Part of the fun of writing a children’s book is the unlimited palate of fanciful characters and situations available.  I have said it before, but I would purposefully compose scenes that I thought would be murder to illustrate.  Ruler Of Space really let me “go crazy”, so we found our main character zooming through space on Nintendo-esque X-rays and having their hair cut by cats wearing rocket packs.

Compared to those, playing hockey on Neptune was pretty tame!  Perhaps I forgot to mention the opposing team… take a look.

Just in time for the Holiday gift season, we are announcing the newest addition to our line of Customizable Children’s Books:  Ruler of Space!

Sara Michaels has created an eye-popping adventure that is full of energy, beauty, and imagination.  Take a look! 

As the author, I can’t tell you how happy I am with how it turned out.  In an earlier post, I admitted that I had no idea how my poetry could be realized and yet Sara brought my words to life.  I also admit that I “nerded out” at the chance to write about Outer Space, and am extremely pleased to discover through Sara that Space is, indeed, as cool as I hoped. 

It’s also been a blast to see Sara’s creative visions emerge from scratch.  For a fun peek at Sara’s inspiration process, read her approach to the “Golfing with Meteors” page:  “I want to really add that creepy, ‘look-into-my-eyes’ effect for the Black Hole…  like the Rudy Coby Whirlytron.”

We’re all pleased to be delivering our new “baby” just in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and we’re sure all you flustered Aunts, Uncles and Grandparents are just as pleased to have discovered the PERFECT GIFT for the Holidays!

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In addition to authoring these books, it has been my extreme pleasure to work with our talented artists and to see them transform the black and white words into worlds of color and imagination.  I’m always interested to see details and scenarios emerge in the artwork that had never occured to me when writing the text.

The artists have been subjected to my terrible dictatorship as they work through draft after draft, page after page, and Sara (for some reason) came back for more punishment to illustrate our next book “RULER OF SPACE”.  Actually, the process is extremely collaborative and I think the results are fantastic.  In order to help you understand the time and effort our artists pour into their works, I invite you to follow the journey of Sara’s sketches to a final page.  It’s a lot like making a movie.

First, Sara sketched out numerous body and head shapes to find the right proportions and style for our main characters.  In the movies, this part would be ”casting”.

Then the characters went into wardrobe and makeup…

Then she started to build the set…  We realized we needed a throne…

and a throne room… we loved the living alien throne so Sara made it bigger. 

Then we rehearsed…

And… action!

CUT!  This scene is a wrap!  Stay tuned for more sneak peeks as we keep filming.

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