My first picturebook is published TODAY by Walker Books. Hurray!
Tag: books
Watch out for parrots!
Here is a heap of my first book, The Girl with the Parrot on her Head, published by Walker Books on February 5th – which now, finally, actually feels quite soon.
Many exciting things will happen around the launch to help introduce the parrot, and the Isabel under its feet. For starters, I’ll be writing about the process of making the book over on Walker’s Picture Book Party blog. Then during February half term I’ll be working with children in Chester, making animals to go on our heads and incredible cardboard dens, as Resident Illustrator at Wayword festival. I’ll also give a talk and reading, document the festival on the Wayword blog AND do a picturebook jam with Kate Pankhurst! See: MANY THINGS!
Details of further events will follow soon – including something at House of Illustration which I think will be GRAND.
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.
The girl, dem papagei, le loup
I was quite thrown by the appearance last week of The Girl with the Parrot on her Head as a REAL BOOK – there seem to be a lot of milestones in this process but this one made me feel quite giddy. Here’s Walker’s picture of the three editions:
The book will be published on February 5th by Walker, Albin Michel (France) and Aladin (Germany), and a year later by Candlewick (USA). It’s amazing to me, and funny, to see the translations and the differences between them – lamely I am having to get friends to help me with the French and German, but both seem to have been really nicely done. Yikes it is just really exciting.
The German “Enten, Hula Hoop” box necessitated this drawing for twitter:
And a most excellent response too.
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:
