So last Friday we had the third of our studio visits from Kickstarter backers. This time from Chris’ parents, so naturally we roped them in to doing more than we usually asked of studio visitors.

We’re down to solving the last few problematic pages, one of which is the sky for one of the final spreads. Here’s Chris’ mum sewing multiple stars for our third attempt at a sky:

And here’s Chris’ dad building more of the cityscape. We weren’t just sitting back drinking tea, honest:

And then we made them both hold up the stars for ages whilst we photographed them (sorry Mum, rather obscured you out of this photo):

So thanks very much to my mum and dad for their help. With these pages just about complete we are almost there – the next couple of weeks will be spent tweaking. We’re hoping to get the files sent off to the printers a week earlier than planned, which means the book will hopefully be sent out to backers a week early.

[Next update should be: files off to the printers…]

A couple of weeks ago we had the second studio visit from one of our backers, Stuart, himself a toymaker. Stuart helped us remake one of the landscapes for the book, and also build the props for the last page of the book: a 3D coconut cityscape. But as we were discussing the best way to go about this Stuart suggested a more interesting way of building and lighting the city. So we, er, well we left him to it.

This is been the best part of making the book: as well as the increased amount of ideas we have had from collaborating together, many of the ideas have been prompted through conversations with other members of the studio and our studio visitors. It’s made us realise how much easier it is to generate ideas when you have people from whom you can immediately get a reaction, and to know almost immediately whether ideas are going to work or not.

And it makes the whole idea of sitting down and writing on your own seem a bit boring now…

Many thanks to Stuart for his help and ideas – you can see some of his own toys and artwork here.

[stage book is at now: all the blank pages are now illustrated… now time for tweaking.]

So in the weeks since our last Mr Coconut update about the here’s what has been happening:

A couple of weeks ago we had Elizabeth visit us in the studio for a day as part of the Self-Publishers Kickstarter reward – she helped with the photography for one of the book’s illustrations, patiently blowing snow into Mr C’s face with a fan whilst we photographed him in a snowstorm. Unfortunately we forgot to take any photographs, though Elizabeth more efficiently took some herself. Which means this is now a photograph of us rather than her, which is a bit of a shame.

We have also organised the boring parts of making a book. We bought the ISBN barcode (some great info on the process for buying ISBNs on Christopher Shevlin’s blog about self-publishing… in fact all his self-publishing posts are very useful) so that the book is catalogued for the shops and online, and have finalised the schedule with the printers. We now know we need to have all the artwork finished by 19 September, in order to receive the books back on 10 December.

Which isn’t, er, quite by the time we promised on Kickstarter, as we said we would send the books out for the end of November. We must apologise for that – the printing is taking slightly longer than the first estimate we were given. If we can bring the schedule forward we will. But we promise that anyone who pre-orders the book will have it in time for Christmas (Christmas 2014, that is).

We’ve also finished the cover. I was going to post it up here to show you, but Catherine won’t let me, she says it should be a surprise.

More on the second of our studio visits soon…