Every book in the Animal Series starts with the same question: would I want this on my fridge? Here's the eight-step path from a pencil scribble to the dashed-bordered cover.
I start every book the same way — with a five-minute scribble on the back of a coffee receipt. The Tiny Friends sketch happened on a Tuesday afternoon in March, in a cafe near the studio. I was waiting for a meeting that ran late, and I drew a fox curled up on a tea cup.
The cafe sketch is rarely the final composition. But it's almost always the emotional brief for the book: warm, sleepy, low-stakes.
Before any digital tools come out, I do twenty pencil thumbnails on one sheet of A4. Each one is the size of a postage stamp. Most are bad. That's the point — bad thumbnails make the good ones obvious.
Once I pick a thumbnail, I redraw it at full size in Procreate with a single-weight pencil brush. No shading, no color — just lines. This is the step where I find out if the composition actually breathes. A cute fox can still feel cramped if there's no air around it.
For Tiny Friends I went through six line tests before I had the version that ended up on the cover. The fox's ears were the last thing to settle.
“A coloring page is mostly negative space. If you forget that, the whole book feels noisy.”
Every iRoly cover has a dashed border floating six pixels inside the frame. It's the one detail that ties the whole library together. People ask about it constantly. The honest answer is that I was prototyping the very first cover in 2024 and forgot to delete a guide layer. It looked right. We kept it.
I pick three palette options and walk them down the studio hallway. Whoever's around — Tora, Sara, the cat — picks one. The room votes more honestly than I would. For Tiny Friends, the cream/peach/sage combination won 4 to 1 (cat was abstaining).
The rest of the process — pages 1 through 12, the inside spread, the back cover, file handoff to Sara for app integration — takes about three weeks. Most of that is staring, not drawing.
Tiny Friends is available now — ¥9.9 in the app or as a printable PDF. See the book →
Founder of iRoly. Illustrator. Spends an unreasonable amount of time drawing sleepy foxes. Based in Tokyo.
The dashed border story made my whole day. So many "iconic" details are accidents.
Bought Tiny Friends after reading this. The fox on page 7 is unreasonably good.
Please do one of these for the Mandala Series next.
We send a curated coloring page every Monday morning. Nothing else.
