New books, and other news…

Just a final blog update before Christmas! A couple of months ago I received copies of two books that I illustrated quite recently, and I haven’t had a moment to blog about them til now. ‘This is Me’ (published by HarperCollins Big Cat) is an instructional book about making a self-portrait from buttons, paint, wool and other fun things. I had just two weeks to complete the final artwork for this book…it was quite an intense two weeks but I managed it!

I really enjoy drawing hands, so loved the task of drawing the little girl’s hands as she completed different stages of her project.

This is from one of my favourite pages… the girl’s reflection as she looks at herself in a hand-mirror.

Here’s one of my roughs from the early stages of planning the book…

‘Jo and Jess’ (published by Hinkler) is an early-reader book that tries to encourage kids not to be afraid of the dentist.

Another thing I did recently was attend a couple of winter craft fairs with the lovely Vicky Scott…

I also went to see my friend Olu’s comic ‘Ding’ which was on display at the cafe in Foyles, Charing Cross Road. It won second prize in the Observer/Jonathan Cape Graphic Short-story Prize. ‘Ding’ is based on the fascinating and hilarious snippets of conversations that you overhear in the course of bus journeys sometimes… it has a clever structure which repeats and alternates between the different characters page by page. The Observer describes Olu’s illustrations as ‘waspish and very funny.’ You can see more at Olu’s website here: www.oluoke.com

I also couldn’t resist showing a couple more examples of Olu’s work… first an illustration she created for Camus’ ‘The Outsider’, and secondly a page from her Cuba sketchbook.

One final piece of news is that I coloured a cover for a comics magazine… the new (and brilliant) DotComics by Elliot Baggot and Mike Medaglia who I’ve been lucky enough to meet at various comics events over the last year. The cover was drawn by Elliot, inked by Mike and coloured by me, and it’s the second issue of their magazine, which aims to bridge the gap between web-comics and print. You can find out more at their Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/dotComics

Elliot and Mike: Serious about comics! :o)