books – Page 5 – 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).

Dulwich Books has a system

To celebrate the release of The Girl with the Parrot on her Head in paperback, the lovely Dulwich books have put Isabel and her system, and the WOLF in their window: Dulwich Books window
I am extremely grateful, again, for the amazing scalpel work performed on this display by the design team at Walker Books. Hmm, I wonder if I will get to design any monster windows when ALPHONSE, THAT IS NOT OK TO DO! is loosed in March…

Paperback parrot and delivering Hilda

The Girl with the Parrot on her Head is published in paperback today!
In other newts, today I’m also taking the last bits of artwork for my third book, Hilda and the Runaway Baby, to Walker Books. Weyll, actually the endpapers will be the last bit and I haven’t finished them, but I can scan those myself.

I am a bit late delivering Hilda: I hadn’t really realised before I started making the screenprints how challenging this book would be. I’d already printed illustrations for half of the original version (made during my MA) but ended up re-doing everything, partly because we changed the format from portrait to landscape. There were one or two vignettes I could have kept but they were the easiest prints in the book (and besides, horrors – the wheels of the pram were unfeasibly small!).
What made it tricksy was the seven landscapes, all at different times of day and night, and the three village scenes, two of which had to be made at a tiny scale because of the size of my silkscreens. I am now much better at getting two eyes, a mouth and a nose onto a face the size of a lentil – but is this a transferable skill? If you need any bespoke personified lentils please do let me know. Here’s is a detail showing lentils printed yesterday (and Hilda, who I’m going to miss).
Hilda and the Runaway Baby will be published in 2017.

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.