It’s officially out today (although I think it’s been in some shops for a bit): Creature Teacher is here!
Written by Sam Watkins and with illos by me, it’s the story of Mr Hyde, everyone’s favourite teacher, who has a rather unusual secret: he turns into a weird creature whenever he gets upset!
It’s a great read and very funny, and I hope it’s a huge success for Sam as it’s her debut book! We’ve not yet met but will be doing a few events together in Worthing in a couple of weeks – very exciting! Purple snot may be involved. Allegedly.
There’s loads more info about the book on our Creature Teacher website (including important buying stuff).
You can find out about all the characters, read an extract from the story, and Sam’s also come up with some brilliant writing and drawing activities which can be downloaded for printing.
Make your own purple snot! Test your slug general knowledge! Make some moon rock cakes!
I did the illustrations for the book digitally, which helped a lot in meeting the deadlines. It still meant there were a few steps in the process of making them, but no boring scanning which always takes ages.
Here’s a walk-through of my process for making an illustration, where Mr Hyde’s doing some crazy dancing in front of the class!
1. I get sent a PDF of the book where the designer has left spaces for the illustrations with suggestions for what they might be. I worked with the lovely Sarah Darby – we’ve not met but I reckon she has a heck of a social life.
2. I block out some basic shapes to help me get the relative positions of all the picture’s elements in place and just get a feel for the illo. There might be several versions of this.
3. Then I draw a rough (digital) pencil sketch showing a bit more detail. This normally goes back to the designer for approval.
4. If the publishers are happy, I’ll ‘ink’ the sketch.
5. The finished illustration. I’ve added some grey tones and a bit of texture to make things interesting. The designer may make further tweaks, particularly if there have been changes to the text layout, but otherwise we’re all done!
Creature Teacher is the first of a series of four books (I’m about to start working on Book 2). Do go and buy it – it’s in the shops now!