Children’s book Rudy Toot by Chris Kennett
Children’s book author and illustrator Chris Kennett has done it again. Rudy Toot is full of rhymes and impressively illustrated, and should be appreciated by both adult creatives and their younger counterparts.
This is Chris’ second book where he’s illustrated and written everything. On an average day, Chris can be found in his home studio animating or illustrating for a variety of freelance clients.
How do you even tackle the task of planning, writing, illustrating, and producing a book? Design Montage seeks to explore the creative process and thinking behind Chris’ latest project. Keep reading for lots of sketches, progress designs, and plans for the book.
For more about Chris himself, check out the interview with him from last year. To purchase Rudy Toot which was published recently by Scholastic, visit Fishpond.
Tell me about Rudy Toot! Where did your ideas start for your new book?
Last year, I participated in a group blog project called “sketchbook month”. The idea being for every day of the month of March you submitted an original sketch. There were no restrictions. Just draw whatever you wanted. Also, at the same time, Scholastic had asked me to come up with a Christmas-themed book. But the story wasn’t coming easily to me, and I was labouring over the text for what seemed like an eternity.
Then one day I was sitting in front of the TV scribbling for my daily Sketchbook and I came up with this sketch.
Two days later I had the finished manuscript for Rudy Toot. I ended up submitting both Rudy and the Christmas story, and Rudy won by a landslide. Interestingly a comment left on that blog post, mentioned how it would make a good book. Unfortunately, the commenter has no contact info, otherwise, I’d write and let them know.
How did you decide that you’re main characters would be elephants?
Really, the whole book just formed from that one sketch. A happy accident that I found really hard to ignore.
What about your process? Any creative roadblocks to overcome?
The creative block for me was the Christmas story. I was really struggling to make it flow nicely. I tried too hard and it showed. Rudy was a distraction from the job at hand and because I enjoyed the characters so much, the story just poured out of me. The first draft was about 95% of what appears in the final book.
When it came to the illustrations, the story throws up so many visuals, that right away I knew how I wanted them to look. It was a fun book to write and draw, hopefully, that shows in the end result.
The illustrations are superb. The colour and energy of the characters is energising even for readers of all ages. How did you work on this project… digitally or by hand?
Thank you. Actually (without wanting to sound like a smartarse) I work digitally by hand. I use a Cintiq 12WX so essentially all the artwork is hand drawn, it’s just that my paper is a screen. With an undo button!!! I’d like to have one of the larger Cintiqs, but for now, this is doing the job.
As for my process. Well in the page planning stage, I start off very roughly. This is because the page order usually changes a lot in the early stages. So I don’t want to invest too much time in a page that might change from a single page to a double spread, or vice versa.
This is the rough stage, where I’m just figuring out text and character placement.
Then I move on to a more finished rough using Photoshop.
This page wasn’t quite working for the Editor, so we ended up flipping the image from right to left. You can see a couple of the characters were already in progress when the page got flipped. So I reverted back to quite a rough treatment until it was given final approval.
The final version is a combination of Flash Vector drawings layered and textured in Photoshop.
Now be honest, what do your kids think of the children’s books you’re creating?
They do love them, up to a point. They get to see the long boring processes involved, so for them, the novelty wears off very quickly… Ha ha. They hear the first draft and see the drawings form slowly day by day. When it hits the shelves they are very excited, but secretly I think they’re a little bit sick of the story itself.
And, I have to ask, are people thinking any differently of you now for writing and creating a book about an elephant tooting from his behind?
Honestly, I don’t know, I rarely seem to leave the house long enough to find out. I hope that people might think that the first book wasn’t a fluke, that would be nice!
