Allie All Along

When my girls were toddler, they would get so incredibly full of feelings that they would just explode into sobbing tantrums. Sometimes it seemed ridiculous, the things they would cry over (the blue cup is in the dishwasher! You wouldn’t let me play with the electrical cords! I can’t take my fingers off!)… But when you are so little and it’s hard to communicate, this stuff is as real as it gets. When my youngest was a toddler, and in the middle of a fit, it often seemed like there was nothing I could do except wait for it to blow over – any attempt I made to talk with her just made it worse. However, her sister (4 years older), would often step in to help, and when she spoke, the little one would pause, sniff, and listen. That break from crying was sometimes enough of a distraction to let us in to help her find ways to calm herself, so that we could deal with the crux of the problem, whatever it was … and that’s what sparked the idea for ALLIE ALL ALONG

One thing that made ALLIE ALL ALONG super fun to create was that I was working in color almost from the beginning! You can see my rough thumbnail/storyboard drawings for the layout of the book above. Usually I start my projects with just plain old regular pencil and leave decisions about color for much later in the process, but for this story, the color scheme was integral all of the shedding layers.