How the pictures are made.

Built like toddlers, on purpose.

Every character in Gerry's world shares the same body language, and it is borrowed from the children watching. A big head. A round, compact body. Short arms and short legs. Small and grounded. Children recognise themselves in those proportions before a single word is read, and nothing about the silhouette asks their nervous system to speed up.

Each character goes through the same stages. First the sketch, where we work out who they are. How they stand. Whether their eyes feel kind. Then colour, where the palette has to sit quietly inside the world of the campfire. Then the final poses. And between those stages there are revision rounds, and we would rather show you those than pretend they never happened.

Edna the echidna

Edna arrives in Book 5, Find Your Way. Every character in the series is built on the same toddler proportion language: a large head, a compact round body, short limbs, small and grounded. With Edna, all the drama lives in the quills above her. The brief asked for quills that feel voluminous, individual and alive, each one with its own weight and personality. They are her crown, and they are the first thing you notice about her.

Edna went through real revision rounds on the way here. Her claws were softened and lightened after the first digital pass because the lighter version read more naturally. A late round added quills along her flanks, so she is completely surrounded by them rather than wearing them like a cape. And her quills were built in three states, raised, natural and lowered, because in the story they settle as she does. Character design by Mary Hejazi.

Toby the tortoise

Toby carries The Slow Hello, a story about a shy tortoise who needs time before he is ready to say hello. You can see the toddler proportions clearly in him: the head nearly as big as the shell, the short limbs, the low centre of gravity. And you can see a real revision below. Same pose, two passes. The first version arrived brighter and more excited. The second settles him, because Toby is the character who teaches that slow is allowed.

Kakky the kookaburra

Kakky takes flight in Book 5, Find Your Way, which is in production now. She will be part of the series from there on.

Building the world they live in.

The characters are only half of it. Gerry and his friends need somewhere to be, and that somewhere had to be built too.

The Slow Hello stays in one place for all ten pages. A single waterhole in the Northern Territory, from dusk through to dawn. The location never changes, so the world itself has to carry the book. If the waterhole looked the same on every page, the story would start to feel still. So it was built in layers, with quiet detail added at the edges, and each page ends up feeling a little different from the last without a child ever knowing why.

It starts with a sketch.

The same way the characters do. Before anything is painted, the small pieces that frame a page are drawn in pencil. Native grasses for depth along the bottom edge. A loose cluster of water reeds, the same reeds Toby learns to peek out from. A ghost gum branch reaching in from a corner, turning an open landscape into something sheltered and close.

Then the world is painted.

The ghost gum on the left. Spinifex catching the last warm light. The reeds at the water's edge, lily pads with a frog who returns from page to page, and the Milky Way laid right across the sky. The same dusk to dawn palette as the rest of Gerry's world, so the place feels of a piece with everyone who lives in it.

The last layer is the quiet life.

A boobook owl on a branch. A dragonfly near the water. A frog on a lily pad, and a cicada you might never notice. Each one was chosen to belong in a warm Australian evening, and to be worth keeping for the books that come after, not just this one. A sugar glider was drawn too, for the deeper night, and you can find it gliding past the moon on the home page of this site. The owl watching over the bottom of every page is the same owl, drawn for the waterhole first.

And the world keeps growing.

Book five steps away from the water and into the bush. The same care, a different light. A new place for Gerry to find his way.