Penguin and iPad

Here is a video of Penguin books for the ipad.

http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-first-look-how-penguin-will-reinvent-books-with-ipad/

Interviews

Last night I gathered up my courage and gave a talk about my experience making iPhone ebooks. I talked to the CamCreative group, which is a bunch of creative types from Cambridge who meet once a month to talk about something in their field.

About 30 people came and some even came just to hear my talk which was a bit daunting. Like any artist I struggle to be complementary about my own work.

But the talk went off well and everyone was very supportive. People were even suggesting I should put myself out there as a touring speaker. Hmmmm that sound way too scary.

A few things have changed in the app world since I last submitted a book. The approval from Apple is now a lot shorter. It took me about 2 weeks but apparently it is now down to two days. Excellent.

There are tools now which can make it easier to get all your data from itunes organised. Previously you would get a barrage of information from each countries itunes store which was pretty unwieldly.

I am also being featured in an article for UK Writers magazine. I will let everyone know when that is out.

All this publicity has been great but I still haven't made much progress on the next book. Soon, soon hopefully I can get cracking on it.

More Playing

I have been doing some studying of Chinese art in preparation for creating characters (three little pigs). As I mentioned before I wanted to make this book more asian than western to get away from the disney cliche.

I did some sketches and making a selection of pieces to be used later as a resource.


Attached is a sketch of a Duan Nue. A painted clay doll that would be used as an ornament. I think she is lovely. I am hoping to include little details like this in the illustrations and maybe they can be interactive.

Also attached is another playing image using Kimono fabric. I used more fabric this time and did all the colouring with inks instead of the usual Photoshop. I really like it and am going to try more like this. Although I think that to get a really polished finish I would have to clean it up in PSD.


There hasn't been much time in the last week to get moving on the ebook but I am hoping to have more time this week developing the characters.


Busy busy.

And I must simply give a big shout out to Brenda Kim from Wootons for so nicely offering to interview me about the upcoming book and offering lots of fab advice and being so supportive. It is greatly appreciated and welcomed.

Style Ideas and KimoYes

Today I am going to go over some of my thoughts for the style of illustration of the new ebook.


For a while now I have been using paper collage as part of my illustration and have had loads of fun collecting gorgeous papers from around the world. I have had to be dragged out of paper shops by my hair... well sort of.

For the next ebook I am looking at using vintage Kimono fabric for the collage elements. Above is an example of how I would use it. He is a cool giraffe called Rodney that I created for Olla Hellands web group "One Million Giraffes"- check out giraffes people have sent from all over the world.

But I digress.....I was looking for a more textural and interesting look and it's always fun to try something new.

Plus I must admit I have a secret weapon. My wonderful mother in law Jill has her own internet business selling vintage Kimono fabric.
www.kimoyes.com
She does a roaring trade in fabric and has just started out making products from the fabric with my sister in law Jane.

While I was in Aus I saw they had lots of little fabric scraps and thought they looked so pretty together that I wanted to use them in my work. Above is a pic of the fabric once I had ironed and sorted it out into colours.

It was harder to cut the fabric accurately as it is all wibbly wobbly but I think that adds to the look and I like the intensity of the colour and pattern.

In other style terms tomorrow I am going to look at some books on Chinese art. Three Little Pigs has been done to death as disneyfied versions so I am looking for a line style which is a little different. As Curnie says "To the library!"

More on that tomorrow......

Initial Thoughts and Ramblings

After our trip to Aus we (my husband Mick and I) have finally found some time to sit down and talk about the next iPhone ebook to produce.

I wanted to do a story that was animal based as a lot of my work has been humans. And I also wanted to make it a simple, worldwide story. While "The Night Before Christmas" is great it is quite traditional and the illustrations were partly dictated by that.


So we have chosen "The Three Little Pigs".

The story is going to remain basically the same but I want to rewrite it to make it more funny and up to date. This is a bit of a new area for me as I usually just illustrate and I am notoriously bad at grammar and spelling. We shall see how it goes. Might be enlisting the help of many SCBWI friends.

Some things I learnt from the last book are:

There needs to be more interactivity: When we showed kids they kept trying to press things and make things move.

Splitting the words and pictures: We found that kids would concentrate on the pictures or words but couldn't do both at once. But splitting the text wouldn't have worked with Night Before Christmas as it is a very long text.

Have Translations: We wanted to do this with the last book but just ran out of time. But we still had a lot of sales in non-english speaking countries. So this time we want to take advantage of that.

Start Marketing Earlier: OK this is pretty obvious to us now, the marketing needs to be all ready to go when the book is released. Duh. App review sites take about 4 weeks and by that time the listing has gone down on iTunes.

Lite Version: We copped a fair bit of slack about our Lite version. People thought it was too much like an ad and wanted more for free. With this book we are going to try and make a Lite version that is a more stand alone product but still encouraging people to buy the full version.


Those are the initial thoughts- More tomorrow on style.

The Start of "The Three Little Pigs"

Hello everyone

Here we are at the start of the process of creating an iPhone eBook.

As you would have seen from my profile I have already created 2 books: The Night Before Christmas and Itsy Bitsy Spider. A preview can be seen on the YouTube clip above and they can be found on iTunes by searching for FUZZ ILLUSTRATION

Also of interest to people may be my previous blog entry as to how I got into making iPhone ebooks.

That can be found here: http://fuzzillo.livejournal.com/21264.html

But this blog is all about the next ebook. Hope you enjoy and find it useful.