Drawing "Liam the Chid"

Liam on the cover of "Liam the Chid & the Kangaroo Warriors"

Over the past year, I have been quietly working away bringing my debut middle grade novel to life! My words were almost ready (with just a few bits and pieces to go) but I had to figure out how my characters were going to appear on the page in a different way – illustration.

First things first, I decided to learn a new skill. I have been drawing in pencil since I could pick up one. But I’d never tried digital illustration before. I am lucky enough to know a few digital illustrators and artists and I felt inspired by them to try my hand at something completely different. And I am so glad that I did!

It’s true you can still illustrate books using pencil but I knew I wanted to go digital for my first book. Mostly because It gives you the freedom to experiment without using too much paper. And I love to experiment and make mistakes and try things out. I love to tweak!

Sketch of Liam - "Unwisdom"

When you start to illustrate, it all begins with the story though. I needed to figure out what I wanted to show in the pictures. So I wrote down a list of what parts of the book I thought were big important moments or really funny parts to make you laugh or bits that just needed a little bit more to help the reader see them, like a new character!

Once I had my list, I started to sketch. That’s right. Although I planned to illustrate the book digitally, I picked up a pencil first and started roughing out some ideas. I thought about what I could show in each picture, which moment exactly,  what angle, what background and all sorts of things like that. You can be sure my eraser was not far away and I had lots of pages in my sketch book.

Early line drawing illustration of Liam

The most exciting bit was discovering the faces of my characters though. What would Liam look like, what would Flip, Unu, Quickfoot? I also had to choose my style for the drawings. At first, I thought I would try something simpler. There is a tradition that middle grade novels like mine should have ink line drawings on the inside. And I did try it that way at first. But it just didn’t feel right for this book. I found I couldn’t show how the characters were feeling and I didn’t think a zany comic book drawings were the right direction either.

I had been trying out a kind of painting style with my earliest digital illustrations. You’ll see my first echidna at the top of this page! In the end, I felt this was what I wanted forLiam. Some more playing around in the sketch book and on my laptop, and I found the faces of my characters one by one. Then picture by picture, I drew them into the story and that’s how they ended up on the pages of my new book.