Today I opened our old metal mailbox and found Morning waiting for me. Each of the Growly books, when I have first held it in my hands, has filled me with a little bit of wonder.
I’m still amazed, grateful that I have the privilege of bringing these characters to the page, visually; characters that were born in stories in someone else’s imagination, characters that I’m reading in letters and words and sentences and filtering through my stories and childhood and imagination, and then penciling out in simple lines. Wonder and a bit of trepidation: I hope I’ve done them justice.
The process of illustrating a story means sifting through pages of the story you’re drawing out, and then revisiting the stories that shaped you. The bears in the Growly Series brought me back to my love for Maurice Sendak’s Little Bear and Garth William’s illustrated animals, and the bears that slowly slugged through the back woods of my childhood home.
How much, as an illustrator, do I draw out the humanity of these characters, stretching lumbering bears into walking, talking friends, or do the bears and monkeys and birds I’m sketching lean more heavily on realistic animals? Is their clothing solidly representative of a past era, the future, or somewhere in-between?
The pencil meets the page somewhere between the litany of detailed questions and the gut-level impulses that happen when you just start drawing. Visually, characters are planned, but characters also emerge. Sometimes I’m surprised myself at how they take form…
(Hop on over to The Growly Books blog to read the rest of the post!)
The third book in the Growly series launched this week, and they are offering the first book, Begin, for free on Kindle until Thursday, June 12th. More info on thegrowlybooks.com