It's been almost five years since I published Scruffy Muffin Loses His Money and I've been working on the next book, Scruffy Muffin Gets a Job, for about that long. Last year I took some time to focus on my illustration portfolio and noticed that thanks to all the drawing courses I've taken and all the practicing I've been doing, Scruffy and his friends look a lot different.
This concerned me, and I paused work on the series. I want it to feel connected. I don't want the characters to look so different from book to book, but I also want to share my best work. I debated redoing Scruffy Muffin Loses His Money. It's not a big seller anyway. When I thought about it, I realized I liked having a book that showed where I started from. At the time I published that book, it was my best work. It wouldn't be very efficient for me to redo my books every time I improve, especially since my hope is that I'm improving with each project.
I decided to redraw some of the illustrations I'd created for Scruffy Muffin Gets a Job though. I definitely want my characters to feel cohesive within the same book and since I started working on this one so long ago, I wasn't seeing that. I thought it would be fun to share some before and afters. Most of the changes were to Scruffy's human Vinny. In some of the images, he looked to old to me, more like a teenager or an adult when I was going for about 8-10.
Here, Vinny tells Scruffy that Dad is paying them to rake the grass. In the first image, Vinny seems too old to me, so I made him shorter and rounder. I also tried to make Scruffy look more excited about helping rather than like he was being scolded.
And in this set, Vinny is comforting Scruffy after he made a mess of the grass pile, because he decided to chase a bird.
Now that I've adjusted the older images I created to be more consistent, I'm feeling much better about getting this book out into the world. I've also learned a few tips recently that are helping me streamline my process, such as working on a two-page spread at once rather than looking at it as two separate pages. This helps with consistency as well.
If you've been waiting for this book, my apologies. I hope by fixing the illustrations now, it will be a higher quality book when I do publish. Thank you so much for your patience!
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