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.

Wee Puffling is out today!

My latest picture book, Wee Puffling, is out today! 

When all the other puffins head out to sea for the winter Wee Puffling decides to hide, and finds himself suddenly all alone.

At first life alone on the island is fun but he soon misses his friends and heads off on an adventure to find them. Here are a few of the creatures he meets along the way.

Seals!

Sea turtles!

Laid back otters

I could draw jellyfish all day

Wee Puffling is available to buy in all good bookshops. If they don't have a copy on the shelf you can just ask them to order one. Or you can buy it wherever you get your books or by clicking here.

Wee Unicorn - Colour Palette

As someone who loves printmaking I have always been a fan of the limited colour palette. My previous books have all featured items in whatever colour they needed to be but Wee Unicorn is different. I knew I was making a fantastical world and decided that would be the perfect environment to use heightened colour.

In the months prior to making the book I'd been doing a lot of sketching using only two or three coloured pencils. I was used to working in a limited way, and I loved the challenges it created.

I had one other reason: I knew my book was going to feature a Loch Ness monster style creature. Now, I live in the heart of Loch Ness monster country and there's a very distinctive colour I associate with it and many of the books about it. You can see it right in the middle of this Emily Mackenzie poster. Four rows down, four across: she calls it 'Nessie'.  

I wanted to avoid this colour. I wanted to make something contemporary and visually different so I decided to get rid of the green. Of course, I can create a green with my blue and yellow but I wanted to use it sparingly and definitely not for Ness. I also started sketching ideas for the book over winter when many of the greens were gone. We have so many burnt oranges, deep burgundies and purples in our landscape that I wanted to celebrate. When I started sketching the book I used these four colours.  

A peek in the sketchbook

And I really liked them. When it came time to make the artwork for the book I did wonder if they'd be too overwhelming so I did a test page. This is a quick test on my Ipad to see how the blocks of colour might look.

Next I did a proper layout with the textures I was planning on using.

 

The larger image are the colours I ended up using. The smaller was an alternative I explored. As you can see they're incredibly similar but the turquoise was a little bluer, the pink a little brighter. And although these shades worked nicely, the secondary colours they created weren't as good.

These are my four final colours.

I used these four colours and layered them to make the secondary colours. If you imagine each colour is a layer of coloured glass it makes more sense to understand that when two of them overlap a new colour is created.  

You get even more variation when you start layering three or four of the colours together.  Here are a few different combinations from the book.

I like that the cover ended up being a nod to the colour palette.

I'm really pleased with the way the book turned out, and I really enjoyed working this way.  I'd love to do a book with only two colours someday.

Wee Unicorn is available to buy now. Click here for links.

Or you can look for it at your local library.

Wee Unicorn - Character Design

The weird thing about living in Scotland is that there are unicorns everywhere.  On flags, as statues, and on coats of arms, but after a while you stop noticing them.  They're our national animal.  Here are a few of the Inverness unicorns.

Before I wrote Wee Unicorn I hadn't given them a lot of thought.  And I'd unfairly been a little dismissive of them lately.  There seemed to be unicorns everywhere. 

Normally when I write a book I come up with the character first.  For Wee Unicorn I'd been discussing Scottish folklore ideas and creatures with my editor and so I didn't actually have a character yet.  The first challenge for me was to see if I could draw a unicorn (at all!) but, more importantly, one that felt like mine.

My immediate worry was that unicorns are horses, and wise illustrators know to avoid these because horses are hard to draw.  But all of my main characters are very young, they're the equivalent age of the child reading the book, so they're often small too.  Lesson one: small horses are easier to draw than tall ones.  Manes are harder to draw than you'd expect.  These are the first sketches I did. 

It's hard to describe what I'm looking for when I do these.  I'm obviously looking at things like face shape and proportion, trying to make the most appealing version I can, but I'm also looking for personality.  A drawing that is not just a drawing but that has a little bit of life in it: a character.  It's one of those know it when you see it sort of things.

You can see I'm experimenting with textures, the mane, the first inkling of a scarf, and I'm adding little bits of information that will eventually make up the story.  I don't really know anything about character design but I always draw mine in different moods and situations.  My character design always ends up being how I figure out what the book is about.

Here I've moved on to playing with colour and working out what a Wee Unicorn might actually do all day.  There were many things to consider.  Does my character use their hooves like hands?  Walk on hind legs?  I wanted her to be essentially horse-like, but that does limit what the character can do, especially one so small.  I kept hearing talk of unicorns being magic but it made no sense to me.  I didn't understand how they were magic, what their powers were or why.  Funnily enough, this became my way into the book.  I decided to write about a unicorn who was very small, loud and not magic, even though everyone expected her to be.  I wanted her everyday qualities, ones that were taken for granted, to be what was truly magical about her.  Once you know who your character is they are easier to write about.

Even though I'm experimenting with markings you can she's almost the Wee Unicorn from the book.

I knew my backgrounds were going to be very vibrant so I wasn't too worried about Wee Unicorn being pure white.  I thought she'd stand out nicely but I did want to give her a little something.  I thought a scarf would be a nice detail.  You get a lot of movement in a scarf if your character is running or the wind is blowing.  It's a nice pop of colour and it's cold in the highlands too.

I wanted to keep it traditional looking so I made my version of a Fair Isle knit.  I chose the crown as a motif because unicorns are seen with a crown around their necks on the coat of arms.  I wanted to add a little nod to that.

Wee Unicorn is published by Hachette Children's Books and is available to pre-order now.

Please support your local bookshop or an online indie if you can.

Here are a few places you can buy it CLICK HERE

One more day to go

Peep! is out tomorrow.  To celebrate I made this little gif of Dot.  She is patience personified.  Unlike my own dog who only stares out the window to bark at passing cars, the postman and the wind.

Peep! is published by Andersen Press and available to buy wherever you get your books.  But please support your local bookshop if you have one, or take a look in your local library.  Libraries and bookshops are the best.

And the winner is...

The Bookbug Picture Book Prize 2020 winner was announced yesterday and I'm happy to report that The Station Mouse won. Woohoo!

The beautiful trophy was made by Emily Hogarth

Every year Scottish Book Trust give all of the primary one children in Scotland a Bookbug bag containing three shortlisted books.  This year Scottish Book Trust gave out an incredible 189,000 books in these bags alone.  That's 63,000 bags!  The most wonderful part of all this is that young readers get three great books of their very own to keep.

The winner is picked by the readers too, which for me is the loveliest part.  It's really nice to know that the people you write books for are actually enjoying them.  Thank you to all the schools who took part, all the libraries that helped out and to all the pupils for voting.

Here is the announcement video.

Huge thanks to Liam, Heather and Jonathan who made this video, and to Hannah who filmed the shortlist videos, you who were all so helpful and supportive.

Maurice and I are off to celebrate with our favourite things, cheese and cake.  Maybe there's a way we can combine the two...

One week to go...

My next book, The Station Mouse, is publishing one week today.  That's when Maurice will begin his new job.  He's a very responsible mouse so he's got it marked on his calendar.  There's still a lot of unpacking to do, but with a whole week to go I think we can let him sleep a little longer.

The Wizard of Oz

Finally, after months of working on it and keeping quiet, I can reveal that I've illustrated a new picture book version of The Wizard of Oz adapted by Sam Hay and publishing with Egmont in September.

It's more than a little intimidating to reimagine a classic like this but I hope that for young readers it'll be a fun introduction to the land of Oz.

You can read a little about it  here on the Egmont blog

My art director, Abi, and I spent a long time working on cover ideas but in the end we wanted something that really showcased the characters.  Here's a sneak peek...

Pigeon P.I. cover

My second picture book is publishing this week so here's a post about how the front cover was made.  Don't worry, I've spared you the gazillion colour choice screenshots I took!

Back covers are one of my favourite parts of a book.  They have all the fun of the front cover with none of the responsibility.  I usually leave the back cover until the very end and so far they've always been great fun to do.

The back cover means more room for silly jokes and shenanigans.  

For me, the front cover is the hardest part of any book I make because it's the first thing that people see.  It has to invite readers in and tell them a little bit about what they'll get inside but not everything.   You want people to want to pick it up, to be able to see it across a room and equally to be able to read it when it's tiny on their computer screen.   This is probably the part of the book that my art director and I spend most time discussing, sending ideas back and forth, usually over a period of a few days, refining as we go. 

This was an early idea we had but it never made it any further.  We wanted to make sure we introduced both Murray and Vee (pigeon and canary respectively) and also had a little bit of a narrative.  I particularly liked how Vee's shadow put her on the poster beside Murray, foreshadowing things to come.  I forget why we chose not to use it, but I still like it.

Here are some sketch ideas.  I tend to send every little doodle.  I find that drawings I'm not sure about can often spark ideas in other people and we can end up using them for something somewhere.

This was the sketch we thought worked best as an idea.

This image made its way onto the case cover beneath the dust jacket.

Some more ideas for the cover, case cover and a few fonts I liked.


We tweaked the image a few more times to make it into this.  We wanted to keep the noir feel and the implication of danger whilst showing through Vee that this would also be a really fun, silly book too.

The hardest part of this cover was the font.  Compared to Life Is Magic this looked like quite a simple book lettering-wise.  But with five separate character fonts, the background posters and adverts plus my simple* endpapers, there ended up being a lot more. 

(*My endpapers were simple.  I wrote this in an email to my editor.  I forget how simple they were, but at some point I had a great idea which turned out beautifully and was by no means simple after all.)

Anyway, the cover went through several rounds of hand-lettering.  I do a lot of typography for someone who is still very much learning as I go, so my way in is a little like that part in The Shining where Jack Nicholson is typing 'All work and no play make Jack a dull boy' over and over.  Like so...

Once I see something I like I'll do my best to refine it.  We actually settled on a font, a perfectly nice one, but decided it wasn't strong enough.

Back to the drawing board one more time and we cracked it.  I'm so glad we re-did it.  The final lettering turned out really nicely, especially with the shiny gold foil finish.

So shiny!

Pigeon P.I. publishes on March 2nd.

You can read more about the making of it here