This is my second self-published children’s book. It is a collaboration with my sister Lisa Owens, and Daughter Stella.
It is a continuation of the story that started in Finn and Shiloh. We set out with the intention to have more adventure in this chapter, and this involved sending the dog Shiloh deep into the forest.
I chose a handful of greens to use as the central color scheme, in addition to other earth tones used for the rabbit and wolf characters.
You always learn from previous creative experiences, and this project is no exception. After a careful review of a printed copy of chapter 1 of this book, I realized that the dog Shiloh needed to be a lighter shade of blue. Also, the type size was overall too large. I tackled both of these problems in chapter 2 by finding a lighter shade to represent Shiloh and reducing the type size from 24 to 18 points.
The creative process of working with my Daughter on the art improved on this project as well. I created a storyboard set of sketches for all 23 pages, and we then refined each page in sequence. In some cases, we would find a photograph of a similar animal in the position we needed and based our sketches on that. Other times I would create a basic shape layout and Stella would add the characterizations. She often supplied 2-4 variations on each page and handled constructive criticism well.
We look forward to wrapping up the series with Chapter 3 in 2022!
Links to purchase are below.
