My 2016 challenge is a children’s book co written with my 9yo son. “If I was Giant“. I started it at the Children’s Book Conference about 3 months ago. While sitting in the audience listening to some amazingly inspiring authors and illustrators I started sketching out some ideas. The ideas were around a comment my son Dara made around what he would do if he was giant sized. Since then I have been working on it bit by bit (I am very slow) until I got a colour sketch of the first two pages done this week. To my surprise it actually looks like it could work as a project.

So now I am talking about it publicly so that I will be too embarrassed to abandon it later!

Below is the progress up to the first colour and layout test. Also a quick Photoshop Mockup so I could see what it would look like in a book.

I will post progress here as and when it happens so subscribe to get every post.

I’ll be honest. I drew this out full size on A2 watercolour paper and then I was afraid to paint it for weeks. I am so used to working on the computer with multiple undo. I was freaking that I would mess it up and have to redraw it again. Eventually I grabbed a smaller piece of paper, at a guess half way between A5 and A4, and redrew the page that you see here. I could use this to practice the painting and test colours.

That’s it so far. According to the plan this is page 16 and 17.

Next step is to do this at the large size. I need to check out if the larger size is actually needed for better print resolution in the final book. For now I will stick to the plan.

The goal is to do a two page spread every month and hopefully have a book at the end.

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