I made this gif to celebrate the paperback edition of Hilda and the Runaway Baby. I’ve only just found out you can animate in Photoshop and this is the first animation I’ve made in years. So much fun.
In other Hilda-news, Beijing Cheerful recently published Hilda (and The Girl with the Parrot on her Head) in simplified Chinese!
It was really exciting to be invited to exhibit some of the original screenprints from Hilda and the Runaway Baby as part of a group show at the Hive library in Worcester. Hatched! featured illustrations from seven new books by four Illustration tutors at Worcester University: Piet Grobler, Becky Palmer, Stephen Fowler and me. Here are few photos by Steve Waldron:
The Hive is such an amazing space for an exhibition – or to just visit and read in. The children’s library has tunnels under the bookcases and a brilliant workshop space, where Becky Palmer and I ran some vegetable print-making sessions. It turns out you can do incredible things with carrots and cauliflower, so after the workshops we added the children’s prints to the main exhibition. Here are an owl and a rabbit followed by a purple bear.
This is the most complicated print I’ve ever made, it took ten screens and I think it might still need another cat. This is the Runaway Baby’s village, which has chimneys from the Alpujarras.
A bit like a pigeon but more like an envelope. My MA class have been sending each other illustrated envelopes and mostly I have been drawing on mine or cutting bits out of them but then I got carried away whilst screenprinting. Haven’t decided who this is for yet. I found it is hard to register variously-sized envelopes in the middle of an A3 print.
Also I have just started printing the (photo-emulsion) line layers of my prints at college like a proper person, which may mean the days of the roasting-tray/daylight-bulb arrangement under my desk are numbered. Phew. However, if you feel like turning your desk into a dodgy exposure unit, here is the personable man explaining how to “Go ahead and use a pie tin.” To be fair the photo-emulsion is dodgier and more to blame than the pie-tin.
Here’s one of the spreads I entered in the Macmillan Prize (see Pigs win prizes), there’s another on the Llamas page. I best do some more now.
And here are all the winning and commended Cambridge students with tutors Pam Smy and Martin Salisbury (both on left) at the opening:
