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...

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 ...

Whoa, it’s been a while. All those tiny doodles that I’ve been doing (both digitally and traditionally) for the last few years were actually preparations for the BIG thing – doing illustrations for children books series! Well, who would have guessed. It started with a doodle of one my best friends - DR Bubbles; and an idea that we wanted to self-publish (more like self-print) children storybooks that we can encourage friends to sponsor the printing costs, so that we can then give it to sick kids in hospitals (find out what we do here: www.facebook.com/myredbubbles ). So I started with a manuscript of maybe a 24-page children storybook (one or two sentences per page), and sent it to Iskandar aka DR Bubbles – he’s a certified translator (and clown doctor), so he’s good with the grammar etc – for proofing. That took a couple of months to get it polished (we didn't have any deadlines, so we kind of strolled through it casually). DR Bubbles early sketches Meanwhi...