ERIE, Pa. — Near the end of first grade, Jakob Cole was asked to write a folktale. The assignment ignited his imagination — and that of his mother, Heather Cole, assistant teaching professor of digital arts at Penn State Behrend.
The two worked through the process of writing the story together.
“He wanted it to be about cats, because he loves cats,” Heather Cole said, “so we started drafting what the story would look like. I’d ask probing questions about the cats and what this cat did and what that cat did. We worked through a few different drafts like that.”
Initially, Jakob used a comic book app to create his story. But one day, he turned to his mother. What if she drew the pictures for him?
Cole was knee-deep in her own projects at the time. She assumed Jakob would have forgotten the project by the time she could do it.
He hadn’t.
By then, Jakob not only wanted her to draw the pictures. He wanted to publish the book, too. So Cole created digital artwork to accompany the story — though, like her son, she had to work through several iterations to get the images right.
“Jakob was very clear with me about what he liked, and what he didn’t,” she said. “I ended up making the images a little rougher around the edges, a little more childlike, because that was what he wanted.”
The book, “How Cats Got Their Colors,” was published on Amazon in time for Jakob’s seventh birthday. It’s available in paperback, or free for Kindle Unlimited readers.