Turning Cartwheels

Detailed teaching notes for Turning Cartwheels are available on the EK Books website.

The Making of Turning Cartwheels

In February 2021, my debut picture book, Turning Cartwheels, was published by EK Books. This was the end of a journey that lasted almost four years – I wrote the first draft of the story in 2017! It went through eight drafts, and I got lots of feedback from my writing friends and from editors that I met at writing conferences. Finally, in 2019, Anouska Jones, the publisher at EK Books, told me they’d like to publish it. And that’s when the real fun began. 

Anouska chose the illustrator Amy Calautti (another Amy!), who lives in Western Australia, to illustrate the book. Amy C. received the story and drew some initial character sketches for the main character, Emma.

She also drew some sample spreads in black and white, of what the illustrations might look like.

Anouska sent me the samples to see what I thought. As gorgeous as they were, this wasn’t quite the image I had in mind for the style of illustration. Since it’s a book about cartwheels, I’d imagined a loose, flowing style of drawings to bring the book to life.

I went to Amy’s Instagram page to see what other kinds of drawings she does, and I found the perfect images to demonstrate what I meant.

I was happy to discover that Anouska agreed with me – this would be a great style to capture the movement of the story. So we gave the feedback to Amy, and she drew another round of character sketches and sample images.

These were perfect! As a team, we settled on this as the illustration style for the book.

The next step was for Amy to match illustrations to the text in the book. This can be difficult, as the illustrator needs to choose which parts of the text are most important to capture in the pictures. Amy, Anouska and I sent lots of emails back and forth, trying to make sure the illustrations told the best version of the story.

Some of the spreads changed quite a lot from Amy’s original idea…

To the final image:

But some of the spreads didn’t change that much from the first draft…

To the final artwork:

To add more interest to the illustrations, Amy used a digital collage technique, where she scanned in real images (like the fruit in the fruitbowl above!) and inserted them into her drawings.

There is a point in the story when Emma makes some posters to stick up around her school. Amy decided that the best way to make these posters ‘pop’ was to actually create them in real life and then collage them in. She even let my daughter and I colour in some of the posters!

Can you spot our posters in the final illustration in the book?

Sometimes an illustrator also adds in additional details that aren’t mentioned in the text, to add an extra layer of detail to the story. Amy added the detail of the Cartwheel Club members all wearing red ribbons in their hair. When Emma decides she doesn’t want to be in the club any more, she tosses her red ribbon away. Since Emma was so excited when she earned her ribbon, readers can tell that she must be feeling terrible if she’s throwing it away now. Amy chose to draw Emma from above in this scene, helping us understand how lonely she is.

Eventually we had a finished version of the story ready to go, which we all agreed looked fantastic! Even the cover had come a long way…

And when we finally had a real book that we could actually hold in our hands, there was only one thing left to do – tell everyone about it! We wanted as many people as possible to read the story of Emma and Carly and the Cartwheel Club. So, Amy used her illustrations and some special editing software to create a book trailer for Turning Cartwheels:

I hope this gives you an idea of some of the steps involved in making a picture book. If you have any questions, feel free to send me a message via my contact page and I’d be happy to answer them!