Blog Title: D-Mom Blog
Read The Full Post at: https://www.d-mom.com/open-up-your-bag-diabetes-book/
D-Kid: Why did you decide to make the characters animals?
Mike: That’s a good question. I wanted this book to tell young people with diabetes that there are other people out there that have diabetes too. I intentionally was trying to make the characters look nothing like the people that I thought would be reading it… and I just assumed that there would be no lady penguins picking up the book. Using animals was an easy way to easily ensure that all of the characters were telling the kids reading it that there are other people out here doing what you do.
Animals are also way more interesting than humans. A book filled with four human characters is not as fun to draw as a book with a panda, penguin, raccoon, and lion. I got to use more color and shapes. People rarely have a huge mane. Drawing humans doesn’t allow me to have fun with sketching out a penguin beak. I feel that having animal characters helped me make the book a little more interesting for the audience I was drawing it for.
