So, I mentioned working on a book way back here…
And then you didn’t see nothing until I just said -hey! it’s done right here…
So what happened during all that time? Well, I got busy making a book!
It takes some work, yessiree! That and I was still doing my day job animating, too!
So, I figured you might want to hear a bit about how it came together in between!
Here’s a few sketches:
These are very very very preliminary sketches! I think these are some of the first idea generation sketches I made after my very first meeting with my co-author/co-illustrator
the Famous Mike Venezia!
We met to talk about doing a book, since he left his publisher… some little book company called ‘Scholastic.’
We talked about different books to make- I had some ideas I was I was doodling about carnivals and circuses that I wanted to do. He also suggested books about animals,
construction vehicles… and was really interested in doing one about cars. I suggested we do one about transportation of all kinds, since I wanted to do a bit more than just cars.
How about all modes? Basically, just ways to get around – we can include all kinds of things that aren’t really cars or trucks or bikes or airplanes! So you can see above that I started looking
at different themes for the book of ways to get around in different places that we could both explore together- cities, on the farm, in the jungle, ways to get around as a kid, riding on your
mom’s back when you’re a monkey, etc. They’re all ways to get around! The possibilities are endless!!
Some of the sketches above didn’t make it into the book- the ATV and the river rafter didn’t make it… or the guy on the vines and the kid on the big wheel and
the one on the pogo stick didn’t make it either. The monkey on the mom’s back made it, though. We only had 36 pages and about a billion ideas!!
Some of those sketches got blown up and used in the final doodles that got painted for the book. This one for example isn’t far off from the city sketch above:
I wanted to show all the ways that things and people get around in the city. Here in Chicago, at rush hour you can see all sorts of things going down the expressway- more
than once I’ve been stuck in traffic and I look over and there’s a truck full of pigs heading north to Wisconsin right next to me! I’ve seen business guys riding scooters, blimps
and yeah, there’s miles and miles of tunnels under the city, too so I added that guy in the manhole!
On a sad note- the words written across that train? Total grammatical oops there. Should be ‘There ARE lots of fun ways to get around in the city”. Can’t win ‘em all.
One more sketch for ya:
Almost NONE of these sketches made it into the book! Actually, the monster truck and the big military cargo plane made it… but that’s it! I liked the cargo plane
because it’s one form of transportation being transported inside of another.
I was liked the dogsledding idea, but Mike came up with a waaaaaaaaaaay funnier drawing for that (of dogs riding the sleds themselves) He also had a totally hilarious train
painting he did, too so I decided to skip mine for that also.
The turtles are fun too- we had an idea of doing fast versus slow modes of transportation… bunnies and jet-cars and bullet trains
versus turtles and escalators and slow things but we ran out of space.
Next time, I’ll show you some more sketches and ideas that we got for the book- some fit, some didn’t and some helped me get other ideas.
