The Lost Stone of SkyCity

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of illustrating the cover for HM Waugh's debut middle grade adventure, The Lost Stone of SkyCity with Fremantle Press. To celebrate the release of the book today, here's a little look at the process I went through.

See more after the break!

Lapphund Christmas Cards 2017

Every year I do custom Christmas cards for some lovely friends. We started in 2013, when they had just got their first dog, so she was the subject of the cards. In 2014 they had a second dog, so I added her in, and by 2015 they had a gorgeous little boy, who naturally had to be included too!  This year marks the 5th year of this card series, their little boy is now two and a half, and most of their card recipients have now tumbled to the fact that these are custom commissioned cards, they aren't just super-good at finding cards with dogs that look like theirs!

Back when they only had dogs, I used to do two separate designs for them, but now I just do one, with a traditional Christmassy red-green-gold colour scheme, and another with a blue-gold-grey colour scheme. Here's that second colourway:

You'll notice that the icecream in this one doesn't match the rest of the colours - that's because strawberry icecream is his favourite and we wanted to feature that. The red card has a choc-mint icecream, (because strawberry doesn't match red) and let me tell you, I got very hungry while painting it!

We got them printed at Moo, and they of course did a wonderful job:

These were done in Adobe Photoshop cc 2018 on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro.

Go below the cut to see all the previous years' cards:

Floral Christmas Cards

Here's a commissioned Christmas card I did this year. I always love these projects! I've been doing cards for these lovely people for a few years now, and they usually feature birds in a woodcut style, but this year we did something different (much to the consternation of my parents, who would look over my shoulder and demand if I was sure this is what they'd asked for. Not sure if they actually expected me to say 'no, actually, I decided to do whatever I liked' or what...) 

The commissioners had done some work in their garden this year, removing a large pine tree and planting lots of paper daisies. They like natives to bring the birds to their garden. The new yard has been attracting a lot of attention, so they wanted their cards to feature paper daisies. I did up a few concepts, including one based on the floral cards I do myself every now and then, and that's the design they chose:

I added a few extra natives - pink bottle brushes and swan river myrtle - to keep things interesting. They came out very clean and modern and I like them a lot!

We were printing via Moo, of course, so I did a dark version as well, to take advantage of the printfinity option at Moo. I like the way the colours glow against this dark background:

They printed very nicely:

It was such fun to do a Christmas card with such non-traditional colours!

Adobe Photoshop CC 2018 on a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro

Gosnells Writers Circle Self-Publishing Expo 2017

This year I was again invited to take part in the Gosnells Writers Circle Self Publishing Expo. (I also attended it last year and in 2015) It's very nice of them, as I don't live in Gosnells and I'm not a member of the circle - but I have done several projects with members. This year I was tabling with my lovely author, Sioban Timmer - we have done two books together so far. Toughen Up, Princess and Feral Fergus.

Here's my set-up. I made sure to bring along a lot of different things to sell, as you never know what people will decide to buy. I had my banner up behind me, and an iPad running a slideshow of illustrations and timelapse videos of me working.

Here is the full table. Sioban (who is organiser for the Expo as well) wasn't at her seat when these photos were kindly taken by Jane Hilton, and I didn't call her over because she hates having her photo taken.

I took a little video of my side of the table to post to my Instagram Story:

Part of my task is to advise anyone who is looking to self-publish and needs an illustrator (quite a low number this year, unless I look too terrifying to approach. I don't, do I??) but I also bring along things to sell, especially things that might make good gifts. 

Last year there were a lot of kids at the Expo, so this year I made lots of stickers and magnets, small items with small price points (last year my bookmarks went well). However, this year the Expo was in a different venue, and less people came in off the street, so the only two kids were there to receive awards for their writing. So that backfired a little. I sold a couple of magnets and one sticker pack, but the single stickers remained entirely unloved. I like them, I think I will start sticking them around my desk. =P

(all the stickers were handmade, printed out on matte paper, Modge-Podged, stuck to double-sided adhesive paper and cut out.)

As usual, I was offering cards and my Literary Romance Colouring Book (Buy it here! Perfect for the literature-lover in your life), and I also had six Expo Special slots open for discounted watercolour and pet portraits, but the price point was still too high for the venue, really. But it's good to offer these things on the off-chance. And in a way, it's fortunate, because I'm horrendously busy this coming month!) I had a couple of pieces of handmade jewellery, and this year I also made felted baubles. I sold a few of those, so I don't have photos of all of them: 

Several of my beaded ones went, along with a mouse and a koala in Christmas hats. 

 

I think the blue beaded one is my favourite...

The baubles were felted in the washing machine, with balls of leftover wool scraps from my mother's hoard inside, and then I embellished them with needle felting and beads.

All in all, it was a good morning! We had two interesting guest speakers, teaching us how to write in technicolour instead of monochrome (Lee Battersby), and how to stay inspired no matter what (Karen McDermott from Serenity Press). The Gosnells Writers Circle was also launching it's Bi-Annual Anthology. Lots going on! Thanks for having me, Gosnells Writers Circle!

Feral Fergus Book Launch

Finally getting around to blogging about the book launch for Feral Fergus, my newest picture book with Sioban Timmer. We worked together on Toughen Up, Princess a couple of years ago, and now we're back with a new book in full colour!

Sioban and Moi:

The launch was held on September 2nd at the Amherst Community Hall in Gosnells. We had quite a crowd!

Our publisher, Cate Rocci of Jasper Books, spoke first, then I did a presentation about the creation of Fergus as a character, starting with my initial meeting with Sioban, where she told me she envisaged a cross between Alfred Newman of MAD Magazine, Ginger Meggs and Fido Dido, though various character sketches right through to the final character:

 

(My father took this photo, he is a master at catching me in weird expressions :P)

Sioban then took to the stage to discuss her role as the writer, while I provided some entertainment and drew Fergus on the whiteboard behind her:

After that we signed books:

We also had a colouring table set up for the kids, with some colouring pages of Fergus. You can download the pages to colour yourself from my website here. The colouring page pack also features the Feral Name Generator that is included in the book. You'll see from the photos that everyone is wearing a name badge - not with their real-world name, but with their feral name. If you're curious as to yours, go download the pack!

Thanks to Ken Mutton, Jane Hilton and Sioban Timmer for the photos.

I'll blog more about Fergus in the near future. I've been so busy with various projects it's been difficult to find time to blog about anything!

The Gosnells Writer's Circle Writing and Self Publishing Expo

Belated post, December is always so busy!

I was invited to attend the Gosnells Writers Circle Writing and Self Publishing Expo again this year, and had a great afternoon after a bit of a slow start. It was 37 degrees outside, which I think tempted more people stay indoors with their aircon - but fortunately we were indoors with aircon too, it would be been horrible to be at an outdoor expo with the heat!

Here I am with my mother, who helped me to man my table. Behind my merchandise we are cutting out the jac paper halos for this year's Christmas cards. I'll blog about the cards later this month, but if you follow my Instagram or Twitter you will have seen snaps as I was working on them. 

You can also see my colouring book on display on the right of the table. I was selling the book on its own and also as gift packs with a handmade book bag, coloured pencils and bookmark. 

As it was a self-publishing expo I also had a form for people to fill out if they were interested in hearing more about working with an illustrator when self-publishing a book or picture book. I've worked with a number of self-publishers, and always try to give them as much help as I can. Having a form for them to fill out was a new method I was trying for getting in touch with them. I hand out business cards as well, of course, but it's so easy for people to mislay them. This way I was able to send out informative emails to everyone on the list, tailored to their specific interests, the day after the expo. I only got one reply (just a public service announcement here (and meant in the nicest way): if an illustrator has taken the time to send you a long email full of information, it is polite to thank them, even if you don't plan on commissioning them soon (or ever). They've taken time out of their busy schedule to provide you with that information and when you don't get back to them, they feel it was wasted, unappreciated time. I can't tell you how many people have contacted me directly, and yet never replied to my reply!) but I hope the information was of use. 

When we arrived to set up at the expo, there was a scheduling clash with the hall, so while we were waiting for it to become available, we wandered down to look around the Centennial Pioneer Park. We don't live in Gosnells, so we'd never explored it before. It was very hot indeed (already up to 37 degrees at 11am) but there was a lovely boardwalk by the river. Here are a few snaps:

 

And for those readers who have never been to Australia, here's a video - this is the sound of a hot day in the bush (and it can be pretty deafening!):

One last photo from the Expo, this time taken by my mother. She took quite a few, but isn't at all handy with the camera phone - every other one was out of focus!

Thanks for having me, Gosnells Writers Circle! 

Anniversary Roses

I needed a 50th Wedding Anniversary card, and isn't that a perfect excuse to play around with creating another floral design?

The flowers for the 50th Anniversary are yellow roses and violets, so they formed the basis for my design. I then filled up empty space with some miscellaneous leaves and some baby's breath, that being a suitably wedding-themed type of flower. 

 

I approved of being basically forced to put purple and yellow together. I like working with colours on opposite sides of the colour wheel!

The metal for this anniversary is of course gold, so out came the gold glitter again:

In an ideal world I would be able to print all cards properly, instead of printing them out on photo paper and mounting them on cardstock. But until I get so amazingly organised that I have all cards ready a year in advance and can send them off to Moo for printing (i.e. never).... this is the way they are done.

Adobe Photoshop CC2015 on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2.

Mothers' Day 2016

Here's the card I made my lovely mother for Mother's Day this year. I've been working on creating some more commercial-type illustrations in addition to my kidlitart stuff, and this was one of those experiments. I think it worked quite well!

I chose chrysanthemums because my father bought her a deep pink chrysanthemum as a present (I bought her a blue butterfly bush and put money towards a dwarf mulberry tree, but they didn't all work together....) and added some gerberas in a contrasting colour and some miscellaneous leaves to keep everything bright. 

And because my mother loves glitter cards, I glittered the text after I had printed it:

I'm pretty pleased with it. I think it looks like something you could buy in a greeting card shop, and I think I shall try more things like this. 

I've also turned it into a repeating pattern:

Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2. I spent four hours on it, but I was watching tv at the same time, so that wasn't solid work by any means. The fonts are from the Storyteller family. 

Chiropractic Christmas Cards 2015

I was asked again to design a Christmas card for Burswood Health Clinic this year. Last year I did a comic snowman design, adapted from something they'd seen elsewhere, and they wanted 'something else funny'. A slightly scary request, but I did my best. 

I came up with six concepts, and they chose this one:

The Clinic was in a mad rush, as usual, so I put this together very quickly. Unfortunately my workspace was by no means quiet, and I was in such a rush to get it sent off that I accidentally masked the bleed. (I want my own studio! Anyone want to fund me a turret somewhere?) When working in Illustrator I mask it while I'm working because I find the artboard with stuff visible distracting when I try to evaluate the design as a whole - but usually I remove the mask! It was a stupid mistake, and even more annoying because I had carefully checked the outlines and the colour separations and everything else. I don't usually make such mistakes, but there's a first time for everything, I suppose. I rang them as soon as I realised, but it was too late to fix it. Arg!

Most fortunately, it doesn't seem to have mattered:

I think they came out rather nicely! The clinic likes huge glossy cards - A5 - so this looks rather striking. My father isn't very impressed with this design at all, but the Clinic seem to be very happy with it, and that's what counts, after all.

Adobe Illustrator CC 2015 with a Wacom Intuos 5. About 6 hours.

Evolution of a simple BLM illustration

I've done a lot of illustrations for Blackline Master books in educational publishing. Here's a look at the process behind a simple BLM illustration:

My brief for this illustration was for the upper body of an traditional Australian Aboriginal mother holding a baby, for a section on totems in the First Contacts Year 4 curriculum. 

My first move was to browse google for a pose that would work. As I was drawing traditional Aboriginal peoples, I had to draw the mother and baby so that no 'naughty bits' were visible - this is for a year 4 curriculum, after all! 

I chose this image:

Image from shutterstock.com

I wasn't planning on using the reference exactly, really I was just after a pose that hid boobs and bottoms. Looking at the reference I sketched a really rough outline in purple, and then got rid of my reference, as I no longer needed it.  Previously I would do this stage on paper with a coloured lead, but I find it easier to draw directly onto my cintiq companion and it saves scanning. It was a little tricker using my Intuos, I found my sketching was much more stilted. 

Still using a purple brush, my next step was to refine that rough outline on a new layer. 

I then created another new layer, and started to digitally ink over my rough with a black brush. I got partway through before I decided that the baby was too old, so I did some rearranging to get the baby closer to a newborn. 

At this point I was mostly finished, but I didn't like the mother's hair, so I gave her a revamped hairstyle. 

My final step was to add some darker outlines, which is my standard practice for BLM illustrations. I feel the thicker lines give some definition to the main shapes, leaving the thinner lines to show the details, and it's less likely for everything to get lost in a sea of linework. I like things to be clear, and it's important that kids can see what's what at a glance. 

Here's the final:

Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2

Illustration: The Masqueraders

I needed some more cover art in my portfolio, and as I was listening to Heyer's The Masqueraders when I decided this, I thought I'd see if I could create a YA-style cover for that story. I first read it when I was about 13, and the plot of a brother and sister switching places amongst political intrigue and romance was a fun theme that could conceivably belong to YA lit. 

Here's a progress animation of the main steps I took in creating this piece. There are hints in the earliest stages of a more complicated background, with silhouetted vignettes, but I eventually discarded that idea and stuck with something a bit simpler. 

This was a good exercise in drawing characters, as each character I had to draw twice, and they each had to pass as both a man and a woman. I couldn't just copy the faces 100%, but I tried my best to maintain all of their features. It's tricky when you don't have hair and clothes to fall back on!

For those unacquainted with the book, the bottom half of the picture has the characters the right way round, with the girl in the red dress and the boy in blue (They spend most of the book playing their opposite gender). Here's an inverted version so you can better see them:

I don't really have any idea how long this took, as I worked on it in small bursts of free time over the past year. It definitely didn't take long enough to warrant the whole year though! 

Adobe Photoshop CC with a Wacom Intuos Pro 5 and a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2

I looked up period references for the clothes and took my own references for help with the (always tricky) hands, but otherwise, no direct reference.

Christmas Cards: Snowmen

This year I put together two Christmas Cards for Burswood Health. I've done cards for them in previous years, and this year I used one previous design, and a new one.

Here's the new design. A couple of years ago I was given a cartoon featuring a snowman who needed to visit the chiropractor, and asked to come up with concepts utilising that basic idea for their Christmas cards, but the project was cancelled due to time constraints on the part of the clinic - so when I got a rush order this year I grabbed the concept I liked the best and worked it up into a full illustration. I got the request Friday afternoon, did the illustration over the weekend, and had three cards ready for Monday. The snowmen were very quick to put together, and as I was flat-out that weekend anyway, I was very glad it wasn't a complicated concept!

And here's the second card. This bauble design has been used a couple of times, but updated it to match the clinic's new branding; when I originally designed it the brand colours were maroon and a rich yellow-cream, but they've had everything redesigned and it's now purple and beige, with a new logo. While I was at it, I also updated the colours in another existing design, a parcel, so that there were three cards available for selection, maximising the chance that there would be something there they'd be happy using, since the time constraints didn't really allow for the usual process of concepts and drafts.

As it turned out, they were happy enough with the two above designs to pick them both, and we were able to get them off to the printers in good time! =) I did both of the designs in Adobe Illustrator CC, which was a good thing, as I wasn't at all sure what size they were going with, and vector artwork can be so easily resized, so there were no issues when they eventually chose A5 size. I also like the clean, commercial appearance of vector artwork for jobs like this.

Adobe illustrator CC

Picture Book: Toughen Up, Princess

I've been extremely busy lately, and haven't had time to sit down and write a blog post, but I mustn't let any more time go before sharing this news. If you follow me on Twitter, you would know that at the beginning of the month my first picture book was launched. It's called Toughen Up, Princess and was written by Sioban Timmer and published by Jasper Books. It was great fun working with Sioban to bring her poetry to life. I'm a bit of a one-stop-shop so I did the design and typsetting as well. 

The book comprises poems retelling classic fairytales from a new perspective, with a distinctly Australian theme. It's aimed at 8-12 year olds, and so Sioban decided that she wanted the inside illustrations to be in black and white, so that it didn't look like a picture book for younger audiences. 

The book was launched at The Agonis in Gosnells on November 1. Sioban did a couple of readings, and we signed books.

Me, Sioban and our publisher, Cate Rocci

Signing books

Signing books

Here's a look at the finished book:

The front cover

The Evil Queen's Garden Tea

Man Cave to Sheila Shack (The Ballad of the Seven Dwarves)

Man Cave to Sheila Shack (The Ballad of the Seven Dwarves)

We've had some nice reviews, too:

Review in the Armadale Examiner

Review in The West Australian

My next post will take you through the process of creating one of the spreads.