Here are just some ideas I was putting down based on the page of Rock Mountain that I posted yesterday. Probably the ones I’ll cross off the list first are the first one, which could be seen as Rock about to jump off a cliff, and the third one, which is Rock lying on the ground staring straight up with a blank expression on his face.

I might go with some supercombo of the next two, showing Rock either letting his arms dangle off the side of the mountain or slumping his face in his hands. I definitely want to show the landscape to push the feeling of desolation, but I don’t want it to be so bland that it’ll make kids cry.

I need to figure out how to show my thumbnails on here without giving too much of the story away. I definitely don’t want to put the exact text from the book on here, since that would take some of the fun away from reading the book for the first time when it’s done. But, until I figure out another way to handle it, here is the exact text from my draft for pages four and five. It comes at one of the more exciting parts of the story, when Rock discovers boredom:

A strange thing happened to Rock one afternoon, at a time of day that was neither warm nor cool, neither bright nor dark. “I have made up my mind, and I declare this mountain to be rightly unclimbable!” Rock announced to the mountain itself. He did not feel like trying any more that day, and so he looked around and kicked a pebble (which was about your size, if you curled up into a ball and did your best at being a pebble). Dragging his feet and moving much more slowly than he was used to, Rock walked around for a bit, stopped where he was, and lay flat on his back. “Well this is a bit boring,” he said. He hadn’t known BORING to be a word until that day, when he learned all too well. But the word BORING was so boring that Rock decided that he never wanted to know of it again. And with that he jumped to his feet and decided to get to work.

Alrighty. I did not think this through, giving you the second-most visually boring page in the book (or maybe.. definitely.. the most boring) as your first glimpse into Rock Mountain. The picture itself has to be plenty boring – desolate and bland – to make the reader (or listener) completely disgusted with boredom. The viewer has got to feel Rock’s pain. Look at all that boredom!

Yesterday I finished the first draft of “The Wacktastic Adventures of Funkmaster Rock” (tentative title), so I figured I’d give you the skip on how I’m going to do this.

The book is going to be 32 pages, which is the pretty average length for children’s books. Most of the pages are going to be illustrated as spreads, with the picture extending over two pages. I just wanted to get the story established, so I put it all down and divided it up over the 32 pages. Now I get to the sweet stuff, which is sketching and doing rough art for each page. But the fun part of doing the writing and illustrating together is that I can still play with the text, so while I’m drawing and getting new ideas, I can add whatever I everlovin’ want to the story.

The next step is for me to make thumbnail sketches for each page to figure out how everything is positioned on the page. Then I’ll spread 17 full-sized blank pieces of paper all over my floor and work them all up together. Once I get 17 finished drawings, I’ll bring one or two to a finished painting, and I’ll have a dummy to take around to publishers. Now you know everything I know about children’s books.

Time to do some character studies of Rock Mountain, the main man from the book I’m writing. This is almost exactly like the other sketch I already posted of him, but I did that one four years ago and wanted to make sure I still had him. This drawing is from the part of the story when a moose disproves Rock’s theory on quantum chromodynamics. It’s going to be a great book!

Alright well you know about two of my illustrations in the works right now, so I might as well tell you about the big mack daddy whopper of all my current projects, which is a children’s book I’ve been writing off and on for about a year. (I’m actually writing two books, but the other one is my bread and butter, my sweet baby Jane, and I don’t want the internet pirates pillaging my idea.) This is the one I’m going full force with right now, mainly because I want to learn the ropes of the business before I pull out the big gun.

This one started off as a simple story without much depth, but it keeps snowballing, and now I’ve got some really good, larger-than-life images in my head that I want to capture before I forget what they look like.

This is the man with the plan: Rock Mountain. I drew him about four years ago when I did a caricature of a man on an infomercial I was watching in Ireland. Ever since I started writing this, he’s the guy that’s been in my head, so now his fate is sealed. Rock Mountain is a colossal man who wears flannel and lives, coincidentally, on a mountain, which is also called Rock Mountain. Nobody knows if the man was named after the mountain or if the mountain was named after the man, mainly because nobody ever met him.

Right now I’m putting the finishing touches on the first draft. I don’t want to give much of the story away right now because a lot of the ideas aren’t yet set in stone. But the story has a very folk-tale-y vibe to it, and it follows Rock responding to his first twinge of boredom on the mountain in the middle of Nowhere.