Lovely Cartwheel - Characters Who Design Themselves

I've been really enjoying this little character called Cartwheel, from a book I'm doing called My Two Blankets, written by Irena Kobald. Cartwheel is a very timid little girl, sheltering next to or behind her aunty. She's moved to a place that is so strange to her that she no longer feels like herself.

I don't tend to spend all that much time designing characters. I don't know whether I'm supposed to do more or not, but they seem to sort themselves out while I work on the rest of the book. I might do some quick initial character sketches, like these ones I did back at the beginning of the year when I started the book.

It's an especially lovely moment when a character gets colour for the first time. And Cartwheel was no exception, with her warm, saturated colour against a cool and pale background. It took me by surprise when I discovered Cartwheel had developed into such a beautiful little child, full of subtlety in her posture and expression. Here she is with her aunty.

Cartwheel seemed to have designed herself and was in complete control.  In some drawings of her, I couldn't even really remember drawing them - it was all her, quietly reworking a drawing until it expressed exactly how she felt.

Cartwheel and her aunty have been my work companions for six months now. They've been very quiet and shy but I'll miss them dreadfully when I've finished. Only a few more days of their company left...

My Two Blankets will be published some time in 2014 I guess, by Little Hare Books.

BANJO & RUBY RED Becomes A Book

Look what has become a real book! 

You can open it, smell it, turn the pages and READ it!  

It's got a quarter binding that looks and feels really nice. And the cover has my two favourite colours on it. 

And so far, there's nothing about it I don't like. 

Banjo & Ruby Red, written by Libby Gleeson, is a lovely story about the antagonism and eventual friendship between an old farm dog called Banjo, and a haughty chicken called Ruby Red. 

My dad, who isn't one to come out and say anything too gushy,  got a bit emotional at one point in the story and I deduced that he really liked it! 

Banjo & Ruby Red is coming out in August, but I believe my local bookshop unpacked some today. 

Here are some of my favourite images:

Horizontal Surfaces

A book can be all encompassing. I work for months, half a year, a year on a book. Everything else falls by the wayside - the lawn doesn't get mowed, the cobwebs build up, the dust bunnies take over.

And it can feel like I've achieved nothing in a long time. Then all of a sudden I turn a corner and discover a stack of watercolour boards with paintings on them and realise that the ideas I've had in my head actually might work on paper. It feels pretty good.

Of course, everything else looks like this:

And this:

And even in the house every horizontal surface is littered with stuff.

It's all good stuff though, and I'm certain it's better to have a table covered in creative bits and pieces than devoid of anything. That's what I tell myself anyway.

It's been an ongoing problem. Here's a drawing I did several years ago of this horizontal surface syndrome. 

Strange People on Trains

Enjoyed drawing these people...

Close ups from a page of a new book called My Two Blankets, written by Irena Kobald.

The Runaway Hug in Japan

It's always very exciting when one of your books finds a publisher overseas. Last week the Japanese version of The Runaway Hug arrived on my doorstep.

The covers of overseas editions can vary from the original, sometimes quite a bit! Countries have different aesthetic values, or the market calls for a different approach. (See the Korean cover below, with bright yellow hearts for added appeal...)

The Japanese version is a lovely edition of The Runaway Hug, with a different image on the cover, a snazzy dust jacket and a fabulous picture on the back. Thumbs up to the Japanese designer!

I particularly like the title font.

And a friend sent a photo of the book in the Kinokuniya bookshop in Tokyo. Thanks Owen!

The Runaway Hug can now be found in Japan, Korea, the United States and Canada (in French and English). Here's the Korean version, sporting some yellow hearts!

Miss Quick Snout Strikes Again

Art Alfresco is on again in Orange in conjunction with Food Week and this year, for the first time, I attempted a painting for the outside exhibition. Forty local artists were given a collection of still life images to use as inspiration for a large painting (1m x 1m). All forty paintings have now been hung on the South Court Wall of the Orange Regional Gallery and the collection look fantastic! If you live in Orange you should pass by the gallery to have a look. 

My painting titled "Miss Quick Snout and the Fate of the Lone Lamb Cutlet" features our lovely but very sneaky whippet, Pivot. That particular lamb cutlet, cooked the night before to use as reference for the painting, was stolen before I'd even finished painting it. And later that day she also stole four banana muffins. She's one seriously fast but extremely naughty dog. 

The Quest to Create Something Completely Different

I often get asked about my creative process, so thought I'd put together a post on this topic. It also seems to have become about my recent desire to branch out and create varied work.

I recently finished the paintings for a book called BANJO & RUBY RED, written by my lovely friend Libby Glesson. I always start out a book thinking I'll try to do something COMPLETELY different. And then of course it gradually works its way back to being something not that different at all. BANJO & RUBY RED was going to be an utterly different book! It was going to be a combination of printmaking and stencil techniques and expressive, uninhibited drawing.

Of course, as it is with many grand plans and exciting schemes, the final illustrations ended up nothing like this.

Funnily enough, I find it difficult to start drawing - it takes me quite a while to coax myself towards a pencil. So I start the illustrations for a book by writing notes and brainstorming. I don't always (or perhaps ever) 'see' a book the first time I read it. Or if I do have a visual style in mind it will be the work of another illustrator whose work I admire and secretly wish was mine.

At this early stage I like to gather images I find inspiring, fully intending to produce something along the lines of this inspiration. I wave the inspiration around and say, the book will look like this. But inevitably the final product bears no resemblance to it at all!

After a lengthy period of anguish and uncertainty, I produce a storyboard, a series of small sketches that show a basic representation of what I imagine will be on each page.

Here's the storyboard image for the first page of BANJO & RUBY RED.

The storyboard sketches always look wonderful - free and wild and inspired. Then you begin the process of basically ruining each page - cleaning them up, fine tuning them and adding details.

Since this book was going to include printed elements and be 'completely different', I had to do some tests to figure out exactly how completely different it was going to be. I really liked the first result - perfectly messy and different in feel from anything I've done before.

But actually, that was the only one that did look any good and I discovered that what I was hoping to achieve was fraught with complications. Would I be able to sustain an entire book using my very limited lino block print skills? Should I print it all traditionally or composite parts on the computer? Would I therefore have to actually learn how to use photoshop properly? Where on earth do you find a decent A3 scanner? Particularly in Orange? 

In the end I gave up, scared of failure and a looming deadline, and went back to my old faithful paint on paper, something I had complete control over, that wouldn't let me down. To spice things up a bit I used oil paints rather than watercolours and loved the process and the result.

Luke Kelly, the best designer in the world, did a FABULOUS job designing the book. I'll be very excited when the advance copies arrive. 

The end result of all of this is that I desperately want to do a print making course and one day soon create a book that really is completely different!