Is most of the text of Bears, by Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak – that’s a good book. Anyway, here are some bears:
I have never been very happy with the bears I’ve drawn before, so I thought I’d investigate the world of long-nose bears. And I like it.
Okay so some of them are geese. The maths is because he rode over a list I was writing.
Then I screenprinted one bear for birthday purposes, though I’m not sure he’s got a proper grip on that balloon.
Eeshk, because I finished a book, I now have to make a new one – this is like actual work with my brain, or should be. It is quite scary to be back in the early development stages again, after over a year, although (with a lot of help from most excellent people at Walker) it is just beginning to feel like it might possibly be possible in the end.
These monsters were originally invented for our MA show catalogue, but now they need another book to live in. For one thing, a brand new mountain of amazing graduates is about to take over the world: their London show is at Candid Arts, Islington, from 11th-15th February.
Apparently I am delivering my first book to its publisher tomorrow, so I thought it might be time to say I have a publisher. Walker will publish The Girl with the Parrot on her Head in 2015, which is just grand and the luckiest thing. It does not make me feel like this:
I haven’t written on here about this story since January 12th, 2012 when I handed its first incarnation in for marking as part of my MA. I re-started work on it with Walker last February and it has been dead innerestin turning it into an Actual Book. It even has endpapers – though they are of course inferior to John Burningham’s Avocado Baby masterpieces, which are my favourite ever. I am going to miss Parrot Head, especially this colour parrot red:
Would probably be full of things I don’t much like – orange peel, plastic cherries, giant sultanas like squidges of snot, mmhmm – unless it was a comic, such as this one Becky and me are making for advent (though even this may contain sultanas). Becky goes firstmost, me next, and then we take turns for ages like persons trying to get their pink or orange cheese well into the beginnings of Boxing Day. Happy Advent to You!
Recently I went to Finland with Becky to see the moomins and their house. Apparently, Finland also has wolves – luckily I did not know this or I might have stayed home and looked for a man with a load of bricks. So here is the first of two comics we drew, which tells more or less what happened to us in Helsinki. The next instalment can now be found on Becky’s blog. A few things may be obscure, such as how all brochures and some humans said the Finnish thing was to go and “be in the Nature”, how there were many gigantic inflatable ice-hockey players in Helsinki’s Narinkkatori, and how the wading stanley is an avid philatelist. Oh and the Finnish dinner is not really part of the story.
As was once firmly established on a placemat in Antepliler, there are all manner of bears. Some bears have mullets, for example, whilst some others are almost spherical. Here is my family as bears, I am the stumpy one:
As I understand it, there are also a number of geese. We know from Sesame Street that some geese live with mooses, but I think some do most likely also live with bears:
Possibly this is next?
My birds envelope, and C5 envelopes by a person or two that I know, will be part of the Mail Me Art Short & Sweet show in London this week (30th of July to 3rd of August). There’s a book of the project too (shown below), with some mighty strange post in – I like this one and this one today. Tis a very various thing, and the pricing is fairly arbitrary, but I do like a decorated envelope yessir.
Eh well dear me that last post is an aeon ago – I almost was not born. A number of things have occurred and one of them is that LOAf 2 is very nearly baked and coming NEXT WEEK to all good comic and book shops (well, at least in London, Bristol, Cambridge and er, Paris) and even having a party at the very fine Eggs Milk Butter of Southgate Road, N1 (if you knew me before I was eight, it’s pretty much in my house). Here is a grand Becky poster:
And here is a smidgen of my slice of LOAf:
Further to my recent post on napkins, I have just returned from the Bologna bookfair, where collaborative drawing happened in a grand number of ways, including this three-napkin bonanza by Elena, Becky, Caroline, Emily and me in Bar 51 (click to see it bigger).
We also drew on placemats and on giant paper on the side of our stand at the fair, and we played a stunning game of telephone pictionary which I hope to share at some point.
In other news, I met hundreds of beautiful books and several beautiful ice creams; I also had an altercation with a wheelie-suitcase on the way to meet a publisher, which resulted in a split lip and an afternoon spent in hospital on a sugar drip. Many lovely Cambridge people looked after me and I am getting less scabby every day.
Oh and here is the suitcase I took (and didn’t trip anyone up with):
I do like to draw on an envelope yessir, so I decided to take part in Mail Me Art 3: Short & Sweet, in which 200 people send decorated envelopes to Mail Me Art, and then there is a show in the summer and a book. You are supposed to not mind when bits fall off your art in the post, but probably it is rash to stick so many bits on in the first place?
I was trying to make a collage in the way I make screenprints, taking the shapes from photocopier-enlargements of tiny doodles. I originally drew these birds on the back of an envelope, which seems nicely circular.
