Ever wondered how the title type for a series gets designed? I’ll show you my inspirations for the title type of the Toffle Towers series. I’ll also show you how I designed the series’ quirky shuttle bus vehicle.
Continue reading “Toffle Towers: old-school hand-lettering & a rocket-powered bus”
The Toffle Towers series takes place in and around the eponymous hotel – it’s historic, a bit shabby and definitely quirky. In this post I’ll show you how I designed the hotel’s lobby.
Continue reading “Toffle Towers: designing a hotel interior”
Here’s a free step-by-step video tutorial, showing you how to draw the main character from Toffle Towers.
Many scenes in the Toffle Towers series happen in and around the eponymous hotel. So it was down to me – an illustrator with absolutely no architecture experience (!) – to design the exterior of the building. It needed to look historic, a little shabby but also exciting and quirky. Here’s how I designed it.
Continue reading “Toffle Towers: designing a hotel exterior”
Ever wanted to know how a children’s book illustrator designs a book cover?
Designing characters is one of my favourite parts of the job. There are lots of little tricks and techniques you can use to design great characters – here’s how I do it.
My new book Gastronauts is out now in bookstores and online.
Today I’m taking you behind the scenes to show you how I illustrated the front cover.
Here’s my final rough:
Continue reading “Behind the scenes of Gastronauts, part 4: final cover illustration”
My new book Gastronauts is out now in bookstores and online.
Today I’m taking you behind the scenes to show you how I designed the robots and vehicles in the story.
Quick recap: Sally Tinker is the world’s foremost inventor under the age of twelve. In Gastronauts, Sally’s baby brother Joe swallows her latest invention. So Sally and her friend Charli shrink themselves down in a tiny submarine and journey into Joe’s body.
Here’s how I designed the cover.
Sometimes you get the cover idea pretty quickly and clearly from the start.
This was not one of those times.
I struggled with this a lot at first; I couldn’t figure out how to show the reader that Sally and Charli were inside a sub, inside Joe, and make Sally and Charli big enough so that they were recognisable, without being too big that the scale stopped being anatomically correct.
None of these ideas really work, but I’ve included them here to show you how a cover design process can go. There are usually lots of rejected, fairly ordinary ideas.
Continue reading “Behind the scenes of Gastronauts, part 3: cover design”
My new book Gastronauts is out now in bookstores and online.
Today I’m taking you behind the scenes to show you how I designed the robots and submarine in the story.
Quick recap: Sally Tinker is the world’s foremost inventor under the age of twelve. In Gastronauts, Sally’s baby brother Joe swallows an invention called the smartCHIP, along with a bunch of tiny robots called smartbots, and also a tiny shrunken submarine containing Sally and her friend Charli.
Here’s how I designed Sally’s SUB and the smartbots. But:
**SPOILER ALERT***
I’ll discuss plot points for the book, so if you haven’t read the book yet, go do that first, then come back.
All good?
Have you gone and read the book?
Ok, here’s how I designed the SUB and the smartbots.
Continue reading “Behind the scenes of Gastronauts, part 2: submarine & robot design”
My new book Gastronauts is out now in bookstores and online.
Today I’m taking you behind the scenes to show you how I made the illustrations.
Here’s one of my favourite spreads from the book. It’s where Sally leads her friend Charli into the SUB (Sally’s Underwater Boat) for the first time.
I thought it would be easiest to show the insides of the SUB by just drawing a massive cut-away diagram. Here’s how I drew it.
Continue reading “Behind the scenes of Gastronauts, part 1: illustration process”
