Wednesday, June 4, 2014

BeaverMAYnia

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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.”

 
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!