Dragon Blood Pirates - Point of Sale display!

It's here at last! Lots of book shops in Australia have my POS in place now to promote Series 2 of the Dragon Blood Pirates. Ace!

Dragons Blood Pirates - Series 2 - Book 11

A couple of sneak pages from Book 11 (!) in the series.

Dragons Blood Pirates - Series 2

It's with great excitement that I've started getting busy with series 2 (books 7-12) of the Dragons Blood Pirates series for Hachette in Australia. The first series is out and doing the rounds. Here's a website all about it - Here

Here's a look of things to come.

Dragons Blood Pirates - Coloured characters

What a treat! A couple of coloured in pieces. These are characters taken from some of the many black and white drawings I've done for the Dragons Blood Pirates series.


Captain Gunner (with bee stings on his nose).


Slicer the ships cook serving up a "feast".

Dragons Blood Pirates - Sneak Preview at books 2, 3, and 4

A couple of interior page drawings for books 2, 3 and 4 of the Dragon's Blood Pirate's series that I'm working on. There's about 30 pages of illustration per book, so these pictures are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Two more books to go and they'll be finished and sent off to the printers, I can't wait to see them!

Book 2 - Saved from a falling bit of ship.


Book 2 - Sea battle.


Book 3 - Luring Vampire Zu from his cottage.


Book 3 - Being shown the right direction.


Book 4 - Slashing through the undergrowth.


Book 4 - Shrunken heads in the forest!

Dragons Blood Pirates character designs - Hatchette Australia

Before starting work on a book I spend ages creating the characters. Dragon's Blood Pirates have quite a large cast of main players, all of which had to be designed and approved, and most importantly notably different from each other.


Vampire Zu and Flash Johnny. Zu is a particularly fun character to draw.


Snotty Nell - one of the main baddies.


Mozzy and Slicer, a couple of good pirates.


Gunner - Captain of the good pirates.


Blacktooth McGee - Captain of one of the baddy factions.

Dragons Blood Pirates Maps - Hatchette Australia

I love drawing maps, and I love researching things, so it was a dream job to come up with a load of maps of the various islands featuring in the "Dragons Blood Pirates" series that I'm currently working on. I had to create 2 different maps, one that will feature on the inside front pages of each book, and a second much more detailed version that's going to be a pull out feature at the back of each book. They were all drawn to look like they'd been created on board a rolling ship under candlelight. Part of the brief was to make the handwriting look "piratey" which isn't a problem as that's pretty much my normal handwriting, just with a couple of extra swirls and flourishes. I can't wait to see the finished items!


This is the small map.


Cannibal Island showing traps and secret routes.


The Town island. The perspective of the houses is based on old maps I found of London.


Shipwreck Island - labeling all the shipwrecks (possibly a little obviously...)

Dragons Blood Pirates Book 1 - pencils and inks - Hatchette Australia

Here's a couple of pages from the first of a series of 6 pirate story books that I'm working on for Hatchette in Australia. They're all chapter books, meaning that there's a B&W drawing every couple of pages to help the reader along with the story. I'm loving drawing these. They're ace!

I've put in the pencil rough and the finished line work so you can see how things progress.



Captain Gunner.



A storm in the kitchen.



Outside Stanley Spong's shop.