Creating a Far North Queensland Calendar: The First Four Months

Four months, eight little characters and more deleted backgrounds than I care to remember.

I thought I was creating twelve separate illustrations for a calendar. Somewhere between the cassowary, the travelling backpack and the many backgrounds I drew and deleted, it became one continuing adventure.

My Far North Queensland Adventures 2027 calendar is still very much a work in progress, but January to April are now complete. Four finished months feels like a good point to stop, look back and share how the characters, textures and little collection of souvenirs began.

My version of seasons

The calendar began as part of a three-month creative sprint with Laura Jane Illustrations inside her Creative Pals community. The theme for July to September is seasons, and this calendar became my version of it.

Far North Queensland doesn't fit neatly into the traditional four-season calendar. Its year is shaped by changes in rain, humidity, plants and wildlife, as well as the way the landscape feels at different times.

Each of my twelve illustrations points to a season or seasonal moment. Some of the clues are obvious and others are tucked into what the characters are doing, where they are and what they encounter along the way.

You might not be able to spot all of them yet. They will make more sense as the full calendar adventure unfolds.

Beginning with memories, books and a library bag

The original idea for the characters came from my visits to Far North Queensland.

We haven't seen every animal that will appear in the calendar, but we have seen a daddy cassowary with his baby (two lots in the same day - how lucky are we?). We've sat at Granite Gorge and fed rock wallabies. We also watched a chrysalis come to life up at Kuranda, which made me cry with joy.

Those are the sorts of moments I want the calendar to hold. Not a scientific record of everything we saw, but the feeling of looking closely, discovering something and coming home with a story.

Before I began drawing, I went to the library with my friend, Michelle, and collected books about Queensland, along with picture books that had nothing to do with Queensland at all.

The Queensland books helped me research what I might include, from its animals and plants to the places they belong. The picture books gave me something different to look at, including illustration styles, colour choices and the way scenes were arranged on a page.

I also went through my own photographs from our trips. When I needed to understand an animal or plant more clearly, or find a better view of a pose, I used additional reference photographs from Unsplash.

Those references gave me the pieces. The rest come from my own imagination.

Creating my own illustration prompts

Lisa Glanz's Drawn to Whimsy helped me think beyond drawing a single animal sitting nicely in the middle of a page. Lisa has included prompts for creating playful characters and scenes. They prompted me to develop my own set of ingredients for the calendar illustrations.

Each image has a main character and a smaller friend. Sometimes there is a mode of transport. A little backpack appears throughout the calendar, and the characters collect a new souvenir during every adventure.

Not every illustration needs to use those ingredients in the same way. The prompts give me somewhere to begin. Instead of opening a blank Procreate canvas and wondering what an animal should be doing, I already have the beginnings of a story.

The backpack is the thread running through all twelve months. Its collection grows as the journey continues, gradually turning separate calendar pages into one long Far North Queensland adventure.

January: inventing the rules

January introduces the cassowary, its butterfly friend and the travelling backpack. The first souvenir is a seed pod.

This illustration took the longest because I wasn't only creating January. I was working out the rules for the entire calendar.

How much detail did the characters need? How would I use texture? Could I make twelve pages feel connected without repeating the same composition? What sort of background would support the characters without taking over?

The background was the part that wasn't working. I drew and deleted more versions than I care to remember. Every one I tried didn’t feel right - I woke up in the middle of the night and realised that the characters didn’t need a background as they are the scene.

Eventually I realised that I didn't need to illustrate an entire landscape. A few carefully chosen shapes could suggest the setting while leaving the characters to tell the story.

The layers you delete still GET you there

Once January was right, I had a visual language I could carry into the following months. The time spent deleting layers hadn't been wasted. It helped me work out what belonged.

February: the adventure starts moving

February’s frog holds a leaf umbrella over the backpack to keep it dry. A damp dragonfly who was flying by notices the shelter and slips underneath to dry her wings. The souvenir collected is a heart shaped leaf.

This was the first chance to test whether the rules I had created for January would work for a completely different character and pose. The cassowary is settled into its scene. The frog needed movement.

The backpack came along too, as it’s an important part of the journey.

March: giving the riflebird the stage

March belongs to the Victoria's riflebird, joined by a little lizard. A feather becomes the next souvenir.

The riflebird gave me a different shape and mood to work with. Its wings fill the scene and its pose brings a bit of performance to the page, while the lizard provides a quieter moment alongside it.

The page still belongs to the same calendar, but it doesn't rely on the same layout as January or February. That was important. I want the illustrations to feel connected, not copied and rearranged twelve times.

April: four pages become one story

April's platypus swims through the water with its ladybird friend, collecting a spotty pebble along the way.

By April, the backpack is carrying reminders of earlier adventures. The heart-shaped leaf and feather have travelled forward, with more little discoveries to come.

One of my peers commented, "I only just noticed the bag that appears in all of them."

That is exactly what I hoped would happen. The bag doesn't need to shout for attention. It is there for the people who stop, look again and begin following the smaller story hidden inside the bigger one.

Finding the calendar's personality

I've had some lovely comments while sharing the work in progress.

One person told me, "You're so good at characters," while another said, "I absolutely love this texture." Then came the comment about only now noticing the bag that appears in every image.

Together, those comments picked up on what has become most important to the calendar. The characters lead each scene, the tactile finish brings them together and the backpack carries the story from one page to the next.

The first four months have taught me that I don't need a complicated background to create a sense of place. I need enough information to lead you into the scene, then I can let the expressions, movement and tiny details do the rest.

January may have taken more drawing and deleting than planned, but it gave the rest of the calendar somewhere to go.

There are eight more adventures waiting inside my sketchbook, more seasonal clues to add and plenty of room left in that backpack.

If you'd like to follow the characters through the rest of Far North Queensland and hear when the finished 2027 calendar is available, join me for Stories from the Dotty Side.

Materials and inspiration note

The calendar is illustrated in Procreate. Drawn to Whimsy by Lisa Glanz helped inspire the prompt framework I developed for these scenes. I have also used Lisa’s Procreate brushes - from Nitty Gritty and Instant Artist plus the watercolour textures are from one of her brush packs.