I wrote this hide and seek story as an exercise in highly detailed digital artwork. It features Charlie, a kid who has trouble keeping both feet on the ground as he is whisked away by his “Wild Imagination” into a series of exotic landscapes, where the reader has to find him and several other characters and objects in an interactive journey of hide-and-seek.
For more details, see my GALLERY section, under Fantasy Art.
Daydream Charlie begins with Charlie’s Grandmother warning him to “keep your feet on the ground, or that wild imagination of yours will run away with you”.
As the adventure proceeds, the reader is invited to find Charlie when he is hiding, and to locate in each picture (both running and hiding images), a gecko, an insect, a musical instrument, a game, Charlie’s grandmother (Nana) dressed as a witch, and Nana’s cat.
“Run, run, run”, called the Toucan. So Charlie ran.
Daydream Charlie discovers that by keeping both feet firmly on the ground he can stop his wild imagination from running away with him.
He also realizes there just may be more to Nana than he thought!
A contest is proposed to reward the first ten readers who can correctly identify every hidden character or object in the book with a trip for four to the author’s home country of New Zealand, a land where imaginations have run wild for countless years, and in which you can find almost every environment in the world crammed into two islands the size of the UK, where sheep outnumber people 20 to 1 and the gorgeous environments remain pristine, natural and largely unpolluted.
