My current project (working title: “Turtle Book”. Actual title: TBD) has actually been an on-and-off-again endeavor for more than ten years. Sometime in 2002, I doodled this in a notepad I had laying around my apartment:
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Original Doodle, 2002
A few friends saw it, and it caused a much more enthusiastic reaction than most of my random doodles. There were many calls for a children’s book to be made. This happened a few times to no avail, but a year later in 2003, people were still asking me about it. I must admit, I thought of it myself from time to time. I decided to roll up my sleeves and make the book; I got out my pen and paints, and created this, version 2.0:
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Pen and Watercolor, 2003
Then, I got a job, a new apartment, started going to school, and (mostly) forgot about the project. It would not die, however!
Friends and family would ask about how the book was coming. Every now an again, I’d pull out the manila folder I kept the project in, and work on the story outline, or do some character design sketches. At some point between the watercolor in 2003 and the spring of 2006, I finished the whole story, sketched in pencil on 3″x5″ cards and the text hand-written and affixed via post-it notes. (I know it was done by the spring of 2006, because I read it in this form to a girl on our third date, and we smooched at the end, and then a year and a half later we got married.)
It was pretty slow going for a few years, with an occasional edit here and there, and a few false starts on a new pen-and-ink version. I got my degree in Art+Design with a focus on Animation and Advanced multimedia in 2010, and with the release of the iPad just a few months before, new life began pouring into the project as the idea evolved from paper storybook to interactive storyapp.
Finally, now in January of 2013, I finished the new digital version as part of a rapidly progressing storyapp:
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Digital Illustration, 2013
