Stanley & Walker: Canine Climate Champs

Project Overview

Stanley & Walker: Canine Climate Champs by Emily I. Hoffman and Ellen Sue Stern (Mascot Books, January 2023) is the first book published in the Stanley & Walker series, and it sets the tone for everything that follows — warmth, humor, and genuinely actionable content for young readers. Across its chapters, Stanley, Walker, and their crew encounter environmental challenges at home, school, and in the neighborhood, modeling behaviors like recycling, reducing waste, saving energy, and caring for nature in ways children can immediately adopt.

The illustration challenge was making environmental responsibility feel exciting rather than dutiful through an anthropomorphic cast — Stanley, Walker, and their crew needed to model eco-friendly behaviours with the kind of energy and personality that made every green choice feel like a genuine adventure rather than a lesson.

Role

This was the book that established the entire Stanley & Walker visual world. The characters, the color palette, the tone of the anthropomorphic cast — every subsequent book in the series would be held to what was created here. Stanley and Walker needed to feel immediately warm, fun, and distinct, while the environmental scenarios they moved through had to read as genuinely exciting rather than instructional. Making recycling and water conservation feel like an adventure is an illustration challenge, not just a writing one.

From the initial character design sheets for Stanley and Walker — built to serve the whole series — through to the print-ready files across all 52 pages, I established the visual language that has carried into every book that followed.

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.