Belated Fanfare!

New episodes of Abney & Teal this week (and yesterday), 6pm CBeebies.

In and out of a printing machine

First experiment mixing paint and coloured print on watercolour paper. Pretty exciting, though I think I can get richer colours.



Wearing the same expression. A cartoonified version of the cat from post below. (Digital)

Brilliant Books

This book and two others (Bop's Hiccups and pop-in-the-slot novelty book An Island Adventure) are released today. 

I illustrated this one by building a kit of parts and puppets, similar to the way the original show was done. The kit was passed on to Davide Arnone (an old friend and one of the main animators in charge of Abney). He has used the kit, adding his own parts, to illustrate the other two, and is currently  working on several more. The texts were written by Stella Gurney.

A painting I did as a gift for Lisbeth Zwerger. She was signing books at The Illustration Cupboard early this evening, and the show is on tomorrow as well. 

The new Tales from the Brothers Grimm is beautiful, although I'm annoyed that she beat me to illustrating Hans My Hedgehog. (In a book anyway, I stuck him on here a while ago).

Illustrations in progress...

...done entirely using the computer:










The last two are Giclée print tests on Hahnemühle German Etching paper. (Giclée is a word for posh inkjet prints on archival paper, apparently laughable and quite rude to actual French speakers).

Tests, experiments and postcards...

 ...done with paper, pencils and paints:

Neep!

If you buy the CBeebies Abney and Teal special magazine this month (I think it's on sale all month) you get a free Neep!



It's available in supermarkets and WHSmiths and all over the place. There's suddenly a lot of Neeps about.
Behind him there on the computer screen you can just make out a sample I'm doing for a new (non-abney & Teal) picture book. I'll find out later what I can and can't show here...

In other news it seems the Hurdy Gurdy from the excited post below was damaged in transit. Still waiting to find out what to do about it...
Sometimes I think my instruments are more trouble than pets. Mind you, if I had this many dogs that'd be real trouble.