Friday 28 October 2011

It's easy to write picture books.

Thoughtful blog post here, chaps.
I've read a few things about writing picture books, and some articles talk about how lots of people want to write a picture book, thinking it will be easy, and the articles say it's harder than writing a novel, because every word counts, and requires thought, and economy and skill to get the ideas across.
And I've also read articles that say that of course it's easier than writing a novel, because it's much shorter and you can rattle one off in a day or two.

Well, it's been trundling about in the back of my mind, and I've ended up thinking about it a bit, and I can kind of agree with both points of view, they both have elements of truth.
But I think the problem is that they're making slightly different points.

And I've thought of an analogy.

Is it easier to run 100m or 10,000m?
Well, one takes less than thirty seconds, and one takes quite a while.
Now most people can run 100m, whereas only people of a certain fitness can actually run 10,000m, so you could argue that one is easier than the other.

But... it's just as hard to win a gold medal in either.
Which I think is sort of the point, really.
Just because something's short, doesn't make it easy to do well.

Though it is maybe easier for more people to give it a quick go.

And having written this (for me) fairly serious post, here are a couple of sneak peek sketches from a book I've been working on :)
They're all bits of illustrations and backgrounds, so as to not give much away, but they are hopefully interesting too :)






Thursday 6 October 2011

Little Bit Bunny - Badger

Well, it's a new month, and a new theme on the Little Bit Bunny Blog, and I've just put up this months post, and it's got a bit of colour this time.

You can find it here - LittleBitBunny
And yep, does look like this is where I'm headed.
I've still very much got a fringe, though, but the sides of it now have to cover more ground than they used to :)
But here's the initial sketch I did when I first got the idea.
As you can see, it didn't really change much from here, just redrew it, and had the idea of it being a sort of diagram in a guide.
I think this guy looks like an English Teacher.
Maybe he'll turn up in something else.