• I’m soon relaunching my Scaredy Cats KickStarter project.

    One thing that bothered me, once I had launched previously, was the cover. I loved it, but after a while I realised that it was probably not the right cover. The style of the cat on the front of the book, did not fit with the illustrations inside.

    Publishers often re-cover books with different styles, but I thought maybe it was also a bit too sophisticated for the age group the books are intended for and said something different to what was inside.

    So I spent some time trying to do a watercolour version, but couldn’t get that right. In the end I decided to do a hybrid. Take the elements I loved about the first cover and add them to a physically drawn version.

    The moral of the tale is that the first drawing is not necessarily the finished version. You can keep tweaking the design and a little time and distance is good – allowing you to see the design with free eyes.

  • I was at Longleaf recently, at a big schools day, and we were introduced to ferrets. I spent the day coming up with story ideas for them – Hmm! is there a ferret story on the horizon?

     

  • Kerry Burgess messaged me from Australia and asked me to have a look at her online portfolio. I did and thought there were things that I would change, so I asked her if I could do an online crit and she bravely said yes.

    You need to think who your audience is. If you are selling yourself as an illustrator you only need impress two or three Art Directors and you are away and in business. Lots of other people may look and say how lovely, but they are not going to commission you. Build your site for your audience/market.

    It is your shop window, so don’t fill it full of stuff that will confuse the passer by. A bakers should have bread on the window. An ironmongers, tools and hardware.

    I will be starting a series on videos about WordPress.com as I think they are the best for free websites, and I will show you how to set up a free and fabulous website for your work.

    If you have a different style or you want to document our art journey, build another site, but don’t mix them up!