Work in Progress: The Imaginary Dragon
Even though we haven’t yet sent out the next Bobbledy Books mailing, which will be a CD of music by the incredible Drew Bunting, we are already hard at work on the book we’ll send out in the mailing after that. It is called The Imaginary Dragon and it’s about a dragon that is not imaginary. I wrote the story a while ago, and now it’s Robbi’s turn to do her part.
When she starts illustrating a book, the first step is to figure out what the characters look like. Naturally, it was important to figure out what the dragon was going to look like. Here are a few of the sketches Robbi did while she was trying to figure it out.
Notice that Bill is made up of basic shapes—circles, squares, and rectangles. You won’t see those shapes in the final version, but they’ll be there, under the surface of the drawing, making Bill look and feel like the same character from page to page.
Another important character in the book is a king. Robbi had no idea what he should look like, so she tried out lots of different shapes and sizes.
Next, she had to figure out what the scenery should look like. The book starts on a mountain overlooking a town.
Here’s what Robbi’s computer screen looks like when she’s starting a book. The image in the upper left is her initial sketch of the first “spread” (that means two pages next to one another). That’s Bill’s mountain on the right hand side of the picture, the town on the left, and fields of corn in the middle. To the right of that image are a series of “thumbnails,” or tiny versions of each of the pages of the book. As you can see, all that’s on those pages right now is the words. Now it’s Robbi’s job to fill up the white space with pictures.
All those yellow boxes you see on the thumbnails are my notes to her about what I think she should draw on a given spread. Robbi enjoys nothing more than ignoring them.
The book’s second spread is a scene of Bill lying on the roof of the bakery, watching as things happen in the town. When Robbi did the first sketch of this scene (just to see if it was going to work), the king was still fat.
By the time she did a more developed sketch, using the cut-out color blocks that appear in every Bobbledy Book, the King had slimmed down. Instead of having a big body, the king is going to have a really big collar (a metaphorical representation of his abiding hubris).
Robbi and I both thought her first attempt at the color cutouts was a bit too busy. It’s too hard to see where one begins and the other ends. So she toned down the color variation within each block a bit.
It became much more legible, but it still lacked the detail that was needed to make it easy to know what everything is. And so she added brickwork to the bakery chimney, stonework to the castle wall, texture to the smoke, and shadows to the fountain. The result is a much more legible scene.
Or so we think, anyway.
When she was done with the drawing above, Robbi showed it to me. At which point, as the writer, I pointed out that she hadn’t left room for the words.
At which point she huffed and puffed and informed me that words were overrated. But when she was done with her dramatics, she conceded that it was probably appropriate to find a place for them. This is where they are for the time being, though I’m sure they’ll fit in better when she does the final version.
In another part of the book, Robbi had to draw a conversation between Bill (the dragon’s name is Bill) and his friend Pete (who is a unicorn, if you couldn’t tell from the drawing below. At first, she drew in lots of trees to make it look like they were in the middle of the forest, which is where their meeting is supposed to be taking place.
But then she decided to zoom in a bit and make the background less busy.
We both liked getting a closer look at what was going on between Bill and Pete (sympathy and tears, apparently) and not seeing as much of the background, which, in this section, isn’t as important as it is in other sections when the main point is showing what the world looks like.
And there you have it. As I write this post, Robbi is scratching away at the next illustration, in which Pete leaves Bill standing sadly in the woods while he goes off to look for some leprechauns.
We’ve decided to live-blog this book as we make it. On one hand, you’ll know most of what happens by the time your copy of this book actually arrives in the mail. But on the other hand, you’ll have a much better idea of how it all came together.
If you’re interested in the REAL nitty-gritty, Robbi and I have decided to do all our collaboration for this book via Twitter. By following @BobbledyMom and @BobbledyDad, you can see the play-by-play, which has so far included lots of sketches and frequent demands by Robbi that I bring her snacks. If this sort of thing interests you, by all means, be a fly on the wall. Or, if you are so inclined, feel free to jump into the discussion.
Or to bring Robbi snacks. Actually, I’d really appreciate it.