Earlier in the year, I had the pleasure of illustrating the picture book “Anabelly the Smelly Squid” by first-time author Meghan Carlile. It’s a cute anti-bullying story set in an underwater school.

Since a large part of the story took place in the classroom, I had to make sure the room was consistent throughout the story. I briefly considered building and photographing a model classroom like I did for Bye, Bye Boogeyman. But I wanted to add shells and little coral reef-inspired details to the classroom and I knew it would be nearly impossible to keep those straight in multiple angles. So I decided to place the characters into the same classroom background– similar to the way they do it in animation. I have deliberately avoided doing this in the past because I didn’t want the book to look like it was simply cut and paste or that I was taking shortcuts.

I drew the classroom wider than a double-page spread so that I’d have the freedom to move it around and be able to crop it differently on every page.

And then I added the characters into the scene. Notice that I made sure to redraw all the characters for every page–even with the re-used background set, I didn’t want any page to look too similar. (The blank area over the window in this image and the chalkboard in another one are where the text was placed.)

And, just in case you still think I was cutting corners on this book, here is another double-page spread from a different section.

This book was also my first time working with the publisher Zebra Ginko, who is relatively new to the publishing world. They had one of their own designers handle the text placement and book design aspects of this project– which is usually I task that I insist on doing myself. And there are a few things that I would have done differently had I done it myself, but they did a pretty good job with it overall.

If you’re interested in the book, you can find it on Amazon: