Change of Idea

I love drawing animals so I started my project thinking that I would write a narrative around the anthropomorphic characters I had been drawing, however I found that my original idea of creating a book about things children want to be when they grow up was a much stronger and more imaginative plot. 

I started out looking at the strange things children say they want to become - such as a leaf or a cat - and then went on to look at career aspirations of children. I did find, however, that children wanting to be an astronaut or a train driver has not only been done plenty of times before, but was also a very grown up way of thinking about this that wouldn't really connect with the children. In order to get onto children's level with this subject I had to go back and look at the strange things I've heard children actually say they want to be - the leaf was based on my younger sister coming home from playgroup and deciding that was what she was going to be when she grew up, and my nephew quite often decides he wants to be a bear, a dinosaur, a tiger...

I also tried thinking back to some of the things I wanted to be when I was younger. I can remember watching butterflies landing on a floral patterned garden chair in my neighbour's garden and deciding to wear flowery clothes in the garden in the hope that one would land on me, so I decided this would be a useful idea for my book.