Doodles

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...

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 ...

A lot has changed since the last time. Doodles became books, and characters became smaller (but more plump!) – that's the evolution of things! :)