The “Shrew Shrew”

Categoriestech wizard mike tales By techwizardmike

This is a deleted scene from the first edition of “Ziggy Wants to Know… Where’s Chippy?” drawn by Alexandra Tataru in Romania 🇷🇴

Mortimer, Ziggy and the shrew

Tech Wizard Mike was not happy with the composition of this illustration plus he decided to have Ziggy encounter only friendly and helpful animals during his search for Chippy 🐿️

(Alexandra also thought that “shrew” meant that Ziggy had an injured paw which is why he is holding it thus in the illustration.)

Tanya’s version

Just for fun and for the purposes of this blog post and his upcoming online course in how to self-publish a children’s picture book, Tech Wizard Mike asked Tanya (who illustrated the second edition of “Ziggy Wants to Know… Where’s Chippy?” to create her version of the scene and she responded with this sketch…

sketch for children's picture book illustration
Tanya gave this sketch the filename: “A strange case of scattered acorns”

filename

noun

A name given to a computer file to distinguish it from other computer files. Filenames often contain an extension that classifies the file by type.

Tech Wizard Mike enthusiastically signed off on this sketch and asked Tanya to finish it 🎨

Tanya gave this illustration the filename: “Screw the acorns, look at the bird!”

Whoops!

You will often see things in a completed illustration that you missed in the sketch ✏️

For example, instead of a shrew character, Tanya used her female squirrel character who appears in the Meadow Talent Show scenes in the second edition of “Ziggy Wants to Know… Where’s Chippy?”

meadow talent show

This character is benign, helpful, willfully engaging in the preliminary search for the missing Chippy…

female squirrel character

Reference Image

This being the case, Tech Wizard Mike asked Tanya to replace the (as of yet unnamed) female squirrel with a shrew character (i.e. a meanie) and sent Tanya this reference image….

shrew

Revised Illustration

Screw the acorns, look at the bird!
Tanya’s file name for this illustration was: “Screw the acorns, look at the bird!”

NOTE: The outfit Tanya dressed the “shrew shrew” in is entirely her own invention.

Don’t make friends with quick-tempered people or spend time with those who have bad tempers. If you do, you will be like them. Then you will be in real danger.