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.
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| The the final version of the scooter in the book © Latfy A Latif |
The Volkswagen Beetle was also based on a real car, owned by one of our friends. I showed him my initial drafts and got wonderful feedbacks from him. I then took some photos of his car as reference.
For this page, I got him to open the boot so that I can get close to the page composition as much as possible.
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On the left is the real Beetles. Notice the spare wheels? In the book it is not there since the pandas threw it out to get themselves in!
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