Character Development for My Next Children's Picture Book

I spent some extra time on this image of the kids having a meal. They were hungry after the hard work of getting over the high wall at the border. I still have 10 pages in the storyboard that lack images. There’s more text in this book, and that means I’ll have to work on slimming down the dialog if I want to limit the book to 40 pages.

I keep seeing an ad on Youtube that the biggest handicap that writers face is interruptions. Without them, a writer’s path to glory is quick and certain. However, with those interruptions, such as walking and feeding the dogs, have a lunchtime conversation with my beloved, without a coffee break in the afternoon, and possibly a catnap, my life would be a lot less fun. I may have several interruptions during the day, but I believe that they help me to put appreciate the hours that I do have.

Here’s one of the images I worked on today. It’s destined to become page 14. In this scene, the kids are eating lunch in a vegan restaurant in Mexico City. I notice that the cranky chef is casting a carnivorous eye on his customers.

More Character Design for a Cute Butterfly

Today I spent my time working of making Buddy cuter. For one thing, he’s got too many legs — they clutter up the composition and he starts to look heavy instead of airy. I’m thinking of humanizing him the same as the other characters, with clothes, arms and legs. When he needs his wings, they’ll magically appear and become huge enough to carry a burro over a wall. The main consideration is making all of this anthropomorphic behavior believable.

Here are some of today’s sketches. Drawing “cute” is harder than I thought it would be.

Picture #32, The Long Lost Uncle

To wrap one of the story’s loose ends, the fate of the uncle who fell down the chimney and was never seen again, I’m going to show that he was a buddhist monk who decided to form a sangha with Bernie the Buddhist Dachshund. I made this rough sketch on my old iPad Pro. I spent hours figuring out how to get the image from the iPad to my desktop computer without using wifi. When I have a free moment I might talk about that.

Affinity Photo For The iPad Is Officially An Obsession

I’m having nightmares about Affinity Photo. The problem is that it’s a deep, full-featured program with a lot of functionality hidden behind gestures, contextual features, “personas”, and “studios.” So far I’ve learned the basics of selecting and deleting selections, the triple color pickers that all have different functionality, installing brushes and swatches, and more. My biggest inspiration for using Affinity Photo is Frankentoon.com, a cool site with some great free and for-pay resources for Affinity Designer and Photo, and Procreate. Frankentoon provides killer demos showing what you can accomplish with his brushes, and with his talent! Exciting stuff.

Frankentoon.com has great Procreate resources, too. I bought his Procreate Crayon Brush pack for my partner — when she saw the demo video and she totally coveted them.

A Tax Day Quickie

I spent the day going our taxes, but I moved forward one inch anyway. Here’s the image of Momma Jay scolding Jimmy for disobeying her strict order not to go near the scary chimney. Squarespace makes it simple to get a post up quickly with minimum fuss. It’s worth the $$$.

Another lost file, or am I losing my mind?

I’ve got to get organized…for the next book. My problem is that I feel that I’m losing pictures that I’ve already colored, but now I’m getting the feeling that I only think that I’ve painted them. All of the images I’ve painted are on this blog, and when I look for the “missing” pictures, they’re not here, which definitely means I never painted them in the first place. Mystery solved.

For the next book I’m going to get organized. When I started this book I had a casual system, but somewhere along the line I got sloppy. Too frequently my “systems” become an inconvenient pain to deal with and I just start winging it. I end up stashing files on iCloud, or on OneDrive, or in Dropbox, or in whatever directory I happen to be working in.

Here’s the directory system I’ll use for my next book. I got this idea from my partner, who is very, very organized. It’s simple enough that I will be able to work with it.

Today’s image shows the Jay family about to get on the Moustache Bus. This is one of my favorite scenes.

Somedays Everthing Slows Down to a Crawl

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Not much progress today. At least, not as much as I wanted. The switch from Sketchbook to Photoshop is giving me bad dreams. I feel like I’m trying to run through hardening cement. The feeling of frustration and impatience penetrates my dreams. I’m dreaming of color palettes these days. Whenever I’m learning something intense and under pressure, my dreams become vivid.

The high point of my day was supporting Shoo Rayner on Patreon. He’s a great children’s book illustrator and author, and he shares everything about his process. I chose the $15 level so that I can watch his process videos, including preparing his books for IngramSpark and his Affinity Photo videos.

I completed this painting today, but it doesn’t feel complete. However, seeing this picture as it will appear on the printed page, I like it more than I thought I would. This is the first time I’ve backed off and viewed it a print size, and it looks good to me. Perhaps I spent too much time poring over every pixel at 400% magnification. When I do that the warts look like mountains.

ETA: I backed off my $15 patronage to $1. Unfortunately, Shoo hasn’t put the IngramSpark videos on Patreon yet. He’s a cool guy and I know he’ll come through. When he does, I’ll go back to the $15 level because I really want to see how he prepares his books for IngramSpark!

Keeping motivated when the demons are restless

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The further I get into this project, the more doubts arise, such as:

• It’s a stupid idea.

• The characters are totally wrong for a children’s book.

• You can’t draw for beans. Actually, the demons say, “What an embarrassing load of shit!”

• You wasted a lot of money on that iMac and that iPad. And all of that expensive watercolor paint you don’t use.

• You’re picking the wrong colors. Learn some color theory, asshole!

• The dialog doesn’t have a arc. The plot is flat. I’m falling asleep! ZZzzzzzzz.

And so on. But, I also had a thought this afternoon that if I were a kid, I’d like this story because it’s different. I like the ugly butterfly because he’s kind of a rebel. When I had this positive feeling, that’s when the chorus of negative thoughts arose. My tactic now is to just say, “Thank you, whiny voices. ” Then I get back to work and the next thing I know, I’m immersed in my drawings.

Here’s one of today’s piecesa

Inking the final three images

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Okay. I inked the last three images. Tomorrow I’ll move on to coloring.

Over the last 3 months I’ve observed that my style changes every time I take an online class or watch an amazing artist on Youtube. So, to make my life simpler, I stopped watching Youtube artists and I stopped taking Skillshare classes. I feel feel better now.

These are the last three images in the book.

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The one where Buddy convinces Jimmy to disobey an order

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I’m getting faster at sketching an idea then inking it, partly because my ideas for my recent drawing are less elaborate. I’m more concerned about getting my point across as directly as possible than I’m concerned about my “art.”

Today’s picture is a good example. My original sketch was just two talking heads that only I could recognize as a butterfly and a jay bird. To get to the point, I drew the butterfly huge to elicit the feeling that despite his actual small size, he was capable of overwhelming Jimmy Jay by persuasion.

Pen and ink again.