Topic: Art
From a recent letter to old friends:
..Perhaps you remember the little cat in the sea storyboard of thumbnail sketches I showed you so long ago. It has been languishing hidden away in my storage boxes for years and years. Occasionally I pull it out and look longingly at it. ( I always associate you two with this set of sketches for some reason.) Initially after doing that first plan, I had drawn up a few images and turned them into cards which have been favorites with people all these years. But, I had learned back then, that children's stories were just not supposed to end with "and then he woke up." No 'it was all a dream' stories. I never could figure out what to do with the ending of the story, and so the project remained unfulfilled. It was stuck for years, though two of the images have gotten plenty of mileage. People always ask if they are part of a children's story and I must confess how I just got stuck with it.
The other day, perhaps even prompted by your initial contact, I came across the sheets of thumbnails again. (I was actually in search of something else.) This time it hit me - I could just scan those thumbnails, rough as they are, and make them into a very loose type of book. And, in such a rough form, this ending can stand as it is - or - alternate endings could be created by readers/viewers. (And, after opening my mind to this solution, I did get a slew of other ideas for stories with this cat character as well as endings for this story.)
I've now scanned all the thumbnails as enlargements. I'll either put it together as a little booklet myself or use one of those POD printers as a simple production. I want to have this as an object in my hand which can be passed on/shared if desired. Even more basic and elemental though, which also just came to me, is that stories used to be only oral. I would love to use my story in that way as a companion to my kids drawing classes. It is good to realize, once again, that prescribed ways, are not the only ways that things have to be!
I'm attaching the sheets as they've been all these years. They're reduced in size but I think they're big enough to look at. Boy are the thumbnails rough. I think I was experimenting with some 'brush' marker. I hate the squared off edges those strokes make. A real brush would have been so much better in being able to form less fractured backgrounds. But I want to put it together anyway, just to bring the germ out to the light of day in a whole form. The prospect of this is gives me such ideas...In Catinka's Animal Notecards for Cat & Dog Lovers you can see the two images that became cards.
