Saturday Sketch Post: David Hyde Costello

This Saturday Sketch Post comes to us from David Hyde Costello.  I Can Help, his first picture book, hits stores this week.  He's been kind enough to share with us some of the preliminary art for it. 

This is the very first storyboard I drew when I was coming up with the idea for the book.

One of my nephews was just learning to read, but he was frustrated because the only books at his skill level were baby books and not very interesting.  I wanted to come up with a good story that could be told with only a few words per page.

I wasn’t going to submit this to my editor until I’d developed it more.  I did show it to him casually, just to let him know what I was working on.  He loved it and FSG bought the book based on these penciled storyboards and one piece of sample art.

Surprised?  I was.

This is the first piece of sample art I did once I had the idea for the book.

One of the first things my editor said was, more animals.  This is what I sent him next.

He also thought the bird who pulls the splinter should be of a specific species, because a duck it also a kind of bird.

My editor thought the giraffe’s problem needed to be more clear.  I sent him two possibilities to look at.  This is the first one…

…and this is the second one.

I liked this one because I read that giraffes are so heavy and have such small feet that they really do have to avoid soft ground.

Another comment from my editor was that there should be a consistent pattern to the layout of the book.  We went with a two-page spread for the “Thank you”s, a single page for the character to identify a problem, and a single page for the “I can help.”

Another person I worked with at FSG was Margaret, the editorial director.  She and I spent a lot of time on the ending.

At one point I thought it might be good to have each animal saying “I can help” on the last page.

Margaret suggested “We can help” because the slight change from “I can help” highlights the new relationships the animals have formed.

That’s what led me to have the monkey riding on the giraffe on the last page.  It makes reference to their earlier interaction, when they went from being two individual animals to being part of a cooperative community.