Illustrating a Picture Book: The Proofs

On Friday, a delivery van arrived, with a package that turned out to be the proofs of my new book: Bears on the Stairs.

This is the final stage for me, where I go through all the prints of my illustrations, checking for any issues, like blemishes, or incorrect colour-balancing. The colours are pretty perfect this time, which is a relief, as occasionally they aren't very true and need adjusting (and on one occasion things were so bad that the whole book had to be scanned all over again!).

There's something extra that's interesting with this project, though. Do you remember that, way back at the beginning, we were concerned about the story's end and made changes by adding the extra illustration above?

Well, Julia Jarman has thought about it some more and decided to also amend the text slightly at this stage, before everything is set in stone, to make the ending even stronger. The illustration above, chasing the parents downstairs, used to read:

"...they get them on the way down!"

But now it will read:

"...I bet my bears will get them on the way down!"

This may seem a simple change, but is rather clever of Julia because, given the remarkably familiar teddies tucked up with the boy in the final image, it underlines the idea that the bears aren't real, and are just an invention of a little boy's imagination.

The 'my bears' even hints that the whole thing may just have been a ruse for him to delay going to bed. Well done Julia!