My new picture book Stellarphant is out in November this year. I’ve been working on it since 2014, so it’s been 7 years in the making.
That might not seem like much compared to Jurassic Park‘s ’65 million years in the making’. But it’s still a lot … but I digress.
I drew the first sketch for what would become Stellarphant on a whim in June 2014. I was sitting with my illustrator buddies in a cottage on Rottnest Island for our annual SCBWI WA Retreat, when I started sketching an elephant and a penguin in spacesuits. No reason why – it just came out on the page. I added some colour and there was the beginnings of a story. The image stayed with me, and I started trying to write something to go with it.
I submitted an early version of the text to a publisher back in 2015; it didn’t go anywhere at the time as that version of the text was a bit rubbish, to be honest! But the germ of the idea was there, and I kept coming back to it to add more notes and research, and to play with the text.
I’ve got pages and pages of aborted attempts at this story, and sketchbooks full of drawings and notes showing the development over the last 7 years. Lots of my colleagues in the industry have heard about this book going back a while now, including those friends who were sitting with me when I first made this sketch back in 2014; they’ve borne witness to this, and encouraged me along the way, and it’s so great to finally have it ready to share with readers in November.
Here are some of my earliest sketches for this project, all from 2014 and 2015, with the final art to compare.
For those of you wondering, yes, that penguin made it into the final book as well!
There’s that penguin again. My early idea was that while Stella was doing scuba training so she could prepare for weightlessness, she met this penguin and they eventually went to space together.
It didn’t work exactly like that in the final book, but that’s the nature of stories – they grow and develop over time.
It’s based on the iconic, heroic slow walk from ‘The Right Stuff’ – now a common visual trope in pop culture, seen in everything from Apollo 13 and Monsters Inc to The Simpsons and the Guardians of the Galaxy films.
You’ll note too that this was back when the elephant’s name was Matilda. But I nixed that somewhere along the way – I think it was when I finally figured out the title – and she became Stella (‘star’).
I would never have guessed it would become the opening scene of the book.
Stellarphant lifts off in November 2021, but you can pre-order it now:
James Foley 