Dog Books
Real dogs, drawn consistently
Illustration
Dog illustrated books.
Most people commissioning a dog book are not commissioning a dog. They are commissioning their dog — a particular animal, with a particular face, that has to stay that animal across twenty-two spreads.
That is a production problem more than a drawing one. It is answered with model sheets, a fixed palette, and the discipline to hold every page against them.
Send us photographs. We’ll send back a character sheet.
A cover is one painting, not two.
Front, spine and back are painted as a single wraparound scene and cut afterwards, so the horizon meets across the fold and the back cover is part of the picture rather than a colour block with a blurb on it.
The artwork carries no lettering at all. Titles are typeset afterwards in real type — which means they can be corrected, resized, and translated without touching the painting. Text baked into an illustration is text you cannot fix.
Nobody draws page one until the dogs are settled.
Before a single spread is painted, each dog gets a model sheet: profile, front view, head study — and a comparison panel with both animals standing on the same ground line at their true relative sizes.
This is the reference every later page is drawn from, which is what keeps a dog recognisable on page 19 as well as page 1. Consistency is not a promise made at the start of a project; it is a document that exists, that you approve, and that the illustrations are then held against.
It is also the cheapest place to be wrong. A note on the sheet costs nothing. The same note on twenty-two finished spreads costs the schedule.
The size gap is the joke. It has to survive every page.
A husky beside a miniature dachshund is most of the comedy in a book like this — and it is the first thing that quietly erodes, because an illustrator balancing a composition will nudge the small dog up until the picture feels even.
So the ratio is written down as things you can check by eye rather than as measurements: her back is level with his elbow, she can walk under his belly without ducking, his head is as long as her whole body, one of his front paws is the size of her face. Numbers in a brief are unverifiable. Those four sentences either hold in the drawing or they do not.
The comparison panel on the model sheet exists for exactly this, and every spread gets held against it.
Wanted the other kind of dog book?
This page is about a bespoke book for particular dogs — your dogs, their story, drawn once and drawn properly.
That is a different job from a personalized dog book, where one set of illustrations has to accept a different name and a different breed on every order. If that is what you are after — as a gift or as a product you intend to sell — it has its own page, its own economics and its own build.
The detail is the whole job.
Real dogs have one thing that no generic drawing of their breed will ever have. A notch in an ear. A grey muzzle. Half a tail.
Those are the features an owner checks first, and the features a stock illustration always gets wrong — because the breed, not the animal, is what gets drawn. We treat them as the identity test: the one detail that has to be right in every panel of the model sheet before any page is started, and the first thing looked at in every illustration afterwards.
Tell us what makes your dog unmistakable. That sentence is worth more to the work than any brief about style.
Dog illustrated books
Send us the photographs.
Share pictures of your dog — a few angles, and one that captures the personality. We'll draw the character sheet first, so you can judge the likeness before a single page is illustrated.