"Where do you get your ideas?"

This is the universal question asked by everyone that's ever drawn a breath...including yours truly! Generally, we're so astounded to meet someone we really admire and we're looking for that one golden nugget of information they'll freely give up about the creative process...how do I find it?...how do I start it?...how do I make the idea truly my own?

When you find out, be sure to give me a call!

Truth is, there are many ways you can receive an idea, and no, I don't think it has anything to do with wearing a tinfoil hat. We forget that everyday of our lives we're open to a constant barrage of input and streaming information from everyone we meet and everything we see...we simply have to learn how to look at something with a different pair of eyes! Once you're able to do that, you'll have your epiphany!

Or maybe not. My latest book took quite awhile to take ahold of my imagination, and it started with our first trip to Sicily to see my second cousin, Antonino Cuccia and his family...a family I'd rediscovered after a "separation" of almost 80 years! But I digress...I'm good at that. My cousin couldn't believe I'd prepared a book of words and phrases in Italian to try to learn the language...one morning he started telling me several tongue twisters and limmericks generally taught to the children. One of them went "sotto un palazzo, c'e` un cane pazzo..." or "there's a crazy dog under the palace..."...there's more to the phrase, but that notion stuck in my mind and I always had a smile on my face when I thought about it....I don't really know why. One day while walking our black lab, Jasmine, my wife said "why don't you make a children's book from that kid's phrase Nino taught you?" 

There was my epiphany.

I'd been toying with the idea of developing a children's book but had absolutely no idea where to begin. We won't even get into the massive competition with the major publishers for that market, or the intense scrutiny of art directors, carefully matching writers to artists to produce the best, and most profitable book possible...no, "we" didn't even have an idea! And yet there it was. Perfect. Fun, bouncy, bright and full of promise....and slowly the story began to make itself available to me. My wife and my dear friend Karen gave me several great notions that I wove into an emerging storyline...why do the people think the dog is crazy? Why, she lives under a palace!...and that makes her think she's automatically a princess! But it needed something else...another main character to balance the idea...and that idea became Topo the mouse. HE would be part of the reason the townspeople thought this dog was crazy...because she talks to herself! But in reality she was talking to Topo who rode in her fur or tucked behind her ear, so well hidden hardly anyone could see him when they passed! That's it!

In the next post, I'll share some sketches from my book and show development from a rough idea to the finished pencil illustration! See you then! Ci vediamo!