Since a month of toil is never enough, after a month of
working on the owl LINE Stamps, (now called Stickers, for the US Market, I
suppose), I then started messing around with finding a new character, and
deciding on a beaver.
He was so cute, I decided, “Hey, why don’t I draw 40 of him, and use 'doing an in-depth character study' as an excuse and come up with a picture book about it?” You know I can rarely do things for less than two rationalized “reasons.”
He was so cute, I decided, “Hey, why don’t I draw 40 of him, and use 'doing an in-depth character study' as an excuse and come up with a picture book about it?” You know I can rarely do things for less than two rationalized “reasons.”
Drawing 40 beavers was fun! Even
though it took me forever. (I was going through a lot of personal drama with
multiple pet death and stuff, so it took me longer than it should have). Then
it took me a month to color them. But don’t get me wrong – in the meantime, I
was writing and revising a beaver-based picture book. It evolved from something
really quite terrible to something that got the high praise that it “makes
sense and could work.” High praise, indeed! Well, that was the second draft.
The first draft was a nightmare of Julia psychoses. (I told you, I was going
through personal drama). Anyway, a few
drafts later, I was ready to thumbnail the story (okay, I lie, I thumbnailed
from the first draft on – it helps!), and then sketch out a first draft of the
dummy. Gotta have a dummy for the big SCBWI conference in August!
