Roughs

When you illustrate a book you go through a stage called roughs. These are ideas of what will be drawn on every page of the book, bearing in mind where text will fit, and as their name suggests they are rough drawings. There are varieties of roughs though. I've seen some much looser than mine, and others so polished they look like finished artwork. Because picture books are so much about the images I make my roughs while I write. I can't separate the two processes.

Watts and Whiskerton is a highly illustrated young fiction book and I wanted the illustrations to be as important as the text. They hold visual pieces of information and readers will flit between the body of text, illustrations with speech bubbles and little comic strips. It sort of looks like the inside of my head. This is how I think. So as I wrote the first draft I created an even rougher set of roughs to send to the editor with the text to help her make sense of the book. It also really helped me pace the page turns and develop the plot. I call these rough roughs.

Here is the rough rough of the museum.

At this stage it's not necessary for me to know what the little details in the book will be, and to be honest I was scared to draw a whole museum.

Once the text was finalised and set by the art director, Sarah, we flipped the image to make sure the text was read before the 'Wow!' and more detail was added. This is the proper rough, there's a whole chunk of time scheduled to make these. This a simple spread but on others we had to cut text to fit or adjust the layout altogether.

The pink part is where you can't put any important information in case it gets chopped off.

This is the final image.

The black line is where the pages will be cut.

The details include some exhibits for Watts and Whiskerton to investigate later and nods to some famous paintings including A Bigger Splash by David Hockney because a swimming pool is a plot point in the book.

Watts and Whiskerton; Buried Bones and Troublesome Treasure publishes July 4th 2024 and is available to buy by clicking here.

Cover Ideas

 My last post was the cover reveal of my next book, Watts and Whiskerton: Buried Bones and Troublesome Treasure. Here's a little breakdown of how the cover was made.

Usually when you're part way through colouring the insides of a book someone will mention the cover, and you think, 'The Cover?!' Or I do because I never have a vision for book covers until I'm asked to think about it. So when the cover question arises I sit and sketch little thumbnail ideas and I send these to the art director, Dominica, to see if she thinks any of them are worth developing further. Sometimes it's elements for various ideas.

Can you see which one became the cover?

We hadn't yet discussed how the title was going to appear but she soon sent some variations on the Watts and Whiskerton branding for me to choose from, picked some favourite ideas and made some suggestions about moving forward. We'd discussed using a faux quarter binding too (that little decorative strip down the book's edge.)

Then I sent these...

We decided to use the lower left torchlit image but to add some bones and treasure for hints of colour, and I was asked to send some colour ideas. I sent endless variations. Honestly, there were so many. The paw print pattern is used inside the book and we decided this would work nicely for the quarter binding too. Here are a select few of the colour trials.

There were also decisions to be made about Pearl's outline and Watts' suit colour because the insides of the book are limited to black, white and red but on the cover we can do what we want.

 

We picked the blue suit.

Watts and Pearl together.

From then on it's a case of me making the thing properly, asking for suggestions when I get stuck and then adding more until we all agree that it's finished. We decided to contain the Watts and Whiskerton lettering in a frame and removed the house silhouette. They were fighting each other. I added some coins and rose petals to add colour to the lower underground section and we used the red from the inside of the book for the quarter binding. I think it turned out nicely. Here's the final cover...

Watts and Whiskerton: Buried Bones and Troublesome Treasure publishes July 4th 2024 and is available to buy at your local friendly bookshop, just ask them. Online you can buy here.