Doodles

Creating Children Picture Books Workshop, Universiti Putra Malaysia. July  2015. Photo courtesy Dr Noris Norowi. Have Fun Creating Your Own Picture Books Workshop, Bedok Library, Singapore - for the Asian Festival of Children's Content ( www.afcc.com.sg ). 31 May 2015. Photo courtesy of En Zamri Mohamad. For the past one year, I’ve had the privilege of sharing/giving talks to primary school students, university students, parents, fellow writers and librarians. Subject: How to create your own picture books for children With these sharing sessions, came great feedbacks. I think it would be useful to share some of what I shared during the sessions with you today. Hopefully we both can learn a thing or two, and can put them into good use :) What I would normally do is present slides on the ingredients of a children picture book (story, characters, settings, backgrounds, story arches, conflicts, scenes setups, motifs, and if the audiences are up to it - layers). I w...

One of the earliest panda sketches, dated 24 December 2014 © Latfy A Latif If I remember correctly, we started working on the DR Bubbles & Panda book somewhere around mid November 2014. Guess when did the book got published? April 2015. It was launched exactly a year after the first book was published (DR Bubbles & Anak Kucing, April 2014), during the Kuala Lumpur International Book Fair. It takes a number of text developments and drawing revisions before a book gets published. Characters changed, stories changed, pages taken out, added in, scenes got swapped etc etc. But if you'll enjoy the creative process, and deep down inside you know that it will be a nice, well-written, properly-thought-out picturebook that children deserves to have. Here are some of the final illustrations that made it into the book: Look closely and you'll find some animals that normally lives in the burrow. These two pages has no text, as to allow parents an...

Bukit Tabur, overlooking Klang Dam © Latfy A Latif

Early in the process, we have decided to add another layer to the story. They are: Additional animals - this can make the reading activity more fun. One this page, parents can allow their child to explore other animals that live underground Vintage  - The Volkwagon Beetle, Vespa scooter, Polaroid camera, and vintage postcards! All these give the book an evergreen theme I tried to stay true to real Beetles and Vespas as much as possible, and for this I used SketchUp. Fire up SketchUp, and download from the many free components from the online library. Based on the page composition, I will try to get the best camera angle in SketchUp, and export them as JPEGS to Sketchbook Pro, where I lay the SketchUp image to trace over. I will then exaggerate the car/scooter by compressing them a bit - just to make them look slightly cartoonish and errr…cuter. This process may take a few times to get the angle right. The the final version of the scooter in the book ...

The story of DR Bubbles & Panda was inspired by real pandas. In June 2014, two pandas we loaned by the Chinese government to the Malaysian government in commemorating the two countries’ 40 years of diplomatic ties. The story was written by DR Bubbles himself, sometimes in July 2014. Character Design During the earlier discussions of the title, I started sketching the panda characters. There are two of them - a male and a female named Xing Xing and Liang Liang accordingly. (Pandas cannot live alone, they have live in pair.)  There are so many cute panda versions on the internet, so it’s quite difficult to make this one yours. Our version (for the book) has round circular heads, with big black noses. The black circles around the eyes are a must, as not to confused them with koalas. The black and white colour bands simply followed the normal colour schemes that you see on pandas. I was toying with the idea of giving the female panda a small skirt, but then I ...