Bigfoot on the prowl.

Did the Vikings run into Bigfoot? You’ll have to buy and read ‘So You Want To Catch A Bigfoot?’ to find out. Available in fine stores and online locations soon!

I received advance copies of the Judy Moody film related So You Want To Catch A Bigfoot book I talked about previously. I did 25 black and white illustrations for the book and overall I’m very happy with how they turned out.

It’s a funny read and there’s plenty of classic Bigfoot visuals to look at in the book, not just my illustrations.

For those who wish to know – I did rough pencil drawings, scanned them in and did the final art on a 6×8 Wacom tablet, using Photoshop with a brush I designed myself to recreate a pen and ink line that I used to use back in the ‘good-ol-days’. Not that those days were that good, or even that long ago now that I consider them…

Working on the computer made it easy to play with adding a ‘wash’ to the drawings and the reproductions in the book are very good. The art director and designers on the book made it possible to get all the work done on a tight deadline. And they had some helpful notes on my art too. And those are the best kind of notes to get. Notes that help make your work better.

I wouldn’t mind catching Bigfoot myself, but I’d settle for someone capturing my neighbors when they are using their leaf blowers and recreating the sounds of living next to a Freeway. But, that’s another story.

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Enhanced books, e-book, ibooks, you books, me books.

artwork above is the ‘help and info’ screen from the soon to be released iPad Cave Bear and Duck comic book.

The dead tree publishing world is changing and change is not easy. It’s scary. It reminds us that our world is a complicated, interconnected realm and our place in that world is not set in cement.

There’s no doubt that material delivered on screens is the future. Exactly what screens? I’ll leave that debate up to the venture capitalists. But as an artist, I know I need to be on whatever screens are around.

Our iPad app has entered Alpha testing and will soon be on its way to the Apple store for approval. I’m making some final changes to the icons, navigation buttons and the support website. We have a good idea about what our next project will be, and that it will use a unique navigation method that would be impossible to do in a dead tree book. One of our goals is to develop some ideas that really exploit the platform. But there’s no reason to not publish a good comic book or picture book just as it is on the iPad.

Yes you can exploit the technology and platform to do some cool stuff, but when you write or record a song, you don’t try and use every instrument, just because you can.

The story is still the experience people are looking for, and if it can resonate with an audience there is no reason it can’t find success on these new platforms without a lot of wacky hijinks. Every book/app released on the iPad doesn’t have to be animated or turn into a puzzle game or let you color the pages.

There’s a lot of terms being used to define and explain what the future of books looks like. But the most important one is still ‘good’. Of course that’s the toughest one to agree on, to define, to market, to develop and make. But it’s the best goal to have.

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