Stanley & Walker: Canine Kindness Champs

Project Overview

Stanley & Walker: Canine Kindness Champs by Emily I. Hoffman and Ellen Sue Stern (Mascot Books, March 2023) is the third book in the series, and it takes on one of childhood’s most persistent and damaging experiences: bullying in all its forms. Across ten chapters, Stanley, Walker, and their crew of pup friends navigate situations where cruelty appears — playground teasing, gossip, online challenges, cyberbullying — and model strategies for becoming supportive allies rather than bystanders. The tone throughout is empowering rather than fearful, giving children specific tools alongside the emotional vocabulary to use them.

The illustration challenge was depicting bullying scenarios through anthropomorphic characters with enough emotional honesty to be recognizable without being distressing — the dog cast needed to carry the full weight of those human social dynamics convincingly, while always pointing clearly toward kindness and courage as the response.

Role

The brief was deceptively difficult: illustrate bullying scenarios with enough emotional honesty that kids recognize what they’re seeing, but through the warmth and approachability of anthropomorphic dog characters — without either softening the reality or making the subject frightening. Each chapter required that balance: a spread about social exclusion, cyberbullying, or verbal cruelty needed to read clearly, then pivot to a model of courage and empathy as the response.

As the third book in an ongoing series, character consistency with the established cast was also essential. From introducing new breed-specific characters through to print-ready files across all 52 pages, the visual language stayed recognizably part of the Stanley & Walker world while the subject matter pushed into more challenging emotional territory than the earlier books.

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.