Jenny Gretton painted every picture in The Tale of the Hoppitysaurus before a word of it had been laid out. A friend scanned the paintings, Jenny typed the story as a single block of text, and both arrived with us in April 2021. When the scans landed, Mike’s reply opened with: “Oh my word, your illustrations are amazing! Loving these :)”
The book follows Sammy, a small green dinosaur who is sad about his heavy tail, his very long back legs, his very short front legs and the awful red spots on his back. We printed it as an A4 landscape paperback, and we have photographed it twice, once when the first copies were finished and again in 2024 for a feature on children’s book bindings, sizes and papers. Both shoots show the same edition, so this tour uses the best views from each.
The cover: a painted palm and a flourish of script
The front is mostly white. A watercolour palm arches in from the left, a frieze of tiny painted plants runs along the bottom edge, and down in the right corner sits Sammy himself, green and covered in red spots. The title is set in a flowing script with Jenny’s credit underneath, written and illustrated by her. Restraint is what makes it work: the white ground lets one corner of painting draw the eye, much as a mount frames a picture on a wall.
Underneath the artwork is a 300gsm gloss board with gloss lamination. Jenny had asked for a cover that was “a bit ‘stiff’”, and Mike described the quote as “a nice card cover and thicker than normal inside pages”. On a wide book that small hands will open from one corner, a firm, wipeable cover keeps the whole thing from flopping.
Why the book turned sideways
Mike asked Jenny early on whether the finished book should be portrait or landscape, guessing landscape because that was the orientation of her paintings. Jenny agreed: the format had to be landscape. A portrait version was on the table as an alternative, but fitting her wide scenes onto an upright page would have meant cropping or shrinking every one of them.
The payoff is in spreads like the lake scene, where a pink long necked dinosaur wades below a blue stegosaurus and a crowd of green ones, the painting running across both pages without a break. If your illustrations are wider than they are tall, let them choose the format. Our guide to landscape, portrait and square picture book formats weighs up each option.
Text laid in segments around the paintings
Turning a long block of story into pages took a designer’s eye. Jenny sent a version with breaks marked where she wanted each page to end, and Mike introduced her to Heather, our artworker, who rebuilt everything in InDesign. Jenny’s verdict on that hand over: “Heather sounds just right for this.”
Heather’s layouts vary their approach from page to page. Some text sits on clean white beside a painted cliff path, where Sammy climbs with his spotted tail trailing. Elsewhere it is set straight over the painting, as in the cave scene where a mysterious voice booms out of the dark rock. One close up shows a single line about bulrushes tapping their heads together, “chip, chap, chip, chap”, sitting just above the painted reeds. If you have the pictures and the words but not the software, tell us what you need on the Helping Hand page for authors who want layout support.
Big red spots on heavy uncoated pages
The spots that make Sammy so miserable become a design feature of their own. Two pages are given over to them: big red dots scattered across white, with BIG RED SPOTS lettered in black and red capitals between snatches of dialogue. Later, a full spread shows a spotted dinosaur tumbling across a pastel sky past a curling green plant.
The text pages are 170gsm uncoated, chosen because Jenny wanted paper heavy enough that the paintings would not show through. That weight gives each page a reassuring thickness, and the matt surface suits watercolour, keeping washes soft and the type easy to read under a bedside lamp. Glued into a square spine, it stands up neatly on a shelf. When Jenny asked about protecting her copyright, Mike pointed her to Nielsen for an ISBN, so the finished book carries its own number and barcode.
A few weeks after the copies arrived, Jenny wrote that she had given them to friends and neighbours who knew she was working on it, and that they now wanted copies for their own friends. When Mike checked in during 2024, she sent a line we were delighted to read:
“it is loved by everyone who sees it, so just needs to grow legs!”
Jenny, author and illustrator
Painted a story of your own? Bring us the scans and the text, and we will help turn them into a picture book printed from your original artwork. You can price an A4 landscape run in our quote calculator for wide format picture books.
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
