"… and the Prince understood, and the Prince was happy."

Very few of you know this, but these are the last words in "The Prince". As you read them, copies of the book (and bag/card)  are on their way to our KickStarter supporters.

Our state-of-the-art distribution center, aka Phu's floor.

We apologize again for the delay, just as the Prince's clothes became tattered and he grew weary during his journey (*spoiler*!) , Annie and I encountered some setbacks bringing our story to you. But just as the story ends happily (*more spoiler!!*), we are so thrilled to have had support from all of you. We thank you, and wish you all the happiness in the world.

Best regards,

--Phu & Annie

At last !!!

PS: Many people have requested to buy the book after we have finished the KickStarter, so we have put it on Etsy, the same place where The Courtyard Kitchen was sold: https://www.etsy.com/shop/phuvan

The Prince and The Kickstarter: WE DID IT!!!

So... the KickStarter exceeded all of our expectations.

Me reacting to our KickStarter passing $1000: goggles and helmet protected me from the shock. I'm told Annie responded similarly.

People we know corralled their spouses, family and friends to support us (the Thorson and Lear families were particularly well-represented). You have our many thanks: 1,299 to be exact:

I'm told at this moment an army of dedicated craftsmen are putting the final touches on boxes of freshly-printed copies of The Prince to be rushed to your doors.

Speaking of printing, we researched about half a dozen printing companies for The Prince. While we could print very cheaply through comic book presses, we felt that The Prince should be well-made with thick archival paper, full-bleeds and decent binding, even if our small printing run made the book a bit more expensive. So we decided to stay with Pikto, the Toronto-based press who did a consistently outstanding job with my previous photobooks and cookbook.

Now that our successful Kickstarter campaign has ended, and we've finished all the illustrations, we'll be working on fulfilling the orders that you've made! Some previews of what's coming to your doorstep in the near future...

Please stay tuned in the next few days as we ship out copies of The Prince. And again, thank you !

--Phu & Annie

Colouring The Prince

First of all, Phu and I want to thank you for all your generous support! It has only been 3 days, and we have already reached our Kickstarter goal! We've been working hard on this book for a long time, and it's awesome to know people interested and eager to have a copy! ...seriously, Phu has been so excited that he was sending me hour-by-hour text message updates every time another person pledged to our campaign. We are super excited :)

Yay!

Secondly, I wanted to do another process post. This project has been a learning experience with many firsts. So far, I've written about the pencil drawings and inking, and I wanted to update this blog with some more detail about the digital side of these illustrations. This will get a bit technical, so if you don't care for the details, don't feel guilty about just scrolling through the pictures.

KickStarted !

Hi everyone,

After more than a year's worth of hard work (Annie sketching, inking and coloring and me making snarky blogposts), we are finally ready to pitch The Prince to family, friends, and strangers on the Internet !

Without further ado, please come check out our KickStarter page:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1823550875/the-prince-an-illustrated-childrens-book

Our KickStarter goodies. Unfortunately, you can't get our cat, Schrodinger. It's against the rules :(

The cover, featuring our iconic castle at night.

And the winner is...

Thank you for everyone who voted in our mug contest, including apparently, two members of the Toronto Maple Leafs :P

We apologize for the delay. Originally the contest was only supposed to take 1 week, but ended up taking a bit longer than that. Mostly I've been writing my PhD thesis while horribly sick with what people tell me is the flu. It actually felt like this:

A common problem with writing theses while sick.

The Prince mug giveaway, and Friends of the Prince

Hi everyone,

As Annie works hard to finish inking The Prince, I circulated an early draft of the illustrations among our friends and the response was overwhelmingly positive. A big thanks to everyone who proofread this early copy, especially while I took some stalker-like photos for our upcoming KickStarter videos:

Completing the inking phase!

This weekend, I officially finished inking and scanning in all 20 pages of The Prince. In celebration of this, Phu threw a small dinner party with friends. We feasted like princes and princesses.

I've already done a couple of pages in full colour, and in the coming weeks, I'll be working on finishing up the rest. Look for an upcoming post/tutorial on how to go from inks to digitally-coloured pages in Photoshop!

Too blurry to see what's going on?
Stay tuned for actual pages in glorious 1200dpi!

Tools of an amateur illustrator

First of all, I want to say thanks to everyone who came out to the auction last weekend to raise money for the Birmingham Free Clinic and Women's Center Clinic! We participated in the silent auction and had a number of bids on our print.

Before the bidding began

Phu plays this down, but I think it's worth sharing - when he started making and selling his photo and recipe books, he wanted to donate the profits to a local cause in the community. He got in touch with the director of the Birmingham Free Clinic, Mary Herbert, and for the past 3 years, he's been an enthusiastic supporter, forwarding proceeds from his book sales and donating items for their annual fundraising auction.

Print auction for Pittsburgh's Birmingham Clinic

Through my good friend Sara (the topic of a previous post) a few years ago I learned of the Birmingham Free Clinic in Pittsburgh and their great work with providing health care to underserved populations. I've donated a few small things in the past for their annual auction. This year, Annie wanted to donate a full-sized print of a page from The Prince for the auction.

If you're in Pittsburgh, the auction is in LR6 of Scaife Hall on the University of Pittsburgh campus, at 6:30PM on Saturday February 1st, 2013. Come bid on Penguins tickets, an iPad Mini, and other good stuff to support a good cause !

Before The Prince, there was Crusoe

The Prince is not my first attempt at publishing a story. No, it seemed I had wanted to tell stories since I was a kid, and I wasn't slowed down by physical plausibility, logical consistency or conventionally-accepted grammar.

And thanks to my Mom's meticulous memento-keeping habits, I have proof from the fabled days of middle school:

The whole book was done in pencil, then inked in red, blue and a bit of green. Apparently this would be the first of many thrilling adventures. I can't recall exactly how long it took, but it was many weeks.  If there was a mistake in the inked version, I would rewrite the whole page.

Ah, the classic "Once upon a time" opener. You can see the corrections I made using Wite-Out correction fluid, and my teacher's corrections in pencil.

The story moves quickly. By the second paragraph our protagonist Crusoe (any relation to a much better-known character ?) already received his task of slaying the dragon of Black Mountain. Ten-year-olds do not have time to lose. Don't let the fact that his horse is named "Jolly" fool you, this story is not a peaceful one. The action picked up quickly:

Then he said, "You are a very dangerous monster, I must kill you !!!" Crusoe drew his sword and fought bravely. But the Fire Dragon was very big and strong. Crusoe's strength was giving out and he fell to the ground.

As you can see, Crusoe was a man of action, a heroic figure who conveniently announces his intentions. Though perhaps he could have benefited from a bit more aerobic training, falling to the ground from exhaustion during a fight is a little embarrassing !

Black Mountain was clearly a metaphorical name, since the mountain is not colored in. (CORRECTION-- my Mom tells me I didn't want to color in the mountain, afraid that the page will bleed though and I will get ink all over myself).

More illustration. For a proudly talkative man, Crusoe had no visible mouth. Maybe he was doing a stoic stiff-upper-lip thing. It's also a bit odd that Crusoe faced *away* from the castle even though he had just arrived there. Maybe he was checking the surroundings to make sure he wouldn't be ambushed ?

A twist !!! The Fire Dragon turns out to be a prince who had been transformed by an evil wizard-prime minister Crome who usurped the throne after the prince's father died. Crusoe traveled to confront Crome at Richmon (not to be confused with the more conventional RichmonD!).

"But Crome was transformed [into] an owl and flew away. Crusoe took a bow, an arrow, and shot it. The owl fell down and it transformed into an egg. Crusoe broke the egg and it was transformed [into] a needle. Crusoe broke the needle and Crome was dead."

I'm sure this scene would have the budget of a small city if this was adapted into a JJ Abrams movie. If it was a Peter Jackson movie, it would be a small country.

An early attempt at cartography. I think I was getting impatient with the third act and needed to explain how Crusoe could get between places so quickly. Perhaps he had learned his lesson and built up aerobic capacity? He seemed to be walking everywhere, environmentally-friendly, but slow. I'm sure it's so he can keep his horse Jolly, well... jolly and just left him/her in the stable (CORRECTION-- Mom: "It's because you couldn't draw a horse !"). There were also an angel,  more transformations, and well... more violence.

After his adventure predictably ends happily, Crusoe was invited to administer the country he had just saved. I'm sure my parents were relieved that my career aspirations included civil service and not just vigilantism and poor transportation choices.

So there you have it. Thankfully I have since left illustration in Annie's much more capable hands, and my narrative skills have improved over the years.

See you next week, when Annie will write a post that will likely *not* involve dragons.

Completing the pencilling phase!

Happy new year, everyone! The end of 2013 marks the completion of the first phase of our book - the pencils for every page of The Prince are now all finished! Yay!

When Phu and I met up this weekend to discuss the book, we shared stories about our holidays. He went back to Seattle, I went back to Toronto, and we both met up with friends and family who asked how the book was coming along.

Flying out of Toronto, back to the Burgh

A short meeting of the minds

This week I made a short trip to Toronto to see Annie, who had gone home to take a well-deserved break, and to see Pikto, a well-regarded printing press in Toronto's Distillery District. Pikto had printed several of my photobooks and my cookbook in the past, and we were considering using them to print the final version of The Prince.

How to get your holiday cards

In other news, Phu has been working hard to make our holiday cards available for sale!! If you're interested in having your own The Prince-themed cards to send to your friends and family this holiday season, please check them out at www.etsy.com/shop/phuvan. We have 4 designs, all printed on sturdy cardstock, and blank on the inside for you to personalize.

2 of our 4 holiday card designs, featuring the prince and his newly-named buddy, Schrödinger the cat:

www.etsy.com/shop/phuvan

Thanks to all our friends and family for your support! :)

Winning cat name

Thanks to everyone for voting a name for The Prince's cat friend! We now have a name for the little guy. 

Now presenting...

Cat naming contest!

Annie wanted me to post this week since it's my turn. Since she had not only done amazing work drawing the cards, but also started writing the post, I didn't want to steal her thunder.

So... I've decided instead to just post what she had written below:

--Phu

Though he has been the Prince's companion throughout the book and you have seen him on the holiday cards, we have yet to give him a name. Surely he wouldn't just want to be known as "honey" or "darling" or "cute thing," so it's about time we name him. We recently asked you for name suggestions, and we've compiled some of them below - we'd love to hear from you about what name you think best fits our cat friend!

Holiday cards

Although we'll be releasing The Prince in 2014, we prepared some goodies in time for this holiday season! In addition to finishing up pencils for the last few pages of the book, we've been working on some festive greeting cards featuring our main character and his feline companion.

The origins of The Prince

The Prince had a rather long journey before he ever came alive under Annie's pencil (pen ? quill ? charcoal nib ?).

(cue water-ripple flashback movie effect)

The year was 2004. I was in college at the University of Washington, which is in Seattle, and not St. Louis. The other common misconception is that typical UW students looked like this:

This is completely untrue. These would be students of The Evergreen State College, 70 miles to the south. Actually, I lied. These are what you get if you typed "hippies" into Google Image Search and take the 3rd result. In any case, UW students looked like this:

From sketch to final product

Some of you have asked me about my illustration process, so I thought I'd do a post on it. The following is a step-by-step description of my process, which I mostly figured out by doing what amateurs do best - looking things up on the internet.

You may have gotten a glimpse of some pages from the book - like the page with the castle - in the video from our first post. Here is how it was made:

1) The pencil sketch

When we first started, Phu sent me the text of his story along with ideas for the illustrations. This page is about halfway through the book, and represents a turning point in the story. I wanted to draw a castle under a foreboding sky with dramatic clouds. When drawing things that I have a hard time imagining, I turn to the the same resource I use for literature searches and advice on whether garlic cloves are safe to eat after they've been in my fridge for so long they start sprouting: Google. 

Google, please google "clouds perspective."

Meet the author !

I realized I haven't properly introduced myself in my first post. Who is this stranger writing a children's story book ?

Well, I'm a PhD student at CarnegieMellon in Pittsburgh. My lab is in the department of Biological Sciences, and I spend a lot of time building things, so some people call me an engineer.

"That has nothing to do with writing children's books !!!", you say. You're right ! I guess it's more informative to say I like trying new things.

My first love is photography. The photo below was taken at my 3rd birthday party, in Saigon. My attempt at photographing my friends was quickly abandoned when the cake arrived, and the party was a quiet, sedate affair. At least that's the version my parents told. Since my report cards from this period regularly included the phrase "Phu is sociable but also incorrigibly disruptive", I feel the reality may have been a bit different.

  I'm not sure what camera I'm looking at here, 

but my Dad took this photo with his Canonet. 

No fruit or child-friendly beverage was harmed during this production.

This will go for millions on e-bay someday

I told my mom about this project and she found some old drawings to demonstrate how far my fine motor skills have come. My grade 1 teacher had our class write and draw stories that she compiled each month into a newsletter for our parents to display on the fridge with pride (or with concern, depending on spelling ability, subject matter, etc). She also had us make books which she published like an O.H.* using a dot matrix printer, laminating machine, and staples.

I think this one was about a girl who went rollerblading down a big hill, got in trouble with her mom, cried, and then she woke up because it was all a dream, obviously. I am still awaiting congratulatory call from the Newbery Medal award committee...

*original hipster