Saturday!

An outtake from Sunny with Lolly and Mild.

It's Saturday. We only have two days left before we give away copies of Foggy. All you have to do is tell us what you think Foggy likes to eat for breakfast.

Sunny and Windy in the woods

In 2000, before we had a publisher, we put out a set of postcards with pictures from Windy and we sold them at Eugene Choo and Dream in Vancouver. We included in the set two snapshots of Windy and Sunny posed sitting on logs (well, sticks really). We called the two pictures "Windy in the countryside" and "Sunny in the countryside". But it's funny, when we came across the old digital files, they were called "sensitive_windy.jpg" and "sensitive_sunny.jpg". We named them that because we thought they looked like "sensitive" folky musicians, especially with the lens flare. This was a joke we had forgotten until the files showed up.

(In the spirit of the olden days, our link to Windy today is from our first review by Shift in Japan. Ah, back in the days when Judith had just opened her studio, Steedman Design, and Robin was still studying design at Emily Carr.)

Edited to add: We still sell the books at Eugene Choo and Dream!

Paper cicadas

These colourful paper cicadas were originally made to inhabit the reeds near Foggy and Cloud's camp site. Although they don't appear in the final book, now you know they are there, behind the scenes, chirping in a papery sort of way.

windmill trees

When we were working on the set for the Windy animation tests, one of the challenges was creating much wider sets and so we set about making new kinds of flowers and trees. Chlose (a friend of Judith's daughter, Stella) made this amazing windmill tree (below) so we tried to fashion some new trees based on hers (above). Chlose's is much better, and ours remains on the cutting room floor.

Chirp outtakes (wheel painting)

Last May we made a story about wheels for Chirp magazine. We tried all sorts of wheels and cars, but we only had room for a few of our vehicles in the story. Some of the tests we did were quite funny. Our favourite one is probably the cherry-tomato-tin-can car. The tape-dispenser-jalopy and the bananamobile are quite funny, too. What would you use to make wheels?

These are are some more of the vehicles from the cutting room floor.

Foggy outtake

In many ways editing is one of the most difficult challenge of writing a children's book. You can only use so many images, and you often have to choose only the ones which really serve the story. This image of the City enveloped in fog was one of our favourite images, but there wasn't room for it in the book.

Edited to add that Sara O'Leary has a related post about writing children's books in her blog today.