Mistletoe’s Night

Visit the official website
Read the book on Scribd

Mistletoe’s Night is a story about a teddy bear whose sole purpose in life is to be a Christmas decoration. Until one December day he is thrown out with the trash and must find a new home.

Origin of Mistletoe’s Night

A number of years ago I created a short 3D animated movie titled The Mischievous Bears that featured two bears similar in design to Mistletoe. Shortly thereafter, I came up with another story with this character, but was uncertain as to how I was going to present it. I really wanted to make another more elaborate movie, but to tell the story I wanted to tell, it would have required an incredible amount of time and resources on my part.

Ultimately, I settled on telling this story in book form for one of two reasons: one, it would be much easier for me to create the visual material required for it, and two, it was a new medium for me to try out.

How Mistletoe’s Night was made

The illustrations were created using a 3D modeling application called Blender. Once they were final, the resulting 2D rendering was touched-up with the Gimp to adjust for lighting, color, shadows, etc. Once the individual illustrations were completed, they were laid out page-by-page in Scribus with the final draft of text. From there all I had to do was to upload the final draft to Lulu (a self publishing service) and the rest is history.

However, making Mistletoe’s Night work as an eBook introduced a new set of obstacles. For the most part is was quite simple, but each eBook reader is a little different when it comes to displaying and the formating of the book.

View more images from Mistletoe's Night

Tools I used to make Mistletoe’s Night

Mistletoe’s Night was created using open source software almost exclusively. All of the applications that were used to create this book can be freely downloaded by anyone.

• Blender – 3D modelling
• Gimp – 2D painting
• Inkscape – Vector art
• OpenOffice.org – Office suite
• Scribus – Desktop publishing