Heather Fluckiger reads Kundersanterbleebin to her daughter Roma

There was a time, Kory Fluckiger says, when his watercolors would sell even before he took them off their board. He would photograph them, email the image to his client list, and have a committed buyer before he had bothered to take the tape off. For an artist with no formal watercolor training, he was quickly establishing a strong reputation: in addition to selling well, his work was winning awards and appearing on magazine covers.

Kory Fluckiger

Then, in 2008, he and his wife Heather signed up to work for the Peace Corps. They spent two years teaching health education in rural Nicaragua. By the time they came back, the economy had tanked, and Fluckiger found the fine art market had dried up. That change pushed Fluckiger to reinvent himself, so he decided to marry his longtime passion — writing and illustrating children’s books — with the developing app market.

When the Fluckigers had left for Nicaragua, the iPhone was brand new, and costly. When they came back, the iPhone was in its third generation and the iPad was the new groundbreaking technology. Developing an app for it was cost prohibitive, though, so Fluckiger bided his time doing freelance illustration work. Then, when the time was right, he joined his uncle, also an artist, and two programmers, to form Copper Pi, an app development company.

Fluckiger began experimentng with the app industry by creating a few music apps, then this fall Copper Pi released their first children’s book for the iPad. Featuring art by Fluckiger and a story by Bret Hickenlooper, Kundersanterbleebin tells the story of Santa and his elves working to restore one little boy to belief.

Kundersanterbleebin, words by Bret Hickenlooper and illustrations by Kory Fluckiger

Publishing a children’s book as an app has its own complications — how to get your app noticed out of the hundreds of thousands being published, for one — but it avoids the struggles of breaking into the publishing industry and the cost of self-publishing. It also allows the book to become interactive. With Kundersanterbleebin the pages turn with the swipe of a finger, and options include background music and narration.

Lots of app books are as much about bells and whistles — the interactivity of the iPad — as they are about the book. For this first publication, Copper Pi has kept the gadgetry to a minimum. “There’s some of these books that are so much about the interactivity that there’s no story . . . We still want to hold on to the idea that these are books,” Fluckiger says. That doesn’t mean Copper Pi won’t take advantage of their chosen medium. “I see an opportunity in this medium to create books for this medium.” In a book now in development, about a boy who claims a tornado is responsible for his messy room, objects will be blowing around the scene, responding to gravity and otherwise interacting with the reader’s experience.

Fluckiger has been creating the art for these first two books. He draws the illustrations, scans them, and then digitally fills in the lines and creates the backgrounds. In the future he sees himself continuing to create art elements for the company’s books, and acting as creative director, but he wants to add additional illustrators to the roster. “I can’t wait to have other illustrators because I want to see other works in the books.”

As a young business in a new and competitive market, Copper Pi still has a lot of work to do, and much of it will fall to Fluckiger, the only partner without a day job. But Fluckiger is excited about a future of bringing interactive children’s books to portable screens. Regardless of how it turns out, he says, “It’s what I want to be doing.”

The Kundersanterbleebin app is $4.95 and is currently available for the iPad. A related app, that tests whether your child is a doobinbleeb (believer) or bleebernob (non- believer) is free, parent-controlled and available for the iPad or iPhone. If you’d like to make a $25 tax-deductible contribution to Artists of Utah/15 Bytes, we’ll thank you with a gift copy of Kundersanterbleebin for you or someone on your list. For a $100 contribution we’ll send you a limited edition print of artwork from the book.

15 Bytes

UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.