Wee Puffling - roughs

When I'm making a picture book I draw as I write. I find it hard write a story without the pictures so when I send my ideas to my editor and art director it looks like this... 

Page turns are really important in picture books so it helps me to edit my work if I lay it out like a book.  The thing that's really important to know is that in these idea stages your drawings can look like this. They can look better, they can look worse, but there's a reason they are called roughs and so my drawings are exactly that. It's important I show composition and where the text will fit but more detail is not required. At this early stage things are easier to move around, and they often will move, if they're kept simple. All I've marked in is the blue of the sea, and that was just for clarity. The sea plays and important part in the book and I think it helps make sense of the picture. 

This image didn't change too drastically throughout but this was the next stage...

As you can see I needed more puffins. Also the art director has set the text in the font we're using at the correct size which helps me to size the speech bubbles. If anything needs to move this will be discussed and suggested by the art director too, it just hasn't happened on this particular page.

At this stage some editors and art directors may want to see colour ideas or main character drawings but I'd worked with this publisher before so I wasn't asked for any of this. I also rarely plan colours ahead but I send artwork as and when I have it early on to get their feedback and make sure we're all happy with how it's looking.

Here's the final image...

You can see that we've changed the opening line. We played around with this quite a bit. This book is sort of a cousin to Wee Unicorn so we wanted the opening line to echo the first line of that book, and to make sure it was really clear to readers what was happening.

Wee Puffling is out now!

Wee Puffling - colours

I thought I'd make a little post about the colours used in Wee Puffling. 

Firstly, I have to admit that pufflings are not purple. They're grey and black and white like this.

From my sketchbook

And they don't have the lovely colourful beaks the older puffins have, a look I much prefer. 

I thought kids would identify the traditional puffin colours easier and though our main character is often alone (searching for the other birds) I wanted to make sure that he stood out when all the puffins were together. 

While I'm writing I do all my rough drawings without colour, although I do mark in the sea. So I don't really worry too much about character design or colours at this point.

a rough page

But as the story got closer to being done I started to do some colour tests to find Wee Puffling's feather colour.

I knew the backgrounds were going to be bright like in Wee Unicorn so whatever colour I picked had to stand out against those colours and also sit well with the other puffins. As I began working on the final artwork I still hadn't settled on a feather colour so I would do tests against the finished backgrounds and send them to my art director to see what she thought.

Some variations I sent to my art director, Katie.

This is when I was trying a more traditional puffin look. I was also experimenting with beak colours and outline thickness. I tried painted feather details but they weren't as subtle as the pencil drawn ones.

I'd settled on the puffin group having this dark blue, almost black, feather colour and so I thought a lighter grey might work for Wee Puffling but it was too dull.

As a little last minute experiment I switched to a lilac. Something that felt quite grey but still young and bright. I was worried it might feel too faint and sent this purple too...

And this was the colour the art director and I liked best. It's so helpful to have a second opinion. 

The background colours are as limited as Wee Unicorn but tonally different. And where Wee Unicorn has its darkest colour be a navy blue, Wee Puffling has a dark purple to tie in with the feather colour.

This is the rough of the first double spread when all puffins are together.

Compositionally I've tried to draw focus to my main character as best I can by giving him more height and space around him. But as you can see having his own dedicated colour helps to pick him out too. Nothing else in the book is the same colour as Wee Puffling so that every time we look for him we find him easily.

Wee Puffling is available to buy now. 

Or you can borrow it from your local library.

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.

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.

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.