The Week Junior Book Awards

A few weeks ago I learned that Watts and Whiskerton: Buried Bones and Troublesome Treasure has been shortlisted for a Week Junior Award in the Fiction Younger category, which is lovely news.

You can find the other fantastic shortlistees here, as well as the nominees in all the other categories. It's a great place to discover new books.

The winners are announced in September.

Out now!

Watts and Whiskerton: Sabotage at the Fete Cake Bake is finally out! 

It has been published today which is strange because it feels like it's been out forever, only because I've known about it so long and I finished the book several months ago. But it's nice to know readers can finally get their hands on it.

For those who don't know, this is the second book in the Watts and Whiskerton series. They are a detective duo (and best friends) and each book is its own mystery so you don't have to read them in order, but it doesn't hurt. 

It's perfect for new readers, budding detectives and young bakers.

I'm currently working on the final art for book three so I'd better get back to it.

Back cover design

Watts and Whiskerton: Sabotage at the Fete Cake Bake (book two) is publishing next week. Here's a little look behind the scenes at the back cover design.

One we're ready to design the back cover the art director will send me a file with all of the words that will be on the back, as well as the space the barcode will take up. It's important not to put any important illustrations under these. And it's best to leave the areas under text as blank as possible.

I then send a selection of sketches to the art director and we decide which one will work best.

Cover ideas

For this book we actually used one of the drawings I'd sent as a possible front cover. The tent provided a nice blank space for the text to sit and the barcode box made a perfect table for the cakes to sit on. We wanted to make sure we saw some of the delicious cakes from the baking competition. These were actually my favourite things to draw.

I will then draw out the chosen design with everything exactly where it going to be. The art director will check this and I will move on the colouring the page.

This is the final image. I wanted to hint at the sabotage by showing the cakes weren't as perfect as the seem at first glance. There's also a sea of cake batter (which will be explained inside the book.) I'm really pleased with the way the cover turned out. The falling bunting frames to text space in a fun way while hinting that something has gone wrong. 

Here's the final cover on the book.

Sabotage at the Fete Cake Bake is published by Piccadilly Press on April 24th and is available for pre-order now. Perfect for detective fans and young bakers. Just ask in your local lovely bookshop. Or you can order by clicking here.

Meet the Bakers

Watts and Whiskerton: Sabotage at the Fete Cake Bake (book two) is publishing next month and I thought I'd show some of the character design sketches. I don't properly start work on character designs until I'm about to begin the final artwork, which feels a little late, but I like to get to know them in the roughs stage. By drawing them over and over again their personalities start to appear so I leave any final decisions until I'm done with this stage. Here are some of the sketches and final drawings.

Roughs stage

This is Fleur Wheatley. She's a great baker and last year's winner.

Character design

Fleur Wheatley in the book

Character design

Mrs 'Cookie' Cutter is the Whiskerton family's cook and she takes no nonsense.

Character design

Whip Lightly competed in last year's Fete Bake but has yet to win the title.

Character design

Ms Partridge is due to compete but is unable to attend. She gets her chance later on though.

Character design

Mayor Dove is in charge of proceedings. Hopefully nothing will go wrong!

Final art in the book.

Sketch

When Ms Partridge fails to arrive Mr Dove, Mayor Dove's husband, is forced to compete. 

But how will he do?

Final art

This image was to help me keep track of how tall the characters were compared to everyone else.

I'm sure everything will run like clockwork at this year's fete bake, but if it doesn't we have two excellent detectives around.

Published April 24th.

Available for pre-order now by clicking here.

Pre-orders really help authors so if you have already ordered a book thank you so much.

Cover design - Sabotatge at the Fete Cake Bake

For the past few weeks I've been working on the cover artwork for Watts and Whiskerton book 3 (which I have to keep under my detecting hat for now.) Instead I thought I'd show you how the book two cover was made.

The first thing I do is think about what the book is about, and how to show this on the cover. This book takes place at the Little Gossip Fete Bake so I wanted to included baking equipment, a cake, some detective items, and to try and show that something had gone wrong. I make sketches of all my ideas and send them to the art director. Here are the sketches I sent.

The art director will then send me one or two images back that she thinks works well. The other sketches aren't wasted though, for this book one of them was used for the back cover.

This is the sketch we decided would work best for the cover. 

The next step is to draw the image and items at the correct size and to make sure there's room for the text to fit. You'll notice the image has changed slightly. Pearl gets a chance to bake in this book so I thought it'd be fun if she mirrored Watts' costume but with a baking hat instead of a bowler, and a spoon instead of a magnifying glass. I was unhappy about the bunting layout too so I adjusted that.

Once the art director is happy that everything is in place I start the final artwork. Utensils and shelves of equipment were added to fill out the background. I tried a few different expressions on each of the characters and we spent a lot of time perfecting the colours. Here is the final cover.

Watts and Whiskerton: Sabotage at the Fete Cake Bake is publishing in April, but is avaliable to pre-order here. Please support your local bookshops when you can. 

And if you missed their first adventure, Watts and Whiskerton: Buried Bones and Troublesome Treasure is out now. Have a look in your local library or a friendly bookshop near you.

Nice things

I hope 2025 is treating you well so far. I've had some nice news: Watts and Whiskerton: Buried Bones and Troublesome Treasure has been long-listed for the Children's Literature Festivals Book Awards 2025. It nice to be in the company of so many other lovely books.

In other news I'm cracking on with a new picture book and Watts and Whiskerton book three.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone! It's 2025. I signed my first book contract in December 2014 so I've now been making books professionally for ten years. 

This would be a good time to tell you what I've learned but every book feels different, and I still don't think I have it all figured out. I do know that my way of making books has changed dramatically in some ways and is still exactly the same in others.  At the moment I'm doing a lot of digital drawing, something I couldn't have done when I started making books. I could barely use a tablet with my laptop! But I still use Photoshop to arrange my images and make the final art.

My first picture books (and most since) have pencil outlines but I've started to use a mix of pencil and digital lately, for time more than anything. I spent sooooo long tidying pencil lines on some of those books and for my Watts and Whiskerton series there isn't time for that. There's 128 illustrated pages per book and since the colour is added digitally I decided to try and do the outlines the same way.

This was quite a scary way for me to work. When I first started experimenting with the Ipad and Procreate I couldn't get results that I liked. As with everything, time and practice helped a lot. Here are a few of my brush experiments for Watts and Whiskerton. 

I experimented with Watts' fur with no outlines but ultimately that was time consuming too. So I made my drawings as simple as I could, and I tried to find a brush that looked like pencil. For the final illustrations in the book I have one brush for all of the outlines, one for blocks of colour and one I like for shadows. Keeping it simple seems to work best for me.

I'm not sure if these early drawings use the brushes I use now but the look is pretty similar. It was only once I made these images that I was confident I could make the whole book look the way I wanted digitally.

Who knows how I'll be working in ten years' time!