Detective Fiddle and the Room Full of Feathers

The making of a mock book cover

Detective Fiddle is one hard boiled detective. Too bad he seems to be a couple feathers short of a pillow. Thankfully, his every loyal sidekick Dee is there to help him untangle the mystery of a room full of feathers. What had caused ever steady Henny Penny to faint so? Why was the room suspiciously empty of golden eggs? And most troubling of all, where was the goose that laid them? The suspects are many- shifty Foxsy Loxsy, Fretful Ducky Lucky, smooth as butter Turkey Lurkey. One of them knew the answers and Detective Fiddle would get to the bottom of it…after chasing some feathers around for a while, of course.

Hello!

It has been A WHILE since I posted a newsletter! I apologize that it has been so long, but last year I was approached to do a really awesome big job (that I will be talking about more at the end of this year, hopefully!) and it took every bit of mental energy I had to complete. So, naturally, this newsletter fell down to the bottom of the pile. Thankfully, I’m looking at a more open calendar and I hope to get back to regular posting!

Today, May 1st 2025, is the start of my SCBWI region’s SPARKS Sessions! This is a monthly prompt/ meetup that I have organized with my friend Megan Emmot. Megan is an absolute wizard with words and she comes up with a prompt every month. The prompt for this month is “It came on the wind.” On the second Saturday of every month at 1pm Mountain Time (US) we meet up for 45 minutes of silent co-creation where we work on our projects and then have 45 minutes of sharing. At the end of 12 months we put all of our work together in an art show and send it around to libraries across Montana! If you want to join in, please comment and I’ll get you the link to our next meeting which will be a virtual show of last year’s work!

In honor of our new prompt, I want to share one of my projects from last year.

I made this mock book cover for the prompt “full of feathers.”

I was really inspired by Drew Weing’s fabulous Margo Maloo series and wanted to try my hand at a bit of comic inspired work, and as I am still working on making some mock book covers for my portfolio, this seemed like a good opportunity to combine these ideas. I also really, really, really wanted to try dry brushing. It is something I never do, because it feels so unpredictable, but I love how it looks.

I spent some time watching a couple of videos about dry brushing/comics inking:

And then when I was fully intimidated I decided it was time I should start before I chickened out (get it- cause of feathers…?)

So what could be “full of feathers?” A pillow, a coat, a down comforter…. I sat down with my brainstorming notebook to try to find the answer.

I started off with word association- something I learned from Sterling Hundley

I was trying to think of a story the whole time. What would have enough intrigue to make someone want to pick up a book? How could you make feathers interesting? Perhaps a “whodunit” story?

At first, I wanted the cat to be the culprit. I wanted to stage a room where there were a lot of feathers, but obviously we would be short a bird and I wanted to include several possibilities that the viewer could interpret. But I just couldn’t quite string all of the possibilities together. I felt like perhaps I was trying to cram too much stuff into one illustration. So I took a step back and pondered for a bit.

I grew up watching Forensic Files and detective shows on TV with my mom (she was convinced we would be abducted at any second and wanted to prepare us. I think it just made weird-little-me just that much more weird.) So when I thought of a whodunit, it was easy for me to harken back to the media I had been exposed the most to. I also was steeped in fairytales and nursery rhymes growing up. As an adult, one of my favorite books for re-reading is The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde which is the first in the Nursery Crimes series. So I started researching nursery rhymes that featured cats and birds. That lead me, finally, to my idea.

“Hey, diddle, diddle,

The cat and the fiddle,

The cow jumped over the moon;

The little dog laughed

To see such sport,

And the dish ran away with the spoon.”

“What if,” I thought, “the cat from the rhyme was invited to attend a shindig at the stately home of the Goose Who Laid The Golden Eggs (her friends call her Goldie) to play his fiddle? But it was merely a front. In the past three weeks Goldie had been receiving threats that if she didn’t hand over her golden eggs something terrible might just happen. She was frankly terrified out of her little bird brain. On the advice of an old friend, she hired Detective Fiddle and his assistant Dee, a sharp but jovial little dog, to solve the mystery of who sent the letters. But at the night of the event, a terrible scream came from up above. When the party raced upstairs all they found was a room full of feathers….”

With my idea pulled mostly together (good enough for a fake book cover, I think) I started sketching. I’ve actually put all of the process together into a soundless time lapse here for you.

I started sketching in Adobe Fresco, then printed out my sketch and transferred it to watercolor paper. I painted everything using watercolor and gouache.

At some point I thought I had pressed the record button, when in fact I just turned the video off so I don’t have any footage of me doing the part that excited me most- the dry brushing bit! This is why instead of doing the documenting myself, I want to hire a David Attenborough character to follow me around and document my life for me. (Wouldn’t that be grand?)

Anyway, once the dry brushing was completed (the blue and black background) I started to paint the feathers…and realized that I just didn’t have the patience to paint every feather and fight the colors bleeding through (I was using strictly gouache at this point because I had been so messy in applying the background). So I decided to finish ‘er up in Adobe Fresco again! I’m hoping it looks seamless. Please let me know if you think otherwise.

In any case, this one was a fun one to do. I don’t know if I will ever come back and actually write the story that goes with this cover, but I think it was a fun thought exercise all the same! I’d love to hear what you think!

As always, thanks for reading! I hope you join us for our monthly Sparks Prompts (just comment below) and I’m excited to get back into writing this newsletter! See you soon!

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