Hey all

Thank you so much for your ongoing support, patience and love for the book.

Really excited to report that the Tomatoes have landed!

This weekend we took receipt of Author copies of the book and it looks brilliant. Unbound did a great job of the print and colours.

Later this week me and Michael are heading to Unbound's top secret location (shhhh!) to sign and sketch in all your…

No, I’m not talking about Halloween! I’m talking about bringing our drawings to life with colour. Having done all our inking I’ve scanned them all in and removed the blue “pencil” lines I was using as a guide.

Now these are added into my drawing software, Clip Studio where I can touch up the drawings and remove any smudges or accidental lines from the inking. We then remove all the white. This…

Step 4: Inks

With our pencils all done the next step is to print it all out for the inking.

All our pages are printed out onto Bristol Board - like a thick cartridge paper - at slightly larger than we need for the final printed book. This bit is tricky but we want to print our pencils out in light blue so that we can draw over them. Then thanks to some computer trickery we can remove the blue…

Step 3: Pencils

With a completed script we now have a sense of the overall story and how this is going to be broken down for the graphic novel.

It is time to dust off the pens and pencils and start fleshing things out (although for this stage we are working with digital pens and paper!).

For each page from the script I start out with a rough outline of the panels and characters…

Step 2: World Building

Before we start any work drawing our story we need to set the tone. This is important as this helps us break our characters and settings down into recognisable shapes for use throughout the story.

This involves a fair amount of research - it may seem surprising to some of you but I have rarely drawn talking monkey statuettes or ornate, lead dolphins before!

There…

Hey all

Sorry it has taken us so long to post an update on the project.

It was so fantastic to hit our target back in September and work continues behind the scenes. We are significantly through the drawing stage so thought it would be a good time and a great idea to give you all an idea of the process involved in bringing Michael’s fantastic story to life!

Step 1: The Script

We…