Merry Christmas!

After a very slow-going year, in work and also on this blog, I suddenly have a million deadlines to meet, so this is the closest most people are going to be getting to a christmas card from me. Sorry about that!

Corners

I keep wanting to show what I'm working on, but all I can show are the tiniest corners without giving the story away.

But look, real paints! For the moment anyway.

Addis Back in Town

This great big poster from my book Addis Berner Bear Forgets is currently proudly adorning the hoarding alongside the street that leads from Kings Cross station to The House of Illustration at 2 Granary Sq. It's in excellent company as you can see here. Obviously it's a great honour for me, and especially nice as I am currently revisiting some of the techniques I used to make this book.

The House of Illustration opens on the 2nd of July, and Quentin Blake is interviewed about it in the FT here.

Proofs...

...are in for The Cow Jumped Over the Moon, A Nursery Emergency, by Jeanne Willis.

It's interesting (to me) how much these illustrations hark back to the earliest books I ever did. This is partly to do with the text, partly to do with digital techniques I've developed that happened emulate those early colours and mark-making, and maybe also to do with the sense of starting to make picture books again after several years away making The Adventures of Abney and Teal. 

This book will be out until early next year I think, but there are two new Abney and Teal activity books, with pictures by Davide Arnone and me, available now.

Currently I'm working on ways to mix more direct black-line drawings with all sorts of different techniques to try to make some work that is as direct as the drawings, and perhaps a bit more contemporary looking. I've got a picture book that is hopefully ready for final art soon, and some new stories and characters brewing for slightly older readers.

More recent experiments are on tumblr.

Also, big news since I have represented myself for the last fourteen years, I have signed with the great Jodie Hodges at United Agents, and am open to illustration commissions, especially black and white or two-colour work for fiction.

Nursery Rhyme Emergency

Here's a peek at some of the finished artworks for The Cow Jumped Over the moon (A Nursery Rhyme Emergency) by Jeanne Willis. I've been working on these, off and on, for almost a year and a half and now they are all finished (well, even now there might be a small change but I have to draw the line somewhere!)

It will be published by Walker Books next year.






Now I'm concentrating on another picture book which I've been working on for about the same length of time. Honestly, I'm actually pretty fast when it comes to illustrating, but for this one the writing duties are mine too, and what seemed like a beautifully simple idea is still proving really difficult to get into a straight line.

I'm tinkering with some ideas for longer illustrated fiction again, but that's sure to be a slow burner even by the standards demonstrated above.



I'm also still posting up general sketches and experiments, but they're going straight onto my tumblr here. As of about a month ago it is all new stuff there, but as an archive it goes back about five years.