I decided on a book about 2 characters but I needed it to be as simple as possible when it comes to drawing the characters since I have zero artistic ability, think stick-figures, the only thing easier to draw then a stick figure is a smiley face. So...those were my two characters. Now they just needed names. I went around in circles on this one. One character was named immediately (Dot) but his/her partner was much more difficult. Since they both looked like punctuation I googled punction marks and filtered through the names. I liked the "com" in "comma" and decided Com would work well with Dot. That was my working names for awhile, however, I was not a huge fan of the "Dot/Com" pun and my review board (wife) said that it would need some joke or story in there somewhere about them being ".com". So...I killed Com and started over. I decided to look at foreign languages for their word for "dot" or "period" and I got a few but finally settled on "The adventures of Dot & Odo" which is short for "periodo" which means "period" in Spanish.
Once I had all of that figured out I started brainstorming their story. You can see below a snapshot into what this looked like.
From there I started story boarding what the book might look like. Here are some sketches, keep in mind I am not an artist which is why my characters are circles.
I warned you not to expect too much. After that it was pretty simple for me to create the story. The hard part was picking a story that I could manage to draw in a way that at least somewhat resembled what I was thinking in my head. I would start by googling an image of the image and then doing a freehand sketch on a piece of paper and then trying to draw that sketch into Publisher using my mouse. Here are a few of those sketches of a whale, dinosaur, and raindrops.
Coming Soon...
So here it is all put together:
Rob, this book is so cute. I love the different animals and think you did a great job laying everything out! I would read this to my little girl.
ReplyDeleteThanks, I am sure the best way to write a children's book is not to google "easiest animals to draw" but I was handicapped by my limited artistic abilities. I think they are all at least recognizable for what they are. Originally Dot was going to be an Owl as well but that didn't work out so well.
ReplyDeleteOh my goodness! This book is so cute! I love how Odo's look changes depending on what Dot thinks he is. So clever and adorable! Well done! Only thing is that Odo and Dot look a little distorted on the final page compared to what they looked like throughout the entire book, they seem more oval than circle. Overall VERY well done!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the suggestion Ashley. I went ahead and "unsmooshed" the characters on the final page. I also changed the facial expression of Odo on the dinosaur page since I noticed he had not reacted.
ReplyDeleteHey Rob. Great story to work with here. I think there is room for some other types of images. For example, Dot could change from a Cumulus Cloud to a Cumulonimbus and you could do a transformational image there. I think the bolding of words was a really great move. Easy to pick out the bits of information you want your readers to retain.
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