Hamish takes the train is the story of a bear who wants to see the world and of his friend Noreen, a goose. It’s about trains and cranes and friendship and pizza and is available now from Two Hoots Books.
This book has been many years in the making – it took us a long time to decide how I should make the illustrations and in the end they look quite different to the screenprints in my other books. Hamish is illustrated with pencil drawings and black ink washes, coloured and assembled in photoshop. There are more images of the book and of the processes behind it on my Instagram but here is a gif of the layers building up and a picture of some of the ink washes:
Ho-HO! It is that time of year again when Becky Palmer and I start a day late on our gloopy pot of Christmas comic jam and continue posting a panel a day (sometimes with gaps and gluts) throughout advent. If your toast needs MORE jam, you can catch up with our 2013 and 2014 comics here or on Becky’s blog, and ahem well I’m to go first:
Last year my friends at Velopresso asked me to draw them a horde of cycling animals, people and beasties-in-general to decorate one of their beautiful pedal-powered coffee trikes. Trike 001 was recently launched during Bespoked in Bristol, where Velopresso also won the Constructors’ Challenge prize – HURROO!
I haven’t seen it with my own eyes YET but I love the photos (more on Velopresso’s facebook page). The designer did a brilliant job arranging the crowd.
Bicycles are quite hard things to draw – not so bad as horses maybe (so many knees! On backwards!), but getting all the legs on the pedals? When the legs may be very short and belonging to pigs or sheep? Ach! I was afraid Velopresso, who clearly have an exemplary understanding of bicycle construction, would want drawings in better working order than I’d be able to muster – but luckily they were very supportive of skrunkiness and wrongness. I don’t know that my bike-drawing skills are much improved, but my repertoire of cyclists has certainly grown. Bring on the unicycling horse.
I must have drawn over 100 beasties or groups as I submitted about 70; I keep losing count, but I think there are 31 drawings on the final trike. Here are a few constituent beasts:
If you’d like to meet a Velopresso in real life it’s probably best to follow them on Twitter or Facebook.
I couldn’t really post these earlier as they were my Christmas cards, so now here are some bears. I spose only two are really SO-the-day-before-yesterday.
