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.

Pearl (Whiskerton)

This is Pearl. She's the Whiskerton half of Watts and Whiskerton, my new detective duo. You can read all about them in Watts and Whiskerton: Buried Bones and Troublesome Treasure.

Pearl meets Watts for the first time when he comes to stay at her home, Whiskerton Manor. She lives there with her dad, Count Whiskerton, and pretty much as soon as Watts arrives all sorts of strange goings-on start to occur. 

Pearl is incredibly smart and she loves mysteries, puzzles sand jigsaws. She really wants to be a detective. She persuades Watts to help her investigate the mysteries at the manor, and fills her new friend with confidence along the way.

This is the earliest sketch I can find of Pearl. At this point I had written 'Penelope?' beside her, but I wanted a more cat-like name so Pearl (Purr-l) was perfect. I've also changed her outfit. When I was looking through old-fashioned kids clothes I noticed a lot of them wore a version of a sailor suit, and it was so adorable I wanted Pearl to have one. I also got rid of her fangs. Some of the drawings in the book are so small that it was a detail that would get lost easily.

Right now I'm working on Watts and Whiskerton book 2 but book one is now available and you can buy it from your lovely local bookshop or by CLICKING HERE

Watts

This is Watts. He's one half of Watts and Whiskerton. He's the main character in my new book Watts and Whiskerton: Buried Bones and Troublesome Treasure. Pearl (Whiskerton) is equally important, but Watts is a writer and he narrates each books for us.

Watts comes from a family of famous detectives but he's not sure if he wants to be a detective too. So when his parents venture off to investigate a case, Watts heads off to Whiskerton Manor for a holiday. There he befriends Pearl Whiskerton. She loves mysteries and persuades Watts to help her investigate a series of strange goings on.

Watts actually began life as Watson. I wanted to create a character in the tradition of Watson and Hastings, a slightly silly detective's assistant. In the story I was writing Watson was much older and through his investigation he met Pearl, who was young and smart and methodical, and much more likely to solve the case. I abandoned this idea quickly because what Pearl really needed was a friend to help her solve the case, someone as intelligent as she was. I realised they had to be the same age. And suddenly they made sense as a pair. 

We changed his name to Watts before the first draft was written. We wanted a W name to sit nicely with Whiskerton. My editor, Ella, suggested Walker because it had a nice dog themed link and I really liked it until I thought of Watts. I loved how it reminded me of light bulbs and bright ideas, and how his name sounded like a question. He is also the son of Mr and Mrs Watts so technically he's still a Watts' son. 

I can't find my earliest sketchbooks but here is a drawing from an abandoned early plot idea.

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that this scene is still in the first book, just changed a little. This was drawn in pencil and then scanned into my computer. I love drawing in pencil but I do spend a lot of time tidying the outlines. I decided to see if it was possible to get a pencil-like quality digitally since I had 128 pages to illustrate. Here's one of the first digital tests.

I was pleased with the way this turned out and decided to make my first book 100% digitally. It did save me a lot of time when I was drawing outlines. 

Another early test that I really liked had the characters with no outlines at all but I realised I had to draw the outline, colour the character and then remove the outline so I might as well save myself time and keep the outline. Here's a peek at the finished artwork.

I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

Watts and Whiskerton: Buried Bones and Troublesome Treasure publishes on July 4th 2024 and is available for pre-order now by CLICKING HERE. Pre-orders really help authors because they show publishers and booksellers that there's interest in a book. And when it gets delivered you think, 'Ooh, a gift from my past self. How nice!'

Speech bubbles

My next book features one of my favourite things: speech bubbles. And my two main characters have their own designs.

I wanted both Watts and Pearl's speech to have straight edges to show they are logical and that they have something in common but I also wanted their speech to reflect their individual personalities.

Pearl is unpredictable, spontaneous and quite loud so her speech bubbles have sharp, oddly angled edges and are a bold colour.

Pearl

Watts is more considered, speaks softly and is a little unsure of himself so his have rounded edges and no colour.

Watts

I wanted readers to be able to easily tell who was speaking when they speak to one another, and on occasions when the characters are very small the speech bubbles help identify them. Like this...

Everyone else in the book uses the same soft pink bubble. To have too many variations would get visually busy.

This is Houndstooth the gardener.

Watts and Whiskerton: Buried Bones and Troublesome Treasure publishes on July 4th 2024 and you can pre-order it by clicking here.

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.

Tiger process

This is a little tiger idea I've been thinking about.  My idea feels too simple so I thought making some of the images might help unlock it.  There's a quick breakdown of how I made the image below.

I was working on this image on Friday which is also #colour_collective day, and I like to join in from time to time.  Luckily, the colours were a perfect fit for my tiger (see below).  I like how unusual the purpley blue is but I do think the darker colour I settled on is a bit punchier.

My colour collective original

Lately I've been making artwork like I would prepare a screen print.  For every colour I make a separate black layer.  Imagine the black lines are where the colour will be and imagine that where the paper is white will be clear.  Completely see through.  It takes a minute to get your head around this.  I like to use paint because I'm not very practised with a brush and it allows a less controlled line.  That's why I like this whole process, and it means I spend less time at a computer.

I knew this was going to be a two colour image (a dark and an orange plus white) but I wasn't sure if the background would be too busy so I broke the trees into two separations to make it easier to delete one if I needed to.  And I wanted to test the tiger outline in both paint and pencil so I kept that apart from the background.  This is what everything looks like separately.

Trees and paint tiger stripes

Bamboo

Tiger outlines and fur tests

The top row is the tiger outline.  As much as I like my backgrounds to feel loose, I still like the control I have with a pencil for character outlines.  I've drawn it twice because I was testing a regular HB pencil (left) versus a softer colouring pencil line (right).  The second row is me testing the fur texture of the tiger.  Ultimately, I used the image on the right.  I placed this over the tiger and coloured everything outside of it black too.  This was going to be my orange layer.

If I lay them all over each other you can get an idea of what the image will look like.

All the separations placed over each other

I scan all of these into the computer and line them up on my page.  I spent some time deciding between the painted stripes and the pencil and edited the layers accordingly.

Once I've blocked in the basic colours it looks like this.

Dark layer

Orange

One layer over the other

I then spend some time editing the image, adding details like highlights, whiskers and fur lines, and I make the image more textured.  I have a selection of textures I've created that I delete from laters to make them look more worn.  I also decide on the final image to use a yellow layer over a red instead of one layer of orange.  That way I could delete parts of each colour and you'd see the red and yellow peek through.

The final image looks like this

It probably seems like a long way of doing things but I find the painting relaxing.  My previous Dream Cars post was made similarly except I drew all the colour layers digitally in Procreate, there was no painting.  That works well for me with vehicles and structured items but for more natural imagery I prefer to paint in a traditional way.

Dream Cars

One of my earliest memories of school is being in Primary 1 and drawing a car.  They told us to draw anything we wanted and I couldn't think of anything but the person next to me was drawing a car so I drew one too.  I don't think I've drawn a car since.  So this week I had a go.  

This is Jon, he wanted to be a fox, in his dream car (which is almost exactly my actual car but according to him it's not the same).

And this is me in my Nissan Figaro.  They're such cute little cars.

Both images were sketched in pencil first and then redrawn in in Procreate using my sketch as a guide. The textures and colours were finalised in Photoshop.  I'm still far more skilled and at home in photoshop but I do enjoy drawing on the Ipad.  It's great for blocking in shapes.

 

The Darling Children

These are the Darling children from Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie.  The first chapter has a lot of nice descriptions in it that feel very visual.  I love this one of the kids going to school.  I think it's the 'in a row' part I like so much. 

 '...and soon, you might have seen the three of them going in a row to Miss Fulsom's Kindergarten school, accompanied by their nurse.'

This image was made digitally in Procreate.  I like the ease of digital black and white drawing but I'm not convinced yet that it's a way for me to work permanently.  I still do love drawing in pencil.

Nutcracker

 A little Nutcracker I made before Christmas.  This was made digitally using Procreate.  I then added texture in Photoshop.  It's a two colour image and where they overlap the darkest tone is created.

Mr. Darling and Wendy

 

This is an image for J.M Barrie's Peter Pan.  Mr. Darling is trying to calculate whether they can afford their baby, Wendy.  I always find it a very funny moment as it's obviously too late.

This image was created in Procreate.