Poopy Pants & Potty Rants

Over on Instagram, I’ve been sharing a few insights into the process behind the creation of the picture book Poopy Pants and Potty Rants, written by AFL Footballer Dale Thomas, illustrated by me, and published by Albert Street Books, a division of Albert and Unwin.

Social media is a very fleeting medium, so while I initially wrote the posts as publicity leading up to the publication date, I am posting all that information here as well.

Here is a brief look at one spread in the book, from thumbnail (that’s the initial, tiny sketch I do when planning out the book as a whole) to the final illustration.

The first thumbnail (round 1) was not a double-page spread, and was from the initial text of the book. The text was heavily rewritten after I had started the initial thumbnail plan, so things had to be reshuffled and rethought rather majorly after I had handed in that first plan. The book initially featured tips on separate pages, with various different families not involved in the main story, but it was decided that this broke up the story too much (I fully agree with this, although I was sorry to lose my inside-toilet-looking-up perspective from this page.

Once the thumbnail plan is approved I start work on the roughs, and then hand in the complete book in this draft format. As you can see, this page didn’t change too much from draft to final, but you might notice the addition of a cat. This cat did not feature in the thumbnails or roughs, but was an addition requested by the author. We debated removing the dog and replacing it with the cat, but I argued for my personal little in-joke; probably no one will notice, but I rather liked having a long brown dog in a book about poo!

Clicking through on the above image will take you to instagram, where you can see a time-lapse video of this page being created. The pose is one of the initial sketches I sent to Albert Street Books when I was first offered the text.

Here we have a look at an initial, unfinished cover for Poopy Pants. The cover is so important, it can take quite a long time to get it right. This illustration, with Tilly in her tutu, looking between her legs at the reader, was the initial suggestion, but it was later decided that it wasn’t working and I sent through some other options based on new requests from the marketing team. It was decided that Tilly should be wearing a football jersey (as Dale is an ex footballer) and should be sitting on the potty. I sent through two options based around that suggestion, they picked one, and we went with that.

Clicking through on the above image will take you to Instagram for another time-lapse, this time of one of the endpapers in the book.

If you see Poopy Pants and Potty Rants in a bookshop, do please pick it up! It comes with a free potty training reward chart and 120 cute stickers!