Becky Palmer and I have previously done a comics jam or two, but here (for a present) we did the same with picturebooks. Here is Rita at Sea (first page me, second page Becky) while Abacus (Becky first) should be over on Becky’s blog. You will be relieved to hear both books fit inside one matchbox, making them exceptionally easy to transport and store, if not to decipher or make head or tail of.
Tag: animals
Four months of not nothing
I have not done nothing since May, not quite.
For one thing, in August I got proofs of The Girl with the Parrot on her Head:
The design and printing are lovely, thanks to Walker, and it will really be a book on February 5th (pre-orderable even now!).
In the meantime I am finishing my second book, which now goes by the name of ALPHONSE, THAT IS NOT OK TO DO! Here are Natalie and Alphonse watching bad TV:
This book is mostly face acting and involves a lot of drawing the same monster MANY TIMES:
Who invited elephants? And the one with the orange dot gets it:
Further bears
Just some bears, three but not The Three. Or at least, I didn’t think of Them until now.
Napkin Bolognese II
Following on from last year’s snakes and skates, here is what a heap of illustrators, in Bologna for the bookfair, got up to during dinner at Trattoria Rosso (Bar 51 now has cloth napkins – pah!). First a shape game that turned into a story:
Then some shape-game people:
Then just some folks:
And some weirdery:
I don’t know why the class of 2012 (Zack, Trudi, Becky) are being so possessive of that second-to-last one – they were surely outnumbered by 2013 (Vic, Suzanne, Steve, Elena, Emily, Hannah, me), if not by staff and very welcome outlanders (Paula, Ariana, Saskia).
It was lovely to see Cambridge illustrators’ books – just published and not quite published – all over the fair, two graduates in the Illustrators Exhibition, and too many hundreds of other beautiful books to get excited about. And it is Quite Grand to see your own book there for the first time too. It is sometimes a bit intense though, and you worry that maybe someone has gotten hold of your squeegee and you better go home and see.
