Lady MacBeth Afraid of the Stairs

October 27, 2018

In 2017 I was able to add another type of project to my resume. This time, it was illustrating a children's book.
I've known the author, Thom Barker, for virtually my entire life. I remember well the first day we met. It was some 49 years ago, in grade one. We were halfway through the year when the teacher brought forth Thom, a new student from Saskatchewan. She asked the class if anyone would like to volunteer and show the new lad around the school. I thought "I can do that", and raised my hand. The rest is history.
Thom and I were best friends throughout elementary school. And he being a creative soul, like myself, meant we collaborated on many artistic projects during that time, most notably drawing comics and later making films.
As adults we went our own separate ways, and lost touch sometimes for years at a time. But we always managed to reconnect. So it was that in 2017 Thom approached me about illustrating a children's book he had written.
You see Thom, in addition to fathering several humans, is also now the proud 'dad' of his beloved Newfoundland dog, Lady MacBeth. Lady, impressive beast that she is, is terribly phobic. Small everyday items, such as a blowing piece of paper, are enough to set her off. Bikes, shopping carts, and lawn-and-leaf bags are also on the list of the terrifying. But she saves her greatest anxiety for the basement stairs at home, and that is the primary setting for Thom's book.
I hadn't yet illustrated a children's book, but it's something I've mused on more than once. It turns out to be an exercise that taps into my experience as a director in film and television. I spent 30 years putting visuals to words, and illustrating a book is very much like storyboarding a script. In television, whenever I would visualize the written word, my default was to put myself in the audience seat and think "what would the viewer want to be seeing at this moment?" That same technique is what guided me through this process. Thus when Thom writes "The big stairs inside the house went down and down and down forever and it was dark down there", I immediately thought of some sort of POV (point of view) shot that would have the audience share in Lady's terrifying viewpoint.
In addition to having the book be a vivid experience visually, I also wanted the adults who would inevitably be the ones reading it to their kids to enjoy it too. So I gave the illustrations a bit of a 'throwback' feel, with settings that are not unlike the ones from 49 years ago, when one grade one boy met another one and became best friends.
I've included some of my initial doodles, plus the resultant finished frames, and a link to the book on Amazon. Enjoy everyone!