A Book For Children and Grownup Children

It's been a dream/goal of mine for a while now to make a children's book and it turned out that this was the year to do it. I've spent the last few months writing and designing, and I'm excited with the progress so far. I completed the rough draft last week and am now working on tieing down the designs and working out the colors. After that I'll have to figure out how to get the thing published and out into the world, but let's take things one step at a time.

The story deals with self esteem and bullying, and involves animals flying around in hot air balloons learning that it's better to be nice than be a jerk. My hope for the book is that it would be a kid-friendly product that also appeals to adults. My fear is that it will miss both audiences- too grownup for kids, too childish for adults. But at the same time, I'm trying hard not to make a "product" to please people, but just do what I do and create a piece of art that I'm proud of. So far I'm pretty pleased. It's just hard when you know that if you create art that's ALSO a successful product, your art can actually buy you groceries (and pay for art school. Ah, irony.)

So, speaking of art- here's a sneak peek. The first is a page of character designs that I finished yesterday. My thought is that they're cute. Maybe too cute. I was hoping for illustrations that weren't quite so cutesy in order to be a little more appealing for the grownup types. The second is a rough page layout. I'm particularly fond of Fox in this one, not sure why. So my aim right now is to make the final product fit somewhere in between these two examples- a little less Nick Jr and a little more Riccardo Guasco. Hopefully by just cleaning up the lines in the rough, and adding some color and a LITTLE more shading, it will pull together into something worth looking at.