Sarah McIntyre (jabberworks) wrote,
Sarah McIntyre
jabberworks

jampires character development

Jamtastic! Today's the official publication day of JAMPIRES, my picture book with my fab friend David O'Connell and our Oxford-based publisher, David Fickling Books! We're quite shocked, this book has been so long in coming - at least four years - that we sometimes thought it might never happen. But it HAS! :D


Photo by Dave Warren

So much development went into the making of this book that I'm going to run a small series here on the blog about how we made it. First, how did we design the Jampires characters? You can see them here, in some of the finished artwork:



Digging through old files, I quite like these ink sketches with their accompanying notes:




And here are some of Dave's sketches!


We both wanted the Jampires to have a slight vampiric quality to them, since they suck jam out of doughnuts, but I think I saw them as slightly more cuddly, whereas Dave's started out a bit more monster-like.


I think some of the monster stuff that didn't go into Jampires may have ended up in his Monster and Chips books.


Gosh, I'd forgotten this drawing until now. This was when we were still planning Jampires as a comic, and I think I was envisioning them a bit like Shel Silverstein, David Shrigley or Exploding Dog drawings.



And I wanted the colour palette and feel of the book to be very different to books I'd done before, but I hadn't quite hit on my new Jampires way of working in pencil. Here are some studies in tea, ink and gouache.



This was before both Jampires had hats; one of them was very bald.



I'll post more about our drawing technique soon, but I'll leave you with a Jampires mask, in case you think jam is so wonderful that you suspect you might just BE a Jampire. You can download it from our jampires.com website here!



Congratulations, Dave and TEAM JAMPIRES! Big thanks to our publisher David Fickling (who was very active in the story's creation - in fact, all the Ficklings, who took part in some way, including Rosie, Caro, Will and Tom), our editors, Hannah Featherstone in the early days and then Alice Corrie, designer Ness Wood, publicity team Philippa Perry, Manchester-based Liz Scott, Phil Earle and Anthony Hinton, to our lovely agent, Jodie Hodges, and to our partners and all our friends who gave us help and encouragement along the way!


Photo by James Petrie

Oo, and Jampires is definitely in the shops! Here's a photo tweeted in by bookseller Nora Goldberg at Foyles Southbank:

jamp_bookshop
Tags: dave_is_fab_club, jampires
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