Chris Haughton has been hard at work creating his new book Oh No, George! Here he gives an insight into the creative process...
FINALLY...! This book has been two years in the making...! This post is just to show where the idea came from, and how the book took shape. It's also quite useful for me to put together this post because its always such a long process that I kind of forget where the ideas came from to begin with.My first idea for this book was a cause and effect sequence called Oh No!... it was an idea for a sort of elaborate circular accident... I may come back to that idea in future in fact...
I was toying with that but was reluctant to settle on it. Another idea was 'Bad duck' about a duck who was bad at being a duck... swimming and quacking etc. Its was a bit like a version of The Ugly Duckling and was sparked by seeing a worried looking duck in London who seemed to be swimming about 2 inches below the water level of his friends.
A third idea featured 'clown man and clown dog' which I think also could be quite good in the future...
I didn't realise it at the time but all these ideas revolved around the idea of characters somehow messing up (which I thought would make entertaining drawings). I realised it's a lot funnier if there is intention from the character to not mess up, so in the end I scrapped clown man and sort of fused all three ideas to make the dog the comic lead character.
One part of the picture book I try to make use of are the page-turns. They can be great fun when reading aloud if there is bit of a build up so i decided to build up to a page-turn where the dog messes up somehow... that was how the basic idea came about ... I jotted it down on 3 pieces of A4 which it turned out hardly changed at all from this first sketch.
I also drew some initial character sketches...
Look out for part 2 of Chris' post coming soon!
You can watch the animated trailer for the book below...
