Counting down the top 10 most-viewed Q&As of 2024--here's #6, a Q&A with Natalie Linn first posted on July 13, 2024.
Q&A with Natalie Linn
Natalie Linn is the author and illustrator of the new middle grade graphic novel Bunnybirds.
Q: What inspired you to create Bunnybirds, and how did you come up with the idea of a bunnybird?
A: I was lucky enough to take Calef Brown's 2016 Visual Thinking class at RISD; one week he challenged us to create an animal mashup. As a child I was enchanted by Ursula K. Le Guin's Catwings, so my first thought was "cute critter with wings!" The bunny part came from my childhood pet rabbits.
Here are the sketchbook pages I brought to class (with censor bars over the bad words haha):
I also took some notes in my “idea notebook”:
You can see the story has changed a lot since its inception!
I met my editor, Mora Couch, at a portfolio review event in 2019. When Mora invited me to send her an animal fantasy pitch, my mind went straight back to the bunnybirds from Mr. Brown’s class.
And thus Bunnybirds was born!
Q: Did you work on the text or the illustrations first—or both simultaneously?
A: I work on the text first, via a plot outline and then a script:
Next, I lay out “thumbnails” for each page. This provides a roadmap for the finished pages:
The dialogue sometimes switches around for clarity (or to accommodate smaller speech bubbles), but my final panel layouts rarely stray from their thumbnail counterparts: