Making children’s books is a lot like story work on animated movies. There are a lot of ideas that just don’t make it. Sometimes the ideas are great, super funny but they might not fit in the jugsaw puzzle which is story. They are the bits and pieces left on the cutting room floor. I always hold on to these ideas, you never know if you’ll have a EUREKA moment that will further propel the idea. Sometimes I feel like these nuggets or discarded stories are floating in a primordial ooze just waiting to evolve. Some are dead ends and others just need that spark to help them evolve out of the ooze and into a functioning story.
I’m always hesitant to share images from unpublished or unrepresented ideas but here are a few images I worked up a few months ago for a picture book based on a parakeet and a boy. The images were fun to do and were done in sumi ink and watercolor.
Scribble, Scrabble, Babble 