TOO MANY DOGS
Written by MAURA FINN and published by AFFIRM PRESS 2025
Percy is tired of being one dog all alone in a house full of cats! They are rude and messy and they blame Percy for things that definitely aren't his fault. He's leaving for a magical place where he can be free: the dog park. Now he can have fun all day, with no cats to make a fuss! But it's hard out there for a top dog, and soon Percy realises that there might be something missing ...
And according to the writer of this book (Maura Finn) the missing thing is cats. Personally I would contest that, but I did have a lot of fun drawing all the dogs (and cats of course).
Too Many Dogs is out now in Australia.
As with Too Many Cats, I created several preparation drawings of the many dogs featured, along with their markings.
There are many dogs in this book that I’m personal friends with, including Sheena (our bull arab/lab cross), Rocky (Maura’s chocolate lab) and Oreo (a blue heeler/kelpie cross with boundless energy).
There are just so many dogs (and cats) in this book, that the easiest way to illustrate it was to create everything digitally. I laid out the thumbnail and rough illustrations on my ipad, together with Maura’s text. Once Maura and Affirm Press were happy with the layouts, I traced over them more neatly and added colour (also on my ipad). To complete my illustrations, I copied them onto my desktop computer and put everything together in Photoshop.
Here are some of the roughs:
