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!