The Kid Christmas Sketchbook Part 2
A second peek behind the scenes of my latest book 'Kid Christmas: Of The Claus Brothers Toy Shop'
A few days ago I shared the scruffy, sketchy beginnings of what would become my sixth author/illustrator book ‘Kid Christmas: Of The Claus Brothers Toy Shop (Out NOW)
Today we are going to look at the next stage in creating the book: The Terrifying Rough First Draft stage.
First Draft
It’s not really that terrifying to be honest, but there is always a bit of trepidation when I send this off to my editor. It’s the first real look at how the book is going to turn out. Its when I see if the excitement and enthusiasm I felt in the sketchy stages is actually going to pay off and the book does have potential to be as good as I felt it would be.
I probably (definitely) do over think these things- everything can still be changed at this stage after all, so yes it probably shouldn’t cause as much stress as it does- but its still a daunting moment.
For the first draft rough I take my sketches from my sketchbook and basically spruce them up so that they are more presentable. I do this stage mainly digitally, using my hand drawn paper sketches as a blueprint and drawing over them with my fancy Wacom tablet. At the same time I will hone the idea and story structure as this process goes on.
A lot of further big creative decisions are made here too. In fact that happens a lot during the whole process. Things will change, story ideas will develop and artwork will be tweaked all the way up to it being prepared to print.
The first step of that happens after I send through the First Draft Rough. My editor and art director will have a say on the drawings and offer input on what to change and how to move the story along. Sometimes this can be pretty brutal as being an arty type I am automatically a big old control freak. But I very quickly learnt that making books is a wholly collaborative process. Even though my name is on the cover all of my books have very much been a creative collaboration.
Anyway, I’m rambling a fair bit now, so why don’t we just have a look at some of the pages from the first draft rough :)
The Cover
Around about the same time as creating the First Draft I will start thinking about the cover. The publishers don’t usually want to see a cover sketch until the books rough internal pages are all ready to go to artwork. But the cover is always on my mind. For me seeing the cover- all be it in sketch form- helps to characterise the entire book. So I often think of the cover very early on.
Another thing that publishers will like to see is a number of different options for the cover. So I aim to sketch out 5 or 6 for them to choose. I definitely had my favourite of the sketches and assumed that they would also go for it. However, I was very surprised that they went for the final design. I love it, and I can now totally understand why it was chosen. But my favourite was actually the image right at the start of this newsletter- with Nicky and his uncles standing proud outside the Toy Shop. Nicky isn’t even in his Santa costume - I thought that we should keep that a big secret- which I now look back on as being a bit of a crazy decision on my part. Again, it shows how important the collaboration aspect is to making books. Having other insights and opinions are really vital.
Ok, here is a look at the cover sketches that I presented, including the design that we ended up using.
Phew….so there we are.
Hopefully you have had a little further insight into the sketching stages of ‘Kid Christmas’.
Thank you so much for reading these two- slightly rambley- recollections of how the idea developed (you can read Part 1 HERE)
Great Thanks also to everyone who has read the book. I’ve been absolutely chuffed to bits with the response that the book has had and it has made all the hard work and trials and tribulations (as fun as they all are) worth it.
Happy Christmas all. Ho Ho Ho.
David :)