DUCK THE WONDER DUCK aka NOT THIS LITTLE BLACK DUCK

Not This Little Black Duck is written by Circus Carnivore and Whacko The Chook author, Mark Svendsen.

When he first sent me this story, back in about 2006, it's original title was 'Duck The Wonder Duck'. It was far wordier then with a few extra plot points. Originally, Mark intended it to be a short paperback, accompanied by a series of black and white sketches, much like Pet Palace, a book I illustrated for Lothian's Start Up series. So I did up a quick character sketch, and that's as far as it got for a year or so.

Mark was unsuccessful selling it in this format, so it was shelved. A year or so later, when I was in my annual lull, I was looking for another project to keep me occupied. I found this text again, and proposed to Mark that it be shortened dramatically and turned into a picture book. We set about editing it heavily and I worked out the basic structure and layout, which pretty much remained intact throughout the edits to come. I fine-tuned the character designs...

At one point I thought about having a frog narrating the story...

... He would have been in every picture, but I felt he drew attention away from the main character and we'd lost some of the simplicity we were striving for with this book. He still remains in a handful of pictures though.

I then did up storyboards...

 Then from those I did tighter roughs...

We then sent it out to various publishers, but as is the way, rejection letters came back from every direction, and when we ran out of options it was shelved for another few years.

In the meantime I'd developed a fruitful working relationship with Koala Books and decided to submit it to them in 2010. They accepted it almost immediately. Once I'd finished See You Later Alligator I jumped straight into Duck The Wonder Duck. The title was later changed to Not This Little Black Duck, which works, and the text was tweaked a fair bit, but nothing much changed from my original roughs.

I decided to do a series of coloured storyboards...

My approach to the colour was different to that of most of my previous books, which were dominated by a lot of white space. I wanted to fill every inch of space with colour, because I felt that the duck characters, which are mostly white, would be lost on a predominantly white background...

 ... It was my thinking they'd stand out better on full colour. Most of the backgrounds have since been changed digitally in favour of white, at the request of the distributor. A decision I begged to differ on, but admittedly, I think the pictures look okay either way. Here's how the finished art originally appeared:

Here's one of my early concepts for the cover:

And this one was a collaboration with the designer:

Not This Little Black Duck will be out soonish...

Click here to read an interview with Mark Svendsen.