Football Freddie and Fumble the Dog: Gameday in Denver

Project Overview

Football Freddie and Fumble the Dog: Gameday in Denver takes the series to one of America’s most scenically dramatic cities. Freddie, Fumble, Lee, and Rookie pack in a full day of discovery — minting coins, exploring Denver Union Station, watching musicians at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, and hiking into the majesty of Rocky Mountain National Park — before capping it all off with Broncos gameday energy.

The illustration challenge for this installment was particularly significant: Denver’s setting spans both urban architecture and sweeping mountain wilderness, two visual environments that require very different approaches. Maintaining visual cohesion across those contrasting backdrops while preserving the series’ signature warmth and energy required careful colour and composition decisions throughout.

Role

The Denver installment came with a challenge the other Freddie books hadn’t faced at quite the same scale: the story moves between two visually opposite worlds. Urban Denver — the Mint, Union Station, the city’s architecture — demands precision and period detail. Rocky Mountain National Park demands the opposite: open skies, organic shapes, and a sense of scale that dwarfs everything in frame. Both needed to feel like the same book.

Beyond the dual environment, this was also a continuity project. Freddie and Fumble had already been established in earlier installments, and every spread had to keep them consistent with how readers already knew them — across 40 pages of new locations, lighting, and compositions.

Character Design

Before a single page is illustrated, I develop the main characters in full — defining their proportions, expressions, and personality. This is the foundation that keeps your characters recognizable and consistent across every scene, every lighting condition, and every emotional moment in the project.

Process

Every project follows this same structured path, so you always know where we are and what comes next. You review and approve at the sketch stage and the line art stage — nothing moves to color until you’re happy. By the time the final spread is rendered, there are no surprises.