The Process - Part 1

In my earlier posts I was in the middle of illustrating the WantsToBe series. These books came about from a bedtime story-telling activity with my youngest son. They were great fun to illustrate and I worked with a talented author, Valerie Harmon. More information about these books can be found at wantstobe.com. After making a Kindle and paperback version of the books I did some investigating into apps that could be created in Adobe InDesign. For the next year I glued myself to the computer and turned the WantsToBe series into 10 stand alone apps which were sold on iTunes. A year later those kind of apps were no longer supported by iTunes. Back to square one I learned how to make them into epubs which are sold in Apple Books and read in the iBooks app (included with iPads and all Apple devices).

I can remember the first of over 700 animations that I created for that series. It was for the book The Chipmunk Who Wanted to Be a Bear. The scene has the sun setting while Chipmunk tries to hibernate like a bear, but has a restless sleep with dreams of flying fish. I didn't know much about the animations panel so I made what was called an image sequence folder that was played with the tap of a button. I used image sequences for most of my animations in those early apps. I had the biggest thrill at seeing my illustration come to life for the first time when I played it in the previewer. Now I rarely do image sequences if I can help it because setting them up takes a-lot more time and they aren't as smooth.

I create the image sequences in Adobe Illustrator in my artwork file. I duplicated the sun and moved it slightly down the art board, then repeated the process 10 times. I exported them as pngs and cropped them to the desired size in Adobe Photoshop. Since image sequence folders aren't used in epubs, I now place them in my InDesign file and make them into a multi-state object. The button action is set to go to the next state (10x), the timing is adjusted, and the sun sets! I will try to not bore you with the details but if you don't know how to do something, just Google it! After seeing the sun set I was hooked! I can't upload a video of this animation here but you can check out other animations on my facebook page.

Water Under the Bridge

It has been over eight years since my last post and I won't even attempt to fill in what has happened during that time. My reason for starting this blog was to establish an online profile to create interest in my books, and nothing has changed in that regard. I apparently dropped the ball on figuring out social media and continued doing what I love; illustrating children's books. I finished the collection of the Wantstobe books (10 total) with the collaboration of a very talented writer; Valerie Harmon. You can find all the links to check out the Kindle, paperback, and enhanced versions (animated with sound effects, music and dramatized narration) on our website wantstobe.com.

My husband was tired of being an illustrator's widow so he pulled me into house remodeling projects for the next seven years. We could have had an HGTV series called Midlife Makeover with all that we did during that time; including the drama. We finally finished our "last" big project this year. I'm not sure our kids believe that we are done, but now we're helping them with their fixer uppers. The title of the series is now more accurately called Retired Renos.

Between house projects I jumped on the computer to begin the next phase of my dream; making animated picture books. The name Tapdoodle came to mind as I thought about young viewers tapping on the screen to operate large equipment in my first book called Construction Works. My grandson requested I make a book about cooking and 5 months later Cooking Works was added to the list. Since my first blog, 10 more grandchildren have come into the world and I love to see their reactions when I share with them my latest book. I can imagine thousands of children's eyes growing large when they tap on the screen and a helicopter scoops water out of a lake to put out a raging forest fire (see the animated page in the attached video). In order for this to happen I have to put out the word that my books exist! You can find links to all my books by clicking on the "shop" tab at the top of the Tapdoodle Facebook page here.

In future blogs I plan on sharing about the process of creating animated picture books so I'll be in touch (before 8 more years have passed).