My daughter is taking a progressively more active role in our collaborative making of the story of the Girl and the Egg. She specifies the colors of the characters and asks every day whether I have sketched the next panel.
As her requests become more detailed, I have been thinking about what makes a good cartoon or children’s book character. Among other things, I think that it is the sparingness of the details and the strategic use of negative space, in the broad sense. The viewers are allowed substantial freedom to fill in parts of the characters, the scenes and even the storyline for themselves. There is a fine line between providing the children with enough details to feed their imagination and over-defining the rules of the game (because, as I am finding out, nearly everything is a game for a four-year-old).
Here is the long-awaited hatching episode of our story:
“When the shell finally cracked open, it was not a chick, who peered from it, but a curious, purple-coloured, Baby Dinosaur with blue spots. The Girl was delighted and danced her happiest dance, which she learned just the day before.”
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