D. Fierst

Station number one. The first Tiger Boat book was originally planned as a series of picture books and, therefore, started visually more so than in written format. So, why is it that sitting right here, right now, with the first book long written and ready, I still need to complete the illustrations?

Yeah, I’m asking myself that one too. But I swear, I do have a (somewhat) reasonable answer and even a positive thought process about it.

Let’s start a little way back. A bit more than 20 years back, in fact. Back when I was still living in the US and fresh into college. For sure, economic times where different, along with mindsets, and thinking to study something that led directly to a profitable career was, well… unreasonable. I needed to follow my passions!

That first passion was film. Ah, yes, the star-shaped eyes of all southern Californians: I want to be a film director! But not just that, I want to be the full package: write, direct, you know, the full auteur. Kubrick was my hero.

Credit where credit is due – this was in large part thanks to “best teacher I’ve ever had” number 1. He was an American Literature high school teacher who took his love of film and formed it into curriculum, and I ended up taking the same class two years in a row. I bought a cheap camera and started writing scripts. I always had full movies in my head and couldn’t get them on paper fast enough.

Naturally, I was to study film and go on to make movies. Not just silly action flicks, but truly works of art.

So, I studied, I worked, and I found myself in the mix of several hundred other students with the same idea. It was a very tough crowd and one I found slipping step by step ahead of me. Mind you, I worked full-time through college, and the time dedication outside of classes was equally limited and frustrating. I had to let many of my ambitions sit on the shelf as the group in the forefront pulled ever further away. This culminated when I needed to again and again apply to the impacted film major program and was continually rejected.

That left me with other required classes to take, and by lucky chance, I found myself in a 101 art class. Why not, right? I wasn’t the best drawer or anything, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt regarding making storyboards.

And that, my friends, is when I met “best teacher I’ve ever had” number 2. A young, freshly graduated artist himself (who now is a full-time artist out of New York) who had, for lack of a better term, a very “punk” approach to art. This off-chance beginner course launched for me all the possibilities of fine art, not-so-fine art, and just making things in general.

That was the greatest lesson I learned from that time that is still a core belief of mine: be in a constant state of “making”. It doesn’t matter what, materials, state of completion, satisfaction, good or bad. Just be making. Eventually you will make things in your way, and that is when you establish your “voice”. But you can’t get there without making a whole bunch of stuff. Most likely a whole bunch a “bad” stuff.

Flash-forward all these years later and I still work like this. Of course, the outputs are different when most are focused on family, work, house, etc., but I do a great many things such as music (yes, here’s an obvious plug) with my solo music under the name K_Kid and in bands. I have always, through the years, kept sketch books and paintings going when possible. And there has even been another element through the years: writing a book.

I bet you thought it would be writing a script…well, I did too, but there was a moment that changed. One of my long-time film ideas was to have a story told episodically through different characters where the exchange of main character happened via nonchalant social interactions. Imagine following 20 different people through a continuous story-line that changes to their individual actions and perspective, exchanged through a quick glance walking down the same sidewalk or passing by a traffic light in after-work gridlock.

Now, back to that moment when I was reading the Murakami book, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Somewhere in that dense book, there is the sentient that a story never ends, and it is just a matter of where the focus is. If you zoomed in or out, that story can be extended infinitely. This was very much in-line with my film idea as far as story telling and sparked the idea of, “Hey, I could write book!”

And thus started my journey in dabbling, in making, a book. Oh, don’t worry, that first book is there in the background to be completed in due time, but was for sure the passageway into feeling no second thoughts in jumping into writing the Tiger Boat stories.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I hear you say, “And what does that all have to do with the first book being done but still not the illustrations?” I hear you, sometimes I do like to ramble, but let’s get back into the present day and the status of these infamous illustrations.

As I said, Tiger Boat started off visually. The number of times I have drawn, re-drawn, sketched, mapped, doodled, charted, and painted these stories and characters is more than I can count. But in the end, as the story evolved, as the world grew and the focus shifted from picture books to a full novel to a complete trilogy, so have the illustrations.

With book one completed and having had time to “breath,” I have become ever surer in the direction the illustrations need to take to complete the story, characters, world and be correct for the expected reading age.

I never forgot what I should do…just “make,” and eventually the voice will form and be clear. It took that doing of story building, writing and the many iterations for me to see what this whole package should be and deliver it in a way that is genuinely from me.

The good news is, at the time of writing this, all illustrations are planned, sketched out, and about 50% completed. I even have the cover and title page complete (OK, let’s call them 99% done). I have a clear timeline for completion and layout checking and am sticking to it.

Above all else, I continue to “make” (no matter what).