Day 5
Day five of the Night Before Christmas process posts. Designing the house (Part one)
Designing the house was a fun challenge for me. I think I might be a little dyspraxic, as I get very confused with spatial design. It’s kind of ironic, as I designed novelty books and did paper engineering for years, but somehow, in navigating spaces, I get completely lost.
In this post, I am going to talk about designing the house, and in the next post, I want to talk about all the personal touches I put into it.
When I first sketched the book, I realised I had to become a bit of an architect and interior designer. I originally designed the house with the fireplace not directly under the chimney (a dead end for Santa!), and I designed the sitting room one way, but later on, when I showed the characters in the rest of the book, the layout of the rooms weren’t consistent with earlier. I was a bit all over the place. So I eventually acceoted I needed to sit down and get a little bit more methodical than I usually like to. This post shows some of the workings out I did. (There are lots more!). As you can see, some are concerned with the position things are in, and some are more about what is in each room. Even though the rooms are small in the cross-section, I wanted each to feel believable, and for them to feel like a family lived in them, so all the little details were important to me. Labelling things was really helpful at certain stages.
I ended up having to make a big change in the last week. I had pretty much painted everything, but I realised that in the spread when we first see Santa, the children are looking at him from the stairs, and the parents are peering from behind the tree.
But in the original painting I did of the sitting room, there was no sofa next to the tree!
So, I had to take some time to figure it out. It was quite a puzzle for a while!
In the end, I painted a whole new sitting room, with a sofa next to the tree (I also needed to repaint the tree, as it was painted differently to later in the book). The new layout is taking quite a lot of artistic license, as it’s a bit of a stretch to imagine you would be able to see the stairs from the sofa, but I think it’s more plausible than before at least!
In the next post, I will talk about some of the more personal things that made it into the book. I’ll leave you with a little video peeping into each room.
Do you have any questions about the book? I’m going to film a Q&A video for my Substack. Drop me a question in the comments below…
Until next time!
Ella xx
You’re an absolute wonder!