occasionally, i'd just give him the reins completely. we were just sketching so, i could always change anything later. this image, a poem from the 1800s, i just let him do "via" me 100%. "draw this" - okay. "put this cat here" - okay. "the bird is doing this" - okay, sure. https://hell.twtr.plus/media/5283f4b9103b4bdb7b0272287821dd9dc3fa49b8a9a29215e98e5a050dcbb2a0.file

but, then i got laid out - my knee got injured, and i was in bed for almost a month. but, i couldn't stop working on this. and, i was still hanging out with him. so, from my bed, we planned out about 70% of the book. usually, he'd just watch me draw and provide random ideas.

together, he was providing the energy my previous images were missing. i was coming at it from too much of my own perspective. so i took the flavor of this image we did together, and brought it back into the images i had already done. i thought that would be the end of it.

one day, i was going over pages in the backyard, and he asked me about the poems. there's one about kittens, by wordsworth. i thought for fun, i'd just let him plan an image. so he's telling me: put this cat here. put a kitten here... and i'm like... wait. this looks great. https://hell.twtr.plus/media/76572bfe97977c76da8fa304ff59c758779aa5ede1f5b8069e6be219c8a0b039.file

the flavor there was almost... slightly pointed, highly illustrated, highly designed... let's say semi art nouveau. they looked great. i knew it had a slightly adult flavor, but i thought that would just be the tone of the book, and i set out to finish it along those lines.

when i started making this book, i did the first six to ten images pretty quickly. here's a rudyard kipling poem. it's one of the longest in the book. the initial pass looked like this, but with no figures, animals, anything like that. it was just the empty forest: https://hell.twtr.plus/media/4e69f3c64444e51135af9ef4f04fe652a831209985eb0a92b02fcb8734e25565.file

(we do it live here, so, i saved these images just to post them now. there's no page numbers, titles, authors, that all appear in the actual book. this text was placeholder - so it does look like this, but if you see a punctuation error or something, i fixed it in the real file)

here's a behind the scenes on our new book, with some unseen images. on the table of contents, i listed owen jr as creative director. this was actually out of necessity. i didn't plan on it at all, but he ended up really making the book with me. this is a real credit. [...] https://hell.twtr.plus/media/732955acbfe3521d9fb97676e6f39e63f252cfc4a06dec94ca442cb1ce814f20.file https://hell.twtr.plus/media/20aac15322b2623cde5f5f40b5f1fe7fc11f6d679b6b901014217416af61bf26.file https://hell.twtr.plus/media/a1b8460c401c310d2b9d22c86193173efecacfd541e16c398c75f8aac3067a0d.file https://hell.twtr.plus/media/567d8dae173e4ffc549ad747673e62cf5af401a2f8d0ea1290c3fbeb8cbb48d3.file https://hell.twtr.plus/media/930c61d8f10de39f07dfae85e1cdbc22b48eea70a830b9f16d69c2a500e221cf.file