Exciting Work Today!

Today we got the first preliminary sketches for the picture book, The Dragon and the Turtle. This book will come out in June of 2010. Our job was to give more suggestions to the artist, Vincent Nguyen, and trim more words out of the text. In picture books, tight is right. We'd already trimmed by quite a bit, so when Evangeline and I got that message, we kind of groaned. Evangeline Denmark is my daughter who has children of her own and is in that phase of her life where she is, out of necessity, an expert on picture books. She's paid attention and knows exactly which books she is going to have to read five times during a week of bedtime rituals. If you'd like to visit her blog it is Breathe In Breathe Out.

So we went through the picture book mock-up and commented on the pictures we loved and made a few suggestions. Then we took a pencil and drew straight lines through text. It wasn't really as hard as we expected. With the pictures in the background, much of the narrative plummeted on the importance scale. We had a ball, and we can't wait to share this project with you All.