Resident Illustrator with a parrot on her head

I spent most of last week in Chester Town Hall, as resident Illustrator at WayWord festival – an eight-day-long parade of half-term excellentness, organised by the lovely people at Chester Performs. My favourite thing was the cardboard den workshop (inspired by The Girl with the Parrot on her Head):

Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs
Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs
Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs
Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs

Mark Carline took lots of other brilliant photos too. This one’s mine and not so good but I did particularly like the robot-rabbit den:
Robot-rabbit
I also did a reading and talked about how I came to make picturebooks:

Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs
Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs

And there were two more workshops in which we made animals to go on our heads. The animals were AMAZING. Here’s The Boy with the Jaguar on his Head and The Girls with the Tasmanian Devil and the Pink-faced Polar Bear on their Heads:
Boy with the jaguar on his head Tas

On my final day at the festival Kate Pankhurst and I made two completely new books in a picturebook jam. One of them started like this (me then Kate):
Jam pig 1
Jam pig 2
As resident Illustrator I also got to loiter around drawing all the other goings on – from an amazing range of author events to giant chess and never-ending free crafts. Some of my festival drawings are on the WayWord site but here’s the queue for Shlomo, followed by Alex Wiltshire talking about minecraft:
Queue

Alex WiltshireI felt very lucky to be there and very well looked-after – Chester Performs put on a grand show (and are incredibly good at collecting cardboard).

Llamas and monkeys

I have known for a long time that it would definitely be good for me, in all manner of ways, to do concerted doodling every day. But there are always MANY THINGS to do – and they often wear more important-looking hats. However, this seems to be mostly where stories come from. So, despite all the THINGS, this year I am really trying to do it every day. Here are some of the llamas and monkeys that happened so far.

Picturebook jam

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.

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, TrudiBecky) 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.

BEARS BEARS BEARS

Is most of the text of Bears, by Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak – that’s a good book. Anyway, here are some bears:
Bears of the long nose genusI 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.
Bears of the long nose genus
Okay so some of them are geese. The maths is because he rode over a list I was writing.
Bears of the long nose genusThen I screenprinted one bear for birthday purposes, though I’m not sure he’s got a proper grip on that balloon.
Brown bear with balloon