A month on from first introducing pencils, crayons & markers to my little girl, I’ve realized I’ve created a colouring monster! Last night I first noticed that she hasn’t played with any of her toys for the last four days… just happily sits and scribbles. Funnily enough, when her crayola markers aren’t out she gathers to herself all the graphite pencils, leaving the colourful ones scattered about. It’s been intriguing watching a little one learn how to use the pencils… progressing from side to side scribbling, to big round circles around them, to carefully drawing little circles imitating mummy drawing on the paper (bottom).

Here is another of the new illustrations I’ve completed for my diary of Hera’s outfits… a simple graphite pencil drawing, with a colour layer tinted over top in Photoshop.

I’ve been busy the last few weeks working on revisions for Spotty & Eddie’s latest adventure, as well as designing the layout for Riley’s Lost Tooth. In between my creative banter with the two lovely authors I’m working with, I’ve been doodling a few more outfits for my diary of Hera’s outfits. More to come!

I’m delighted to be working with Lisa Chalifoux on the sequel to Spotty & Eddie Learn to Compromise… in this adventure, Spotty & Eddie travel with their owner to visit Percé Rock in Quebec. Having never visited Percé myself and now living in Australia, I am relying heavily on photographic reference for the surrounding areas. While inspired by Bill Guffy’s use of Googlemap’s Streetview, unfortunately I can’t use it to get a feel for the town as Google has yet to “do” Canada yet. Sigh. Anyway, here are a few snapshots of the rough sketches generated from these thumbnails and ideas. By the end of this week I will have finished the revisions Lisa has requested on the rough sketches. The final illustrations are to be done in plain old graphite pencil with digital colour applied afterwards in Photoshop… stay tuned!