I’m lucky to be involved in a healthy mix of development and design in my day-to-day work. With the unique (and helpfully vague) title of “digital designer”, my actual role tends to vary based on the project. I appreciate the variety because, in general, there’s always room for creativity and craft in any project, but sometimes to really scratch that creative itch, you have to find your own projects. No deadlines or schedules, no budget or billing, just making something for the sake of the making. 

So, a few years ago I wrote and illustrated a children’s book. A couple years later I made another one. Now, I’m part way through a third. I had already worked on a few books professionally, but that was really more about bringing a client’s vision to life. No matter how much of my work went into those books, they were all still ultimately someone else’s story. I was finally compelled to make my own, start to finish. The whole endeavor is the very definition of a passion project because honestly, I’ve wanted to make my own kid’s book since I was a kid. And it turns out when you grow up, you can just do that. For fun.

I try to work in what feels like an organic way, just letting the story form as naturally as I can, and I think the process would be about the same regardless of the final format. Sometimes I’d storyboard out a few pages ahead, sometimes the illustration itself would lead the way to the next page, and other times I’d have a specific phrase I wanted to use and would have to shape the story around that. Occasionally I’d have to just let a section or detail percolate quietly in the back of my mind for months. Then one day a piece would click into place and I’d know what happens next or what the next picture should look like or the change that makes the whole thing make more sense. Without deadlines, schedules, or structure, I certainly didn’t keep up a brisk production timeline, but I did end up with a finished product that to me, at least, actually feels done. (Although is any project ever really done? Or do you eventually just have to put the pen down and say “good enough”? Haha)

In each case I started with the main character and worked outwards from there.  Since I’d be drawing them again and again, I needed characters I could easily reproduce, but that were still visually interesting and expressive. With them established, then it becomes a matter of what they want, what they’re doing, and what would happen to them in their daily lives that might spur them to some kind of action. I find it’s fairly easy to pick out the start of a story and a vague ending starts to crystalize pretty early on, but it’s always the middle parts that give me trouble. Basically, how do you move from point A to point B in an interesting way when the story is so short and the two endpoints are the whole point of the story?

You also want a manageable page count for this sort of book, so either the scope of the story stays smaller or each page needs to cover a lot of ground. I opted for the former as the stories I want to make are all small affairs with low stakes. There’s a sort of puzzle element here for me, a mental math where I have to roughly calculate what’s the right ratio of words to pictures to pages for what I’m trying to convey. It’s a lot of arguing with myself, really. How much needs to happen in the text compared to what information I can share through the illustration? How many pages do I need to complete this scene versus how many I want? Do I just need to add more pages entirely? And, most importantly, does it feel right? The whole process felt closer to making a comic book than a novel.

Once you get the framework built out a little and start gaining some momentum, then you just start filling it all in as you can. Any direction works too, sometimes working backwards from the ending for a bit can be helpful or jumping to a part you know you’ll need later. A children’s book is a wonderful exercise in fun little details because they will 100% study every page, so each page gets to tell a story. As you explore those details, you start to see where the story is going and the world where it’s happening. Like my own best childhood memories, all my stories are invariably set in “the woods”. Almost the opposite of a blank slate, the woods are so jampacked with mystery and potential that nothing out of place can happen.

There’s no creature or place I can make up that won’t be right at home there. And scattered through the woods are all my own personal inspirations: horror movies and old woodcuts and tarot cards and Halloween, folklore and mythology, Edward Gorey and other spooky artists, comic book legends like Mike Mignola, the Appalachian Mountains themselves, along with all the scary stories I was reading way too young like Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood. That said, I’m never going for scary. My monsters are nice, the woods are inviting, and even creepy things can learn kind lessons. Because I was never really afraid of the monsters as a kid, I just wanted to see them and know what they were up to and maybe stalk the woods with them. So, the least I can do is make a few more books for kids like that.

There’s plenty of technical aspects to it as well, of course. Laying out the actual files, getting proofs printed, doing revisions, begrudgingly learning to take constructive criticism, but the story and its creation is what’s important to me. It’s fun to think of my creatures lurking in someone’s childhood the way so many did in mine. One of the kindest reviews I’ve ever gotten was from a very young relative just after I’d finished the first book, she said:

“Aww, he hates everyone. Like me!”

That’s the target audience.