Tilly the Triceratops was, for a while, a frog.
Not a very good frog, we'll admit. A stubborn, slightly-too-short frog with a green thumb and a pair of reading glasses that kept sliding off her face. In the 37th draft of what would eventually become Adventures in Dino Valley, she was still a frog. Then our lead illustrator, Maya, said: "She should be a dinosaur. A small one. With horns."
And the whole book clicked.
This is, in our experience, how character design actually works. Not in one inspired flash. Not in a focus group. In something closer to 47 tiny adjustments, some of them catastrophic, until the character walks off the page and refuses to go back.
Sketch 1: The reading frog
The original brief for Book 1 was straightforward: "A gentle, curious character in a peaceful valley. Kids should want to be her friend." Maya started with a frog because frogs felt peaceful. Frogs sit on lily pads. Frogs read books. It was a reasonable place to start.
The problem, we realized by draft 8, was that frogs are already everywhere. Every children's book has a gentle frog. The reader wasn't going to look at a green frog with glasses and feel like she'd met someone new.
Sketch 15: The gentle lizard
Then we tried lizards. Lizards felt warm-climate and story-ready. But lizards, it turns out, have a problem: their faces are mostly mouth. It's hard to make a lizard look gentle without accidentally making it look goofy, and goofy wasn't the brief.
We wasted a week on lizards.
Sketch 22: The dinosaur, first draft
Maya drew the first dinosaur version on a Tuesday afternoon, almost as a joke. A triceratops with three stubby horns, big eyes, a small satchel. We all looked at her and agreed, with the weary certainty of a design team, that dinosaurs were overdone and we should move on.
But the drawing stayed pinned to the studio wall for three days. And every time someone walked past it, they smiled.
Here is the most useful lesson we've learned about designing a character for kids: if you keep smiling at the sketch three days later, you're not done trying.
That's the test. Not "do we like it?" (designers like everything). Not "is it on trend?" (who cares). The test is: do you still smile when you walk past it on a Thursday morning when you're tired and slightly grumpy?
We stuck with the dinosaur.
Sketch 31: The personality test
Now we had a character, but we didn't have a person yet. Our process for this is probably the most surprising part of what we do. Before we finalize a character, we put her through a small informal personality test:
- If her house caught on fire, what would she grab first?
- What's her favorite snack?
- What does she do when nobody's watching?
- What sound does her laugh make?
- What's the thing she's most secretly proud of?
Tilly's answers came quickly, which is always a sign: her watering can, strawberries with too much honey on them, talks to plants, sounds like a small trumpet, and the tallest sunflower in the valley last summer — she'd grown it herself from a seed and told nobody.
The second we had those answers, drawing her got easy. The watering can had to be in the book. The strawberries had to appear somewhere. The trumpet-laugh is, we admit, impossible to convey in a coloring book, but it affected how we drew her mouth (slightly open, mid-giggle, in most of the pages).
Sketch 41: The watering can
Here's the thing about the watering can. It's not just a prop. It's what we call an anchor object — something the character carries or returns to across the whole book. For readers (especially kids), anchor objects are a visual cue that they're meeting someone they already know. "Oh, the dinosaur with the watering can. Hi, Tilly."
Every character in every doodloo book has one. Rex has his cookie tin. Leo has his space helmet two sizes too big. Luna has her captain's log. Marina has her seashell crown. Barnaby has his honey jar. Once you notice this in our books, you can't stop noticing it — it's how kids form attachments to these characters across 96 pages.
Sketch 47: The final Tilly
By the final version, Tilly was a small, gentle triceratops with three gardening-tool-holder horns, enormous round eyes, the watering can in her right hand, and a small daisy tucked behind her left ear. She had a satchel full of seed packets. Her face was very slightly asymmetric (the left eye about half a line higher than the right), because perfectly symmetric characters feel uncanny and we wanted her to feel alive.
We showed her to three four-year-olds as part of our pre-print check. Two of them immediately tried to hug the iPad. One of them said, without prompting, "that's my friend." We signed off.
Why we tell you this
Because when your kid sits down to color Tilly, they're not coloring a dinosaur. They're coloring a small, brave, slightly trumpet-laughed gardener who once grew the tallest sunflower in the valley and told nobody. It took us 47 sketches to get her exactly right. Your kid's crayon work finishes the job.
That's all the book is: a collaboration between us and your kid. We do the 47 sketches. They do the colors. Tilly shows up either way.
Adventures in Dino Valley is out now. Tilly is waiting on page 1. Bring crayons.