Finnegan Frog & Jellycat
I had the complete privilege of spending the early months of last year working on a picture book with the lovely people at Jellycat. This was our first collaboration, and it was really unique for me because it was all based on one of their soft toy creations- Finnegan Frog!
It’s difficult to go into any depth about the whole process behind a project on social media, so I thought I’d share something a little more substantial here. The whole journey spanned about 7 months (of course, there were gaps whilst waiting for feedback, and I was working on other projects for different clients at the same time). But it’s fair to say that there were many stages and lots of people involved along the way.
The first part of the journey was to create a series of character sketches of the soft toy. Here is my initial development work, and the character sheets that I eventually sent to Jellycat:
Once I’d established Finnegan’s body shape in various poses, I used a lightbox to trace over the initial rough sketches. I wanted to capture Finnegan’s playful and charming personality, and explore how his facial expressions might show various emotions.
We then moved to the book cover design. It was challenging to work on the cover straight away, because the story was still in development, so the setting and environment weren’t set in stone. But it REALLY helped me to set a tone for the whole book in terms of colour palette and the overall look of the book.
I’ve selected a few of the development sketches to share the process before I landed on something! But, full disclosure: the whole process involved many many more sketches, tweaks and conversations. In my experience, the cover of a book is often the hardest thing to nail and is very rarely straightforward!
At this stage we also ironed out any issues with Finnegan; it was important to stick as closely to the original toy character as possible. So I paid careful attention to certain features, for example switching out the whites of his eyes and giving him black pupils with a glint to match his beaded eyes more closely.
Next up was the roughs stage, in which I mapped out the story visually. The most challenging part for me was establishing the environment. Finnegan’s home is the log pictured on the cover, so the pond and any other features were built with this being the central landmark in my mind. I created quite a few versions for some of the spreads below, as I wanted the wider' team’s opinion on what worked best. These were the sketches we landed on after two rounds of alterations and feedback- the creation of a picture book really is a community effort!!
The final stage was creating the artwork! I usually prefer the rough stage to the colour stage, but for this book I think I preferred the creation of the art. A lot of thought went into establishing the character of each of Finnegan’s little frogs, as well as getting the layouts to work cohesively, in the previous stage. But the artwork stage allowed me to have fun with the colours and atmosphere of each spread, especially since there was the opportunity to illustrate so many gorgeous skies, landscapes and watery pond textures! I created the final art in about 4 weeks, with each spread taking 2-3 days depending on the level of detail.
Below I’ve shared the development work for one of my favourite spreads:
I initially envisaged the waterfall page being one where the reader was required to spin the book to portrait to see what was happening. We all agreed that the drama of this worked well visually, but in the end we went for the landscape option so that the flow of the story wasn’t interrupted to this extent. To create the movement and texture of the waterfall, I digitally layered up a variety of textures which I created on separate sketchbook sheets and scanned in. I used ink, colouring pencil. gouache, and felt tip to create various scribbles and splashes. I also loved being able to incorporate my own hand lettering throughout the book, and this felt especially important to the overall impact of spreads like this one.
Above are a few more spreads from inside the book. Having had about a year’s break from children’s publishing, it felt like a big step to create this book, and it took a while for me to find some sense of confidence in my intuition again. I was keen that the next picture book I committed to would be a comfortable fit with my work/ visual language, and this book felt like a really authentic collaboration. Myself and the Jellycat team gelled naturally in terms of our vision, and I’m really grateful to Sophie Lunnon, Harriet Stone and the wider team for their amazing creative input. Thanks also to Hannah at Creative Sparrow who first connected me!
A Fantastic Day for Finnegan Frog, as well as Finnegan Frog himself, are available now in many book and gift shops, as well as directly from Jellycat’s website.