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!

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.

 

Llama or Alpaca

This is a birthday card I made for my niece.  I'm pretty sure I've drawn a llama...but then again it could be an alpaca.

This image was drawn in Procreate and finished in Photoshop.  I love using limited colour palettes.

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.