Nene Lonergan talks about early drafts, being believed in, and the line of sight
by Ruth Ennis
Tell me about your design process for the characters in Amelia Cheeseheart Investigates?
Designing Amelia was super easy. I’ve always loved drawing cute animals and Cat Weldon had written her with such a distinct personality. Once I figured out what she physically looked like, it was just a case of drawing her over and over for me to figure out her visual mannerisms.
The more I draw her, the better I get to know her
The more I draw her, the better I get to know her. She’s a brave, adventurous and confident mouse who adores her best friend Webster. All of these things inform how I imagine her body language. When I draw her, I try to keep her curiosity and energy in mind and try to express that in her physicality; Amelia is always leaning, power-posing, or jumping around in joy and excitement.
Cleo was also quite easy for me. I had a vision of what she looked like since I first read Cat’s manuscript. I knew she was a mummy, but still had to be able to express emotion, so I made her bandage fall off enough to reveal one eye. I try my best to make Cleo as expressive as I can with her one eye, whether it’s widening in shock or closed in kitty-like happiness. She’s also quite a frantic character (which is reasonable, because if I had attempted ancient Egyptian magic and it had gone wrong, bringing to life a billion beetles, I would also be freaking out).
I try my best to make Cleo as expressive as I can with her one eye, whether it’s widening in shock or closed in kitty-like happiness
I got to do lots of fun stuff with her body language, she’s almost always throwing her paws up in dramatic exasperation, or arching backwards and clutching her cheeks in fright. Cleo talks a lot with her hands, to compensate for her lack of visible mouth. I also wanted to give her some colour, so I gave her a little golden collar with a heart-shaped jewel. The ancient Egyptians loved their cats, and I imagined that she was very well-loved before she became a mummy.
Webster was the hardest character for me to design, ever! I had never ever drawn a spider before and was horrified that I had to somehow figure out a way to draw one that was cute! I used to get a lot of huntsmen spiders where I lived, and I am so scared of them. I watched a lot of spider clips on YouTube and stumbled upon a video of someone making an enclosure for their pet jumping spider. The close-up shots allowed me to get a better look at their little faces, and I ended up finding them really quite cute. I also felt like he is like a little brother to Amelia; he follows her around, he’s quite scared of dinosaurs, and he gets into all sorts of trouble. I gave him some big huge glasses to express some of that little-brother-clumsiness.
I had never drawn a spider before and was horrified that I had to somehow figure out a way to draw one that was cute!
While the mouse characters have some limit to their manoeuvrability due to their large heads and short arms, Webster is essentially two fluff balls and legs that sprout from mysterious origins. I can pretty much put him into any pose! In the second book, Amelia Cheeseheart Investigates: Chocolate Cheat, I used the space between his first fluff (head) and second fluff (body) to store Choconana wrappers. I think I’m quite proud of his design, in the end! He’s a favourite among my friends, one of them has even said he wanted a tattoo of him!
As for the rest of the mice in the museum, their designs and characters come quite naturally to me the more I bring their home exhibits to life. I can easily imagine the kind of characters that would naturally emerge from such environments – due in huge part to Cat’s writing. I like to imagine there’s a whole world in their society even as I draw them in the background. With the Vikings, I gave the queen mouse a big battle scar across one eye, she’s quite confident but in a quiet way, which is why Ivar the One-Eared tends to do most of the speaking for the Vikings, and is more expressive than her as well. There’s also an unnamed Viking mouse with a beard who’s usually quiet and a bit clueless, you can usually see him in the background looking a little confused. With the Aztecs in book two, I designed one mouse as an eagle warrior, so when he speaks, he comes across as quite impatient and bossy, while the other mouse is designed after a priest and is a little more diplomatic and even-tempered.
I can go on and on about my mice! I put a lot of thought into designing all of them. I really enjoy making up little stories about them in my head. It’s so magical that I get to flesh these things out by making decisions about their designs, the things they own or what their houses look like. I try to make each group of mice as interesting as I can in case the next book is about them!
What was your favourite series of panels to illustrate in this book?
I really love the big panels with lots of stuff going on. I’m also hugely into ancient Roman history (my Roman Empire is the Roman Empire). I can read/understand a baby amount of Latin. I’m slowly making my way through the Cambridge Latin Course textbooks. Which is to say, I loved drawing scenes with the Roman mice so very much. The pages included below were a blast for me to draw. It’s the point of the story where the beetles are wreaking havoc through the Roman Exhibit, and the Roman mice are trying to fight them off. I loved how the bottom right panel turned out, with the dramatic Dutch angle and the mice and beetles flying everywhere. I really enjoy the challenge of making order and sense out of a busy composition.
My favourite pages or spreads to draw are always very busy and time-consuming
My favourite pages or spreads to draw are always very busy and time-consuming. I find myself storyboarding busier panels or complex backgrounds in books two and three – I think that’s because I’m getting better as an artist. Sometimes, I would draft these huge spreads with a million background elements and a million mice all doing different things and then when I get to the part where I have to colour, I’m like ‘Oh my god. Who storyboarded this? Who gave me all this work? Now I have to colour a million tiny little different details.’ But those big pages are always the most rewarding when I complete them, and I hope it’ll be fun for the readers to stare at as well.
What is the best thing you learned during the Children’s Books Ireland Raising Voices programme?
My god, that is a difficult question! I learned an enormous amount; from file formatting to submissions to agents to publishers and beyond! I didn’t know very much at all about the publishing industry before the fellowship. But I think the most important thing that I took away from it was the feeling of being believed in.
I think the most important thing that I took away from it was the feeling of being believed in
I didn’t have much support towards becoming an artist while I was growing up, I never thought I could actually become ‘good enough’ to be a professional artist. It feels like I haven’t earned that title, even now. The fellowship told me that I was good enough. That people believed in me. The support I received from the programme, from Children’s Books Ireland, from our group mentor Celine Kiernan (I love you, Celine), from my mentor Chris Judge, with whom I still collaborate, and the guys in the fellowship was incredible. It made me feel like I did have a chance of following my dreams, that I was a good enough artist to do that. Honestly, at the start, it felt like they believed in me a little too much! They really made the dream of making books suddenly accessible. I can’t ever sing their praises enough for that.
I dedicated the first Amelia Cheeseheart book to Children’s Books Ireland and my fellows because I quite literally would not have gotten there without them. I’m thankful for the fellowship program every day. I would be absolutely directionless without it.
You designed the cover for Meg Grehan’s The Lonely Book (Little Island). Does your approach to cover art differ to your other illustration work?
Hmm, I think I actually find it easier to do cover art. When you’re making work for yourself, you are responsible for all of the choices in the piece: where should I put this element? What colour should that thing be? But when you’re working with an editor, the idea for the cover is already there, the characters are already there, they even tell you what colours to use!
For someone like me, who suffers from oftentimes paralysing anxiety, having someone with experience who can tell you ‘yes, make that choice’ or ‘this doesn’t quite work, do something else’ takes so much guess-work out of the experience. It almost feels like being spoiled a little bit! I enjoy illustrating for clients and authors very much. My experience with personal work varies a lot more. Sometimes I find that rare stroke of inspiration and I can almost see the full picture in my head before I draw it out. Sometimes the idea is hard to develop and I end up not being able to develop it at all. Both are rewarding in different ways, though!
Which comics and artists influence your work?
I read a lot of comics. Like, a lot of comics. I have been reading comics since I could read. I find it hard to pinpoint specific artists or works that have directly influenced me, because I am an amalgamation of every piece of art I’ve seen on Instagram and every omnibus comic I’ve consumed.
I spent a very long time in the children’s ward’s books section, and they had a lot of (random volumes) of old comics
Lots of people, when seeing my work for the first time, would say something like ‘wow, you must really like studio Ghibli!’ And while I now adore Studio Ghibli, I hadn’t seen any of their movies until I was about 22, quite far in my art journey. I think maybe the people who worked for Studio Ghibli and my humble self may have grown up with the same Mangas. My brother was very sick when he was born; we spent the first couple years of his life either living in the hospital or in and out of it. I spent a very long time in the children’s ward’s books section, and they had a lot of (random volumes) of old comics: Doraemon (Fujiko Fujio), Dr.Slump (Arika Toriyama), Blackjack (Osamu Tezuka). I must have read each book two or three times.
I continue to be influenced and changed by the things I see and read. New artists come up with incredible ways to tell stories that knock my socks off all the time. I hope one day I can be as good as the people that inspired me.
My brother is very much fully recovered now and has grown up to be a very cool, intelligent young man who inherited my vast comics collection when I left home. We also donated a huge part of my collection to his old hospital when we left Thailand.
Your illustrations often use a spiral as a frame to shape the flow of an illustration. What role does shape have in your art style?
The spirals started as an experiment on the ‘line of sight’ – the path a viewer’s eyes travel as they observe your illustration/painting. As a comic artist, you have to constantly think about the line of sight. You want to control the order in which people see your images and make sure people read the speech bubbles in the correct sequence. You can usually get a renaissance painting or baroque painting and trace with a red pen the paths your eyes are intended to travel down. That being said, they’re not often geometric. I just thought it would be fun to use that idea of sequential observation to tell a story.
As a comic artist, you have to constantly think about the line of sight.
I think the first illustration I tried it with was of a witch making cookies using magic where your eyes start at the top where she is mixing batter, down to where they’re being pressed into shape, and down again to where they are on the tray ready to be baked.
What are you working on next?
Well, book two, Amelia Cheeseheart Investigates: Chocolate Cheat, has just gone to the printer’s! I had a really fun time working on this book. I have a huge interest in ancient Mesoamerican cultures, so it was really cool to get to design the Aztec mice for the story. I’m really proud of how the pacing came out too. I think the story flows really smoothly. I’m really excited for everyone to read it when it comes out in November 2025.
I’m also working on Amelia Cheeseheart 3! We’re really hitting the ground running with this series. It’s funny, I feel like I can be much looser with my draft pages now that there is an understanding that I can produce finished pages that do look coherent. I find my drafts look more and more horrible and borderline indecipherable the more books I work on. Sometimes I’ll open a draft file to work on the line art and think ‘What the hell is this supposed to be? Who drew this?’ But I do think the finished pages are coming out better and better. Maybe there’s a weird correlation there? I hope to keep improving with each book and make each more exciting and fun than the last.
