In the company of my wife and two cats, I finished writing and illustrating my third children's book, Buffy & Roxy Decorate a Cake. Buffy is our original character in the first and second books, and Roxy is a new character inspired by my son and daughter-in-law’s Golden Doodle, Roxy. This book won't break any sales records or win the Caldecott medal, but it's my work and I enjoyed every step of the process to get it published on Amazon KDP.
I discovered while illustrating this book that the method I was using to illustrate the characters didn’t reproduce very well on the proofs that I received from Amazon KDP. I had to change the settings a few times to get the colors to pop. I’m still not entirely happy with the final colors but I had to let it go. I found that I should be using the CMYK color space for the illustrations in Procreate on my iPad.
While I was working on Buffy & Roxy Decorate A Cake, I kept thinking about a possible story line for one of my illustrations from a couple of years ago. The character is a winter wizard and he sorta resembles Santa Claus. Different story ideas kept running through my mind but I was firm about taking a break after the third book before starting another book. Finally I set a rough timeline for myself and got started on The Santa Wizard of Mrakovich Mountain by sitting down with my laptop and ironing out a story. Rough sketches started in June 2025 and now I’m at the stage of inking the pages in digital ink in Procreate. My plan is to have the book finished and uploaded to Amazon KDP by October, just in time for the holidays. I’m still not sure how I will illustrate the pages or if they will have the look of my other work of black outlines and watercolor fills.
Here are a few preliminary pages of the book, I plan to ink all the pages before starting in with the full color illustrations.
The Wizard drives the same brand of electric scooter as Buffy The Happy Laughing Dog. And he has a cat. I’m not sure who would be cat-sitting for the Wizard while he goes on his trip.