One of the first projects I got to work on from start to finish at S&S was Sophie Peterman Tells the Truth written by Sarah Weeks, illustrated by Robert Neubecker, and edited by the hugely talented Andrea Welch. I was thrilled to get to work with Robert, I'd been a fan ever since I first saw his WOW! series.
In Robert's early sketches, he hand-lettered the entire text. My eyes bugged out I was so excited (who doesn't love hand lettering?), however, it was clear that there was so much hand-lettering that it lost much of its impact...
So I started playing with classic, set type to play off his wild, great scrawl...
At the same time, Robert and I got way into character development. Sophie was reading too old, and so we worked on character studies for her, and her brother, at their various ages throughout the book. Robert would send drawings in, I would draw into them in photoshop and lob them back to him, he'd revise and send back.For Sophie:
For the little brother: 
Somewhere in there, Robert was about ready to kill me. BUT, in the end, it all came together beautifully, received 3 starred reviews, AND we are happily working on our third book together. So I suppose it wasn't all bad for him. Or for Sophie.
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