Moomin stuff

Loving these Moomin trays, on offer on Achica today. I like the colourful one best. Various designs are also available full price here, here and here. Now I must get on with some work...

Meanwhile...

Here's a little snippet from another book spread I recently completed for Dorling Kindersley. Best not ask what it's about!

what I've been up to

I've been doing a little illustration job for another educational book, this time on ways to trick your body into doing or imagining weird things. Here is a snippet from it. If you do what these people are doing in the picture and stroke both noses at the same time (you being the person in the blindfold), eventually the other person's nose will start to feel like yours and you will think that your nose is as long as Pinocchio's. I haven't tested it yet!

As you can see it wasn't in my usual drawing style, but it was a good challenge! I'll be back later today with something else, work permitting.

OK. I need to get a grip

I am going to stop moaning and get on with things. I have a silly idea for a children's picture book that I want to draw some sketches for. Even if it ends up as portfolio nonsense it's better than sitting around and doing nothing. And it involves drawing ferrets and food. A good combo, right? Maybe I'll do something related to it for this afternoon's One Hundred drawing. I've just sent off my first draft for the Dorling Kindersley book spread. I don't know if I've spent quite enough time on it - I am so lazy sometimes and just do things on autopilot, colouring in on Photoshop. Just for fun, here is a snippet from it:



Simple, colourful, silly.

new work

Some of my most recent work for Skoda has just come online here(EDIT: sorry, the ad isn't up in this space any more!). It's meant to be a bit like a children's pop-up book, so when you activate the pull tab on the right hand side, it all pops out. Sorry about my awful screen grabs.

What happens is the banner appears at the top of the screen like this:


It animates a bit if you just mouseover it, but on the right hand side there is a pull tab, which you drag down and it all pops out to look like this:


There's more to come later, but this is the first. Click on the link to have a play - it's quite fun. I'm glad I didn't have to do any of the coding for it, though! eek!

EDIT: Boohoo! the banner isn't appearing on the site all the time - I'm getting a vauxhall banner right now, so if it's not working, don't blame me! I'll see if I can get them up somewhere more permanent on my website or something when all three pieces are finished!

happy Friday!

It's nearly the weekend again! I'm not sure if I'm looking forward to it or not - it all depends on whether someone gives me work to do or not... I'm not anticipating a completely carefree two days :-( Hopefully I will be able to get my shop up and running, fire some of the ceramic pieces I've been decorating, go shopping with the husband in London. He is in need of sartorial upgrading - he's one of those sporadic shoppers who won't buy anything for a year and then goes out one day and spends two hundred pounds in one pop. If I do that I come out in hives and need to lie down for a bit - a little at a time is my method. That way you realise much more slowly how much of your income you spend on clothes and junk and it hurts a little less (but is probably more insidiously damaging).


I've spotted a few things I'd like to see at next week's auction at Willingham. I shall write about it next week. One of the pieces is a landscape watercolour by one of my illustration idols, Arthur Rackham. OK, it looks like something he smeared onto paper whilst at the beach on holiday, but it's still by him! Here's one of his images (from Wikipedia):


He was one of the most famous and best-loved of the illustrators that were a part of the late 19th/early 20th century golden era of illustrated children's books. His strength was certainly his line work - he was essentially a drawer rather than a painter. His illustrations were well coloured-in (I'm not being derogatory, though!), masterful drawings. He was not that bothered about colour, but the drabness of his work is part of its appeal to me. It creates a real moodiness and gloomy atmosphere that perfectly suited a lot of the material he illustrated.

On the other hand Edmund Dulac was an absolute master of colour and pattern. He balanced the drab with the most exquisite, jewel-like colour washes, and was wonderfully skilled as a painter. His sense of lighting and composition was gorgeous. We were privileged enough a few years ago to see some of his work in the flesh alongside some Rackham, Kay Nielsen and other contemporaries at Dulwich Picture Gallery. These images don't do the originals justice. For more images, look here.

Holiday Stories

Here are a few scans of that book I mentioned. What's nice about it? The thick, textured paper that has gone all yellow and patchy. The beautiful silhouette on the back cover. The quirky titles of the stories, with crisp black and white illustrations and lovely typesetting, and the print almost debossed into the paper. Cute, for a couple of quid.

the weekend

was pretty good, all in all. Minus having to drive the husband to the airport via one of the most annoying motorways in England (take a guess... yeah, the M25). Lordy, that was awful - stop-start driving amongst the never-ending roadworks and alongside what appeared to be EVERY SINGLE nutjob driver in the South. Urgh.

The weekend visit to the North was good - lots of family fun and appallingly bad Trivial Pursuit 'pop-culture edition' playing. I'm the worst person when it comes to knowing anything about TV, films, music etc. I watch nothing, I watched nothing in my youth and my musical knowledge is more of the, uh, classical kind. Call me sad, call me behind with the times, but I don't really mind not ever having watched 'Spaceballs' or any more than one 'Back to the Future'...

Best bits included an eye-opening foray into Halifax, which had a charming indoor market and lots of charity shops. I bought a pair of 1980s black pixie boots, which are all the rage at the moment and, because they are too small for me, I intend to sell them on eBay where they are selling for ridiculous sums of money right now. What else did I get? From an amazing second-hand bookshop in the Piece Hall, I got hold of a beautiful children's story book with perfectly aged paper, which I shall scan something from later today if I have the time. Bear with me, I'm supposed to be working!

The husband is away again, this time in Korea, and has taken the camera away from me, so no photos this week! I popped into some charity shops this morning and came back with a teapot and a squat little planter that I intend to draw on with porcelain pens and sell in my soon-to-be-open shop. How exciting. Now I've just got to think of things to draw on them. I love experimenting.

david hughes

For a little non-seasonal bedtime reading last night, I was looking (drooling slightly) at 'Silent Night' by Sandy Turner. It's about a little dog who goes crazy, barking at apparently nothing one Christmas Eve night. The only text is the 'woof, bark, yap' that the dog emits. Only the dog can see Father Christmas, not the humans who only see their pet going mad in front of them. I particularly like this bit below, where the father is looking through Santa at his dog and Santa isn't coloured in because the man can't see him.




I love the minimalist style and limited palette of this book - quite unusual for a children's book, but then the author and illustrator is no ordinary chap either.

Turner's real name is David Hughes who is a very well known British illustrator, best recognised by his sometimes caustic but always very sharply observed caricatures. I think he is a magnificent talent - he's been at it since the early 1980s and has caricatured the likes of the Royal Family, Nietzsche, Jack Nicholson and Osama Bin Laden. His work dances on the very edge between acceptable wit and downright insult, but his eye for detail and character is razor-sharp. I have huge admiration for someone who does their entire illustration on paper and goes nowhere near a computer. Check out his 'Drawings' book (link below) for more of his stunning work.


Thom Yorke/Radiohead, Rolling Stone 1997.


Pressure of Numbers, Observer Magazine (A Doctor Writes) 1991.

Poorly-scanned images from 'Silent Night', by Sandy Turner, and from 'David Hughes: Drawings' published by Kerber.

anne herbauts

Pieter Brueghel's The Fall of the Rebel Angels depicts the fall from heaven of angels who have turned into all manner of freakish creatures and are seen tumbling into a pit at the bottom of the image. Brueghel had a wonderful way of making his monsters both frightful and faintly ridiculous with their wibbly flesh and comical expressions - are they scary or just silly? Whatever the case, you might think that they are hardly the kind of stuff that you might show to very young children. Yet the monster on the bottom right, which has had its egg-filled belly slashed open and is holding the gaping wound wide with an almost rapturous or pained expression on its face, appears on a spread from L'Arbre Merveilleux by Anne Herbauts. This is ostensibly a children's book but it is packed with difficult French and an eye for the dark and peculiar. I remember stumbling upon Brueghel's painting in the library whilst researching Hieronymus Bosch and Brueghel, and being quite taken aback when I made the connection to where I'd seen the image before - what a revelation it was to me that this lady had so boldly used such disturbing material as her inspiration.

On the previous spread it says (my rough translation):'Suddenly all these birds appear in the sky. Under the tree, the shadow of the magical egg is strange. Too big or too deep, too dark. Is it a stain, or could it be a hole? Monsieur Comme-Toujours asks himself. It's a chasm of mysteries, of metamorphoses! It is the unknown, the forgotten, the magical!'


The French is so poetic and suggestive of things much darker than the mere appearance of the image. Then you turn the page and you see that the birds are all a bit monstrous, with fish heads and bodies like mammals, and with Brueghel's eggy lady at the bottom tumbling into the shadow-chasm.


The story is pretty strange, involving a man who lives in a strictly regimented community made up of coffee pots, lighthouses and hot air balloons amongst other things. He angers the fairy who is in charge of the coffee pot house and ends up running off to 'see the country' with a little monster as his companion.


Along the way they encounter a monster with a bell for a head, a witch who cooks up fairytales from words, a little creature who lives in an apricot and a frog who serves them coffee whilst weeping because he has lost his memories.



What I love about Anne Herbauts' work, apart from her lovely, expressive style, is the way in which she tells stories through her pictures. A red thread - a 'story thread' runs like a vein throughout this book and there is a playfulness in the way that she uses it, for example when the little monster stitchs up the page with the red thread, representing the way in which narrative can be cut and joined up again, or stopped and re-started. The whole narrative is tied to the idea of creating stories, playing with words, and the way in which she links that idea to the very fabric of the book is wonderfully imaginative.


Enough talking. This is the only book of hers that I've got - anyone fancy buying me another?!

rébecca dautremer

I adore children's picture books, especially those that have unusual narratives paired with beautiful illustrations. From my (admittedly limited) experience, I have found that children's publishing in England can sometimes be a bit narrow-minded and 'safe'. By that I mean that they like to go with things they already know - I once lost out on a job doing some book jackets because the sales team at that publishing house decided that they wanted an already known illustrator to do the covers :-( Or if a book is deemed too 'scary' they will back off it. Most of the very memorable books I read as a child are quite dark: Maurice Sendak comes to mind in particular. I am sure that the editors are very experienced in terms of knowing their market and knowing what kind of books sell the best, but sometimes I wish I could find books here like the marvellous treasures that I've brought back from France. Over on the continent it seems to me that they are a bit more willing to push the boat out into really surreal territory sometimes. We're talking half-finished puppets coming to life and running amok, parents disappearing from home and surreal adventures involving little demons and Brueghelian tableaux (more on that later).


From La Tortue Géante des Galapagos.

I thought I'd share the work of one of my absolute favourite French illustrators, Rébecca Dautremer (sadly her site isn't too great for looking at her work, so you're actually better off with her gallery). I own at least four books illustrated by her and I keep them all on our coffee table because they are so inspiring. Her use of colour and tone are stunning, and the compositions she creates are both unusual and effective. I think the way she captures the light and atmosphere in some of her work is extraordinary - such luminosity juxtaposed against the quietness of shadow and space. She also has a way of scraping and scratching back into her painting to give it texture or highlights that is pretty brave but works a treat. I've just done a quick search on Fnac's website and they seem to stock most of the books. My favourites would have to be Nasreddine, Sentimento and La Tortue Géante des Galapagos. Unfortunately whilst I can translate the large part of the first two books, the last has me completely baffled without a dictionary. Such complex language for a children's book!


From Nasreddine et Son Âne.

I've not been able to find many images online, so I've photographed some of her spreads. I don't think they really do the books justice (plus it's been so gloomy these last few days in England), so go out and buy some if you want to see just how amazing they are.



From La Tortue Géante des Galapagos.



From Nasreddine.


From Sentimento.