The story of Fluff and Billy Part 4 - Penguin drawings

Apologies for my blogging silence of late - I am working hard on artwork that I can't show you at the moment. However, I realised that I could continue with The Story of Fluff and Billy - so here's part 4!

Having decided that my story would feature penguins, I felt that I needed to draw real penguins to help me develop their characters. I already had a few drawings from London Zoo that I'd done for a previous project but I now spent time at Whipsnade Zoo drawing and observing the penguins there. At the time they had Humboldt, Rockhopper and Gentoo penguins and it was so interesting to watch their behaviour and movements ( and to also hear what the zoo visitors said to them and about them)!

I also made a trip to the Zoology Museum in Cambridge. This allowed me to do some more detailed studies like the bigger drawing in the middle.

When I'd gathered all this reference I could start working on my characters.

See Part 3 here.

The story of Fluff and Billy Part 3 - Dummy Books

After I'd finished a storyboard I was happy with, the next step was to make a small dummy book. I would really recommend doing this as it is so helpful to see how the pace of your story works and to check that the scale of your characters is varied through the book. As you can see from the covers above I had also started to play around with techniques to use for the penguins but I will talk about that in a later post.

As you can see from these phone pics (please excuse the blurriness), I make my dummies as a concertina. I went to see the marvellous Mini Grey give a talk about her picture books while I was a student on the MA course, and this was a method she shared. It makes it very easy to cut out any pages you're not happy with and replace them with new ideas without having to make a new dummy.

I showed my first dummy book to Pam Smy, a wonderful tutor on the MA course and she suggested making more of Fluff and Billy falling out and the ensuing silence. We then worked out a way of changing the pagination so that there would be an extra page with no text at all, emphasising the break in their friendship. I then changed the dummy book accordingly, and this is how the story stayed until it was published 3 years later!

See also: The story of Fluff and Billy Part 1 - Where the idea came from

The story of Fluff and Billy Part 2 - Developing the idea

The story of Fluff and Billy Part 2 - Developing the idea

I now had an idea for a story where one character copies everything the other character does. I decided that to make the story more interesting, the two friends should fall out at some stage before making up again at the end.

I then had to think about:

What or who would the two characters be?

What actions would they be doing/copying?

How would they fall out?

How would they make up?

As my previous projects on the MA had involved child characters, I decided to make these animals of some kind. I thought about two bears or a bird and a bear but decided that the characters needed to be a similar scale so they could interact easily. I used to work as a Christmas card designer before starting the MA, so maybe the idea of penguins was a leftover from those days - my top 4 Christmas characters were always: 1. Santa: 2. reindeer: 3. snowman and 4. penguins! (If I remember I'll post some of my old designs closer to Christmas)! I thought the contrast of black and white penguins on water and snow would work well so I made my decision......penguins!

I then started working on very rough story boards - drawing thumbnail ideas of what the two penguins would get up to.

As you can see, these were very basic! I wanted their actions to fit into their environment so things like sliding, swimming and splashing seemed to be the way to go.

I originally called the penguins Scruff and Billy - Scruff was big and scruffy and I just liked the name Billy for a little penguin! But when I was drawing Scruff, he looked more fluffy than scruffy, hence the name change!

Initially, I thought the pair could fall out by getting carried away when spinning each other around. One of them would take a tumble and get in a mood. However, I thought it might be better if the copier deviates from the pattern at some point and so when Fluff rolls a snowball, Billy throws a snowball.....straight at Fluff!

The making up started off as Fluff pulling a funny face to make Billy laugh but soon switched to a spot of tummy tickling!

Next: Part 3 - making a dummy book