Flap Book Artwork is Weird

I've just spent 2 days glued to the computer (at least the weather's been so awful, it's not felt too bad). It's all to do with A Lark in the Ark...

When Peter Bently and I perform it at Hay Festival (May 29th) and Edinburgh Festival (August), we are going to project the illustrations as we read. Apart from looking really good, this will be really useful: it's nice to go into the audience and choose children to open the flaps, but it's tricky for anyone else to see what's underneath. This way, each time a flap is lifted, everyone gets to see it.

But the trouble with flap books, is that none of the artwork makes any sense outside of the book, so I couldn't just load my existing illustrations into PowerPoint, ready for projection. For example, there is a page that looks like the one above. You lift a flaps on the duvet to reveal baboons in pink pantaloons hiding in the bed:

...along with llamas in pyjamas:

Except, what I actually drew was this:

...and this:

So, I had to re-visit every illustration in Photoshop, joining all the bits together, turning them into images that match what you see when you are reading the real book.

Unfortunately, I quickly discovered another issue: when you open a flap in a book, and it goes across someone's face, well, that's fine, but for a projected image I thought it would look weird:

So, perfectionist (or obsessive?) that I am, I did more fiddling around, moving background characters out of the way:

While I was at it, I moved some of the eyes, and even pasted in this wee wombat to fill a pregnant space created!

It's all done now (phew) and looks really fun. Egmont are going to print us T-shirts for the event, and we are going to use my 'doctored' version of the llamas in pyjamas on the back! I think Hay is now fully booked. I'll post details of the Edinburgh event in a few weeks.