What is this blog for?

Tracking the progress of creating an illustrated book. 

Summer 2011 I went camping with my family and we stayed at an oceanside site on Hornby Island.  I’ve been camping there most summers since I was a kid, I introduced my wife Jess to it shortly after we met and we’ve taken both our daughters almost every year since (one’s 6 the other is 16 months old).

The beach there is mostly a wide sandstone shelf.  It's been worn down by a million tides and is a beautiful sculpture of different shapes.  It looks pretty alien to most peoples idea of what a beach should look like.

I had brought my Nikon and a borrowed macro lens with me.  Getting low to the ground, bringing my perspective right down to sandstone and shooting photos of tiny things in such a strange landscape inspired a story.  I drew some sketches and Jess and I bounced ideas back and forth. 

We left that camping trip with a memory card full of macro shots, some sketches of characters on my daughters construction paper and a loose outline, a skeleton of a story.

Fast forward to now and I've filled two sketchbooks with ideas and we have 10000 words down.  The text needs a lot of revision, and I need draw and paint a ton of art.  Then we hope to put it together and self publish it.

This blog will serve a few functions.  It lets us keep our friends and family aware of how the book is going, it will help keep us motivated by getting early feedback on the art and words, and it documents the pitfalls and problems providing a resource for others attempting something like this.

Up next:  Who are you people?  What makes you think you can write and illustrate a book that someone will actually want to read?