Mistletoe’s Night

I wrote and illustrated the children’s book Mistletoe’s Night and published it in 2008. The story is about a wayward teddy bear named Mistletoe searching for a new home set around Christmas. I modeled all the illustrations in Blender, as well as a litany of other open-source apps to polish off the embellishment art and overall layout.

I was inspired to write Mistletoe’s Night after I had finished my 3D animated short movie The Mischievous Bears back in 2003. I wanted to tell a larger story, but I chose to make that story into a book instead of an animated movie, because of the complicated logistics and work that would be required to animate it.

Tools used in the creation of Mistletoe’s Night

In making Mistletoe’s Night, I chose to go with open-source applications for creating the artwork and illustrations. There are four primary apps that I used.

The Tools

• Blender – used to create the illustrations as 3D-generated static scenes.
• GIMP – used to clean up the final renderings that came from Blender.
• Inkscape – used to create the logo and embellishments seen throughout the book.
• Scribus – used to put the whole book together and produce the final print-ready book.

Illustrations

The illustrations from the first three pages of the book.