My Strawberry Monkey

Thank You! Appreciate the feedback....

The long term goal is to turn the children’s picture book series in to a cartoon. Whilst I’m not an animator, that’s a road I’ll eventually head down. But for now here’s this! I think the focus might have to change and start to write a script and start putting a storyboard together. House Animation.mp4

I've always been a fan of combining illustrations with photography, it adds another dimension to Strawberry Monkey and it allows me to be a little more creative! I've

Thanks George!

Ohhh My! Guess who's got themselves stuck up a tree... Thankfully our favourite firefighter Harriet came to the rescue. Harriet is my latest character, creating her has added some dynamics to My Strawberry Monkey, and has made me rethink about some of the roles the other characters play. Stay tuned!

Thanks George! I'm starting to put myself out there more and telling the story behind My Strawberry Monkey, it helps to have this written down as I'm sure I'll create content from this.

We're super excited about this! Check out this interview we did with Affinity about our journey with our children's picture books and preschool website over on Affinity spotlight, hopefully it will provide you with some inspiration! Affinity Spotlight - My Strawberry Monkey

Ohhh My! Maisie and Strawberry Monkey spent the day down on the farm with Mr and Mrs Horse today. Looks like they had a fun time! What have your cheeky little monkeys been doing today?

Daddy's home! Daddy's home! Guess who's excited to see Daddy Monkey? Do your own cheeky little monkeys get this excited when Daddy comes home? Loving the the direction My Strawberry Monkey is moving in, not a path I expected when I started, but it's very exciting! Stay tuned for some more revelations and exclusive insights and something that I'm very excited about! Not sure how my tiny little brain comes up with all these ideas, I love getting inspired by my surroundings and creating images, and then analysing them: What do you see? What’s the setting? Are they young or old? Animals or human? What are they doing? From questions like these, I then create more images, then I start to tell the story based on the images, as they say a picture paints a thousand words. It’s definitely an alternative approach, however, this is what works for me! Allan Thompson

Here's a look at where Strawberry Monkey used to live and where he lives today! Yep, we've had the builders in...

I created the first book around the last image I posted, the 'normal' process of creating a book would be writing away using word etc, then spend time trying to find the right illustrator! I started my process by creating an image and turning that into a book. What's the setting? How did he get burnt? Does he learn? Why is Betty there? (the Giraffe) From questions like this I was able to create more images, then I started to tell a story. Here's images from the first idea I had for the book cover, then what it turned into and what it looks like today!

Here's one of my first ideas for the full Strawberry Monkey character and what he looks like today! I think one of the biggest challenges I face with this is, learning how to illustrate and use Affinity Designer at the same time, remember, I come from a video editing background, illustration is new to me. I used a body from a business card mock up after recreating the head for my logo of my freelance company. Still learning at this point and the thought of a book still hadn't entered my head. When I did get a bit more comfortable with the app, my original idea was to create these witty one-liners feat Strawberry Monkey, aimed at adults, with a goal of producing a comic strip weekly over on Instagram. Whilst I had used Facebook and Twitter the world of Instagram was new to me and I still had to work out the platform. The second image you see is, I think it's the first (nope, just checked, it was the 2nd) of the comic strips, I did make a post on here and remember a comment from @eejits, wishing me luck but from experience he also made me aware of how challenging it was keeping it up on a weekly basis. Yep, you were right @eejits! I think I posted about 9 images between April and September 2016, so much for my "weekly comic strip" It was around this point, October, November 2016ish I thought I would have a better reach aiming this at the preschool/early years world.

I think it was early 2015 that I discovered Affinity Designer and I started to play around with some ideas for my Twitter Header, I was trying to sell some wall prints on ETSY at the time and I also used the same font and logo for both platforms. Attached is then and now, only a slight difference!

So, I've decided to share where My Strawberry Monkey all started over the next few posts. Hopefully it will inspire and encourage you to keep going at what you're doing. Looking back at these images, clearly I was blind and didn't have a clue at what I was doing, still feel the same way, well, just a little bit. My Strawberry Monkey originally was the name for my freelance company back in 2014 ish, I was working on some motion graphics and video editing at the time. Before that I was called Saffire14 Media but I really wasn't happy with the name and was inspired to change by a company I came across called Fox & Velvet, my name just felt so boring in comparison. When I did change (I will share how I came up with the name in a future post) I needed a logo. I was just learning how to use Photoshop at the time and had no skills besides video editing & motion graphics. So I used my best friend, Google and found the image attached, I worked out how to apply a couple of filters to make him look pink and the second image was the result. This was before Affinity came into my life and yes downloading an image and using as my logo wasn't the best or right thing to do, I just really wanted to get going with an Idea and I never intended to keep this logo and as I said, I really didn't know what I was doing in Photoshop, it was so daunting and complicated to use. Let me be clear, at this point in my life I had no intention to make a children's picture book and preschool website or even a clue of what to do.