I’ve been thinking about a short fable on the sun and the moon dancing in orbit around mother Earth. I know: it sounds fairly new agey—fairly hippyish.

But I’m not the one who named my kids Moon and Sun.

Unlike my initial experiment, my goal isn’t to produce an entire children’s book in one week. At the end of the week I’d like to be 90% of the way to having a book that could be submitted for publication. That means:

• Story completely written
• A dummy book showing the pacing of the story and refined sketches for each spread
• And two or three finished illustrations that show the style and quality of illustration expected for the entire book

I  want to approach this week with the enthusiasm of art school with all-night drawing sessions. There will be no chores. No housework. And I’ll do my best to ignore any other distractions.

I’ll use this blog to record my progress.

This is how I learned to make books in art school:

Straightedge, knife, double-sided tape and a bone folder. Cut out each spread and bind it together.

It is a time consuming process. Add in the cost of having the pages printed at Kinko’s on nice paper and it is also potentially very expensive. I think my college portfolios cost about $75 each and took about 15 hours to bind.

My first children's book

I was reminded of this on Christmas Eve as I was rushing to bind a dummy version of my children’s book experiment, “Piper Had a Little Lamb”. I finished the book on December 22. Unfortunately that didn’t leave me enough time to have it published and delivered in time for Christmas as a present for my niece. So I printed the spreads off on an old Epson printer and bound the book by hand.

The small prototype was half the size, flimsy and had very faded colors. And on Christmas morning I sat there trying to explain to my two-and-a-half-year-old niece the concept of a dummy book being a prototype for an unpublished book. The published book would be larger, hardback and with bright colors, I promised.

I used an online print-on-demand book publisher called Blurb. I heard about them at a St. Louis illustrators’s meeting in November. Blurb offers a variety of books from small softcover, black and white books to large, color, hardback books with image-wrapped covers and dust jackets. People make amazing photo books, portfolios and comic books. You can order as many copies as you want, whenever you want and the prices are comparable to what you see in book stores.

The published books finally arrived this week. I think they’re beautiful (the books, not the illustrations). I ordered one hardback and one soft cover book to see how they would compare. The hardback book has an image-wrapped cover. It has a soft, matte finish. The pages are glossy, nicely weighted paper with enough opacity so that the illustrations don’t show between pages (I sprung for the $3 upgrade for nicer paper). The softcover book has a high gloss cover that is faintly translucent . In both cases the colors are bright. (One thing i noticed: The colors on the softcover book shifted slightly yellow compared to the hardback book.)

The other nice thing about Blurb is that you can list your book in their online bookstore. You set the price and people can flip through a 15-page preview of your book.

They feel like Real books. They even smell like Real books.

And they’re SO much easier and cheaper to produce than the books I used to spend hours and hours printing, cutting and taping together.

After holding one of the books, I’m eager to start work on my next book: An original story with more detailed and fully realized illustrations. Maybe if I start now, I could actually have it printed before next Christmas for my niece.

So last weekend I created a deadline: Produce a children’s book in one week. The goal wasn’t to create the perfect book (and rather than worrying about the story, I just used a nursery rhyme). But in 9 days I’ve taken those thumbnail sketches and transformed them into 12 11 spreads.

I need deadlines. I need accountability.

My hope is that setting deadlines and starting this blog will help motivate me to tackle one of my larger projects.

I’ll try to post examples as I work but for right now, check out my portfolio.