Making of Pearl and Her Bunch - Part Two

Illustrating Pearl

I LOVE sharing my “behind the scene” stuff! In the previous newsletter, I touched on writing Pearl and Her Bunch (Orchard Books). In this one, I’m going to share visual side of my process behind this book. Read on if you’re interested.

Character Design

Anthropomorphised food is my comfort zone and my style is quite simple so designing the characters for this book was pretty straightforward. Having said that, I was quite shocked when I dug out the initial character samples from my archive. How different they looked to the final designs!

The initial character sample of Pearl and her family.

I enjoyed drawing the big family of grapes as well as other veg/fruit families in the story.

My favourite character in the book is Grace the grapefruit - a fruit Pearl and her friend Carlos the carrot find lost and sobbing behind the couch. I kept the her identity rather mysterious for a narrative purpose for the identities of her parents were supposed to be a surprise. So, in the story, she is referred as “a big, round, yellow fruit” and she is kind of a toddler who just sobs. The main inspiration was the gigantic baby in Spirited Away.

Unfortunately, this great gran raisin character didn’t make the cut.