A new story, "Joel is so grown up..."

Hello,

As you may have noticed most of my stories are about my daughter Sofia. I have been meaning for a long time to add to Joel's collection of stories. Over the next few weeks I am teaching a 'How to write and illustrate a storybook' course and thought I would take the opportunity to do the homework I set my students and create a new storybook- this time for Joel.

The first week's homework was to write the story.

Here is my first draft.

Joel is so grown up...

This is Joel.
Joel lives with his mummy, his daddy, his big sister Sofia...
and his cars.
Joel is very grown up.
Infact, Joel is so grown up he can drink from a cup without a lid.
Joel is so grown up he can wash his hands all by himself.
Joel is so grown up he can put his shoes on all by himself.
Joel is so grown up he can go down the stairs all by himself.
Joel is so grown up he can put things in the bin all by himself.
Joel is so grown up he can choose his own bedtime stories.
Joel is so grown up he hardly needs any help from Mummy, Daddy or big sister Sofia at all.
But sometimes, when he decides, it is quite nice not to be so grown up...
And have a big cuddle with Mummy.

I have allocated one sentence for each page for this particular book. It looks like the book will be 13 pages in all. This is a good number of pages as it is few enough for me to realistically complete the illustrations within a few weeks.

The next step I need to complete in order to finish my homework is to draw a rough sketch, an idea of the illustration I would like to have on each page. I'll show you my work in a blog post in the next few days.