So, after building the ship with Nick, I used some of the photos as reference for character sketches.
These sketches look very similar to the final roughs for the book- I’ll show their development in a future post.
From this point I started developing a very early version of Knut, which looks nothing like the final version… I call it the ‘big-nose’ version. Here’s a peek:
More next week!
With the cardboard cut and painted, it was time for Nick and I to put the pieces together.
First we poked holes in the side of the ship with a screwdriver, then bolted the shields on.
Then we attached the two sides to each other.
We cut a hole in the sail so that the mast could poke through the middle- all finished!
Time to set sail. (…there’s an awful lot of seagrass here.)
This process gave me lots of ideas for a sequence in the book, and for the character design of Josh/Knut. Next week I’ll show you some sketches I made from reference photos…
Nick, Roy and I had finished cutting the cardboard– it was time to paint it. Roy bought some silver and brown spray paint, and Nick and I got started…
Continue reading “Building a Longship- spray painting (part 2 of 3)”
To recap- a boy who lived across the road from my parents was helping me develop the main character for the book. This boy, Nick, seemed very much like the main character of Josh (Knut)- both are very inventive and creative boys, with vivid imaginations. For research purposes (and for fun), Nick, his dad Roy and I set about building a Viking longship out of a cardboard fridge box.
Step 1.
We laid the cardboard out flat and ruled a line straight down the middle- we’d be building two identical sides for our ship, so we would need to divide the cardboard in half.
Step 2.
We drew the outline of the boat onto one half of the cardboard, making one half of a ship.
Continue reading “Building a Longship – Cardboard Engineering (part 1 of 3)”
While Norman was in the Shetlands researching, I was at home in Perth, doing some research for the pictures.
I made a few initial sketches of Viking things- costumes, houses, the bows of ships, rune stones, helmets… Norman has a huge collection of books on Vikings, so I wasn’t short of material. These sketches gave me lots of ideas for how the pictures and characters might look. (I haven’t shown all the sketches here, because don’t want to give away too much of the story).
James Foley 