In the Studio
July/Aug 2025
Catworld, the comic style picture book about giant cats I am working on is coming along! Right now I am looking to find the right agent who can help get Cat and Whisk out into the world. Someone who has an editorial background, knows about publishing internationally and of course loves cats. At this stage the directions for finding an agent is to get at least 3 pages to finalised art stage and have the mock up of the book ready as well as the synopsis etc. Advice given to me was also to send it out to publishers, so Allen and Unwin were the lucky ones! I'm of course expecting to hear nothing back from them, but do have unil 5 August to confirm I won't be hearing back from them. Gotta be in it to win it! Rejection letters make you a real writer :)
​
Another thing happening early August is my new studio! This will be a fantastic opportunity to be part of an artist community and to be involved in a couple of exhibitions while I continue working on Catworld and other illustration projects.
​
Here's some working images of Catworld, cover ideas and mock up pages. Other projects I am still working on are all the cat species and My Comic Life.
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
Here's some ideas/tips I have learnt this year around comic illustration and also how to use traditional approaches in Procreate.
Hope you try them out and enjoy.
​
​
1. choose a 300 dpi canvas set up incase you want to print it later
2. choose a Procreate brush from the sketching file- any of the pencils is good, but I use the smallest one possible to get the best results closest to a graphite pencil
3 instead of drawing lines think about the shading and use contrasting shades to create shapes instead of lines
4. layers, layers, layers! Build up stroke by stroke, then use the smudge tool with the same brush to burnish the shading.
5. New layer. Repeat what you just did on the previous layer but use a slightly lighter or darker shade. You may not want to burnish (smudge) this layer but you can do that in the next layer.
6. Let me know how you go! See images above to see the results I have from this technique.
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​​​​​
​
​​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​​​​
