A cheery disposition
(Rosy cheeks, no warts!)
Hello!
It’s another week and of course that means… another cover reveal! Don’t worry, there won’t be one every week, I haven’t been that busy! As far as I know this is the last one for a while. Above is the cover for The Mindful Magician And The Trip To Feelings Town. Written by Lauren Brukner, who is an OT with 6 published books, and publishing early next year with JKP/Hatchette UK. The Mindful Magician meets a kid, who is a Magician In Training, and the two of them travel around feelings town on a bus, meeting children that are feeling overwhelmed by situations and their environment. The two Magicians show the children useful, practical, OT approved methods for dealing with their specific issues. I really loved the concept behind this book, as it’s a fun, enjoyable story to read with a really important purpose. There are lots of great characters for the Magicians to meet on the way, and I was just so excited to get started on the character designs.
The first character I created was the Magician. I wanted them to be reasonably gender neutral, with the quirkiness of Willy Wonka, and the maternal authority of Mary Poppins. A cheery disposition, if you will…
When designing a character I know I will need to draw lots of times, I try to find a balance between having a enough cute details that the character has a clear, visual personality, but not too many that it takes 3 times longer to draw and I start to lose my mind… I also knew with this book in particular, many of the pages were going to be very busy so the characters needed to stand out, even with a lot going on. I did this by keeping the main two characters that appear on most pages reasonably simple. The book is also full of colour, so I kept the two magicians in grey so they would always stand out.
Above you can see the 5 children that the two magicians meet in Feelings town. Each child only appears in their specific part fo the book, so I know I would not need to draw them too many times, so I had fun creating patterns for their clothes and things like that, which I really love doing. It was important to me that the children were diverse and accurately showed their emotions. Above you can see a few sneaky little rabbits, which managed to sneak their way onto most of the pages in the book, getting up to all sorts of silly things. I always love these extra details you notice in books, and like to try and include my own when I can. I am really excited to show you more of this and go into more details about the process of making the book when I can!
Super chilled writing retreat
The other thing I wanted to talk about, was the writing retreat that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. The wonderful Claire O’Brien has organised another retreat, in the same eco hostel in the South Downs, UK. And the great news, this time it’s not part of SCBWI BI, so anyone can come! It was exactly what I needed to get into a clear headspace to get some really great work done. The next one is in January. If you have any questions feel free to ask me, or if you want to book a place then send Claire a DM.
Thanks for reading! And as always feel free to reach out with any comments or if you feel like you have a newsletter me or my readers might enjoy then drop a comment.
While you’re here…
My Illoguild crew are AMAZING at writing brilliantly thoughtful, creative, useful substacks so you should go take a look at them. Here’s a few of them:
Patterns do look great! I 'm also in love with different hairstyles and leg poses - all distinctively unique.