Children's Book Illustration Project for Pacific Northwest Children's Book Conference 2009

Those of us in the illustrator's track at the PNWCBC were given a scribbled prompt that an anonymous person in the writer's track had written earlier that day. We had to create a story around the prompt, and then tell the story visually.

My writing prompt:
"The red lady's hair perfectly matched her orange dress and she bobbled along like a giant pumpkin. 'Sweets for Sweetie,' she sang as she rolled into the bakery."

Our first assignment was to create a front and rear view of our character. Here's what I did:


















Then we had to come up with a story using all of the narrative points in the prompt. For me, it all just happened organically. There was all this talk about "No Cutesy-Pie!" being Linda Zuckerman's hard and fast rule, and here I was drawing a big lady going to a bakery...well, I couldn't resist.



On the last day, the illustrators (there were 8 or 9 of us), had to go up in front of the whole conference group and explain our process. I had a pretty good 5-minute walk through of it, but I think it worked most of all because of presentation, not the bizarro interpretation of the prompt. The story, in short: Sweetie's the daughter of Cutesy, the big lady. Sweetie's sick and tired of Cutesy's pie. They've plumbed the depths of their individual psychoses. Sweetie fantasizes about the demise of her mother, ergo: "No More Cutesy-Pie!"

Everyone had a good laugh, and it felt pretty good!