Do it again Dummy! - it's hard to be a perfectionist.

Well having 'completed' my dummy book and done few critique sessions I have decided to undertake a bit a of a rewrite.

The process of making a picture book is very much like creating a dot to dot puzzle; you need to get just the right number of dots in the right pages so the overall image makes sense... the problem is it is all to easy to skip dots when you already know what the picture is supposed to be.

When choosing what each spread should contain I found I was focused far too much on trying to explain the plot, whereas a great deal of my story should be focussed around the main character. The end result was the events made sense but it was difficult to empathise or even like the main character so you didn't really buy into the whole thing.

So I have taken out a few pages, and rejiggered a few more...which gives me a whole bunch more work to do, but I think it will vastly improve the book overall. ( This is the new plan, blank pages are completely new pages, green post-it notes are major edits, yellow post-its are minor edits)

The moral of the story - get ideas into book format as soon as possible! flat plans are just not the same!

The Timekeeper: Dummy Book Progress

I am currently developing a dummy book for my current project, with a working title of 'The Timekeeper'. Here are the first few rough pencil pages, plus one colour experiment. The final 32 page book will be full colour, produced using mixed media (my influences at the moment include Shaun Tan & Simon Bartram). I will also be writing the accompanying text with possibly a little influence from Dr Seuss & Edgar Alan Poe.

The story begins with an astronaut named Alan Shepard, commanding the second successful manned mission to the moon, Apollo 14. Little did NASA know he had smuggled 3 golf balls and the head of a six iron (making the handle from on board equipment). Shepard got one clean shot which he claimed went 'miles and miles and miles...'. Even an astronaut could not have imagined the journey that little golf ball had in store.

In a galaxy far far away an old man, who has been living in space since the dawn of time, is happily going about his business of building the universe one (clockwork) star at a time...Until one day a mysterious little orb, all covered in dimples, pops out of a wormhole and shatters his peaceful existence.

What happens next? well you will just have to stay tuned!

I read about Alan Shepard's moon golfing exploits many years ago, and have always been amused by the idea of it being our first contact with an alien species. I finally got the idea for this story while watching Professor Brian Cox's 'Wonders of the Universe series on the BBC. The idea that time as relative and only existing with the existence of the universe itself inspired the basis of Timekeeper character. The craftsman aspect is possibly down to my dad (who modelled for over 700 photos during the early development of the book) who is a skilled painter (and previously a carpenter). I also wanted to play around with mythological & religious ideas of a creator, or perhaps father time. All in all this book is the convergence of many loosely related items of fact and fiction weaved together.

I feel it is important to challenge children, and their parents! Making them to question the world around them helps create a curious mind...which in my opinion is the greatest gift you can bestow upon a child.

I hope to have a complete dummy book and a minimum of 4 finished spreads for the MacMillan Prize 2012 for children's book illustration, which closes on Tuesday 8th May 2012