Make sure that you finish the practice sketches of your characters and backgrounds before you begin the neat illustrations. This is very important because it helps keep all the pictures in the book looking the same and makes neat copies better.

When you do your neat copies, use some of Eric Beddows's tips:

• Use frosted Scotch tape for making white lines, like the cat's whiskers, if you're making pencil drawings.
• Use models and cutouts to move things, animals and people around and see what your illustration would look like.
• Use lines as guides to help you keep the characters the same size, in relation to each other.
• Use pencils with hard leads for tracing and soft-lead pencils for dark lines and shading.
• Smudging to soften the picture.

You could also use rulers to draw straight lines and trace other shapes.

When you have finished the illustrations, do a special one for the front cover of your book.