monsters – Page 3 – Daisy Hirst

ALPHONSE at WayWord festival

I’ve just come back from having the MOST FUN being Festival Illustrator at Chester’s WayWord children’s festival for the second year in a row. This was my first chance to read ALPHONSE, THAT IS NOT OK TO DO! with children (even though it’s not published until 5th March), and to try some monster-themed drawing and making.

Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs

At one event we read ALPHONSE and The Girl with the Parrot on her Head and played drawing games together, just as Natalie and Alphonse draw together in the book.

I also ran a monster finger puppet workshop.

Puppets — Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs

And another (with a lot of help from Nicola and Helen of Chester Performs) on stencilling onto canvas bags. It would have been hard to do screen printing (which is how I usually make my illustrations) in this workshop, unless everyone had printed the same image, but the freezer paper stencils were quite magic, and the resulting bags were so cool!

nvnb — Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs

I spent the rest of my time drawing the festival – which was embarrassing as I’m heinously out of practice with observational drawing, but good for me. Here’s one of my drawings – visit WayWord for more (and next year, maybe visit the actual WayWord as it is ALL THE FUN).

Alfons, Alfonso, Antero and Ingolf

¡Estoy muy muy emocionado porque mi próximo libro va a ser publicado en ocho idiomas! Me gusta especialmente el nombre danés ‘Ingolf.’
ALPHONSE, THAT IS NOT OK TO DO! will be published in Dutch by Lemniscaat, Finnish by Lasten Keskus, Spanish by El Naranjo, French by Albin Michel, German by Aladin, Italian by La Marguerita –Ellebi and Danish by Jensen & Dalgaard. Oh and English too I spose.

ALPHONSE, THAT IS NOT OK TO DO!

Here is an advance copy of my second book, ALPHONSE, THAT IS NOT OK TO DO! to be published by Walker in March 2016.

I have been drawing monsters for a very long time and am so excited to see some of them (almost) about to be loosed into the wild… I’ll write more about the book closer to publication, or there’s a little snippet here.

Velopresso beasts on bikes

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!

Velopresso 001 — Photo © Velopresso 2015

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.

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: