Allon and the Tower Tumble
Every page of the story — and its companion coloring workbook, Calm Together — started as a pencil line. Here's the road from first sketch to finished shelf.
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Every page of the story — and its companion coloring workbook, Calm Together — started as a pencil line. Here's the road from first sketch to finished shelf.
Before a single color went down, Allon's face went through dozens of pencil passes — a hairline redrawn, eyebrows nudged, the shape of a smile tried again and again. And he wasn't the only one: his cousins Teo and Jeremiah each went through just as many rounds before they looked like themselves too.
What's shown here is only a handful — the real sketchbook ran to dozens upon dozens of versions for the three of them.
Character design is a conversation. Shirt colors were tested, compared, and swapped back and forth between author and illustrator until the palette felt right for Allon.
A quick color test — one of several shirt options tried before landing on Allon's signature striped tee.
The quiet middle step: clean linework, laid down before a single brush of paint touches the page.
The playroom spread in pure line — every toy, every shadow, planned before paint.
The tumble scene needed real emotion — not just a boy on the floor, but a boy mid-stomp, mid-CLUNK, fully feeling it. That took its own round of line art before color ever touched the page.
Some of the most important work never makes it into the book — circles and arrows marking what to shift, what to nudge, what to try again.
"Move the tower here, and let's rebuild it bigger."
Marking exactly where the page split should fall.
Even the dialogue kept changing — "exclaimed" became "smiled" — as the calm-down space took shape in pencil, then paint, then in Allon's own breathing.
And then, the mend — cousins talking it through, then building the tower back up, one block at a time.
And then — color, light, and a room full of Allon's things. A few sample pages from the finished book.
Alongside the story, a whole second book was taking shape — a coloring workbook of calming activities, built page by page, activity by activity.
Printed proofs, checked page by page — corrections penciled right onto the paper. Not every page made it: the line-art title page below was reworked before the final version made print.
Print proofs on the living room carpet, an extra "o" in "wooosh," a title that briefly read backwards as "Tumble Tower" — the last small catches before everything went to press.
After every sketch, every correction, every "is this better?" — a printed proof copy, real in the world, in someone else's hands.
From a scribbled hairline to a finished shelf — this is what it took to bring Allon's story, and its companion coloring workbook Calm Together, to life.