The Pig-Elephant Continuum

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Out now: Hilda and the Runaway Baby!

My third book, Hilda and the Runaway Baby, published by Walker Books, is available now! I should write a proper blogpost about this really – it has been a fairly epic process, during which I became very attached to this friendliest and reddest of pigs. However, I am printing monsters at a million miles an hour for my fourth book so I will just have to do it inaminute. Meanwhile, here is a post about how it was not the most sensible thing to screenprint and here are some places to get your very own Hilda in English or French.

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Further Advent-yures

UPDATE: unfortunately this year's advent comic has been cancelled due to non-availability of Becky, as they say on the Piccadilly Line. Very sorry, here is an elf by way of apology/distraction: Original post: Mm, dubious title. Anyway, it's the second of December! The traditional day for Becky and me to start late on our Advent comic! Howzat? Mm, middling. Previous years' comics are here and also soon to be available as actual paper objects in the olde physical world (see below). We will be selling 2014 and 2015 editions (plus variegated other stuff) on the Brolly Lolly table at House of Illustration's Illustrator's Christmas Fair on December 10th. 2013's pie-based comic has to wait because we cannit find the proper files, curses!

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Klaus Flugge Prize shortlist

I was extremely excited to be shortlisted for the first ever Klaus Flugge Prize (for debut picturebook illustrators) for The Girl with the Parrot on her Head. The party had gold balloons AND tiny macaroons! Nicholas John Frith won for his very beautiful Hector and Hummingbird: interviews with him and all the shortlisted illustrators are here. Thank you very very much to the judges! And to Andersen for starting the prize.

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Monster puppets and adventure drawing

Last Saturday I had an amazing afternoon at House of Illustration, running a family workshop based on ALPHONSE, THAT IS NOT OK TO DO! After a quick reading, we did some giant collaborative adventure drawing – just like Natalie and Alphonse do in the book. Highlights included Natalie and Alphonse on their five-wheeled motorbike: Squirrel and treehouse worlds joined by ladders, and a majestic giant bee featuring cup-holder, chips-holder, sound system, umbrella and MANY SHOES. Next it was time for monster puppets: here are just a few of one family's horde. We started with corrugated paper finger puppets, with all manner of multiple heads, horns, tongues, wings and other appendages. There was even one with eyes on accordion stalks. It's interesting running events at House of Illustration because the great facilities and unusually long workshops mean you can plan more extended, open-ended activities, so I'd prepared various kinds of puppets to experiment with. There were accordion-beasts inspired by Chinese dragon stick-puppets, of which this was definitely the longest. And this one has a wonderful expression. There were also puppets with moving wings, mouths, arms or eyebrows made using split pins, but I seem to have no pictures of those. At least I can show you this brilliant new thing: a box-mouth monster with a monster baby inside, operated by hidden lolly stick!Some people even got around to building theatres – I bet some ace plays were staged once they got them home...

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ALPHONSE launch: biscuitmania at Gosh!

My second picturebook, ALPHONSE, THAT IS NOT OK TO DO! was launched on April 20th at London's most splendid comics shop, Gosh! by a crowd of very lovely people and an unreasonably delicious new instalment in the Emily-Wilkinson-bakes-my-books saga (see here, and here, and here, and here for Emily's page). I arrived in a tiswas, thinking, "AIEE, what if no one comes?" followed by, "AIEE, what if someone comes?" and, "AIEE, biscuits stuck in traffic! What if people come mainly for biscuits and get justifiably enraged?" But those nice comics folks calmed me right down with tea, and got me started on signing The Heap. I was overwhelmed by so many friends and relations coming along to celebrate Alphonse, and that was before the biscuits and Natalie and Alphonse arrived to make sense of it all – sitting down centrepieceishly in the space between all the books and drawing their giant pig (which was eaten and magically regenerated two times! And then decisively consumed in our third attempt). Thanks so much to everyone who came, and to Gosh! and Walker Books. If you couldn't make it but would like a signed book, I think Gosh! may still have part of The Heap.

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Monsters in residence at Mainstreet Trading Co.

Last weekend I went all the way to Scotland to paint a window and fill it with cardboard monsters – now there's a thing I never could have imagined I would do. The window belonged to Mainstreet Trading Company, a beautiful book (and cake and soup and many thing) shop in St Boswells. I arrived with fourteen brushes, three kinds of tape, two kinds of glue, two kinds of string and four rolled-up paper monsters, feeling fairly daunted by the idea of making a window display worth bringing someone to Scotland for. First I had to mount the monsters on cardboard (running out of both kinds of glue) and cut them out with a scalpel. Then I convinced them to stand or hang in the window (thanks to both kinds of string). And (now in a panic about having used up most of the day without actually PAINTING THE WINDOW), I sort of managed to get the smaller Alphonse to eat a copy of the actual book. Finally I got around to using two of my fourteen brushes, and Mainstreet's window pens, to help Natalie and Alphonse decorate the window. I did some of the drawings with my left hand, as I did for the monsters' drawings in the book, and perhaps I should've done left-handed painting – except I think I'd still be there now (it took six and a half hours as it was) and it was important to leave time for signing books and eating cake. Okay actually, I didn't, so I had to eat my cake in the taxi, but it was Mmmmm. In fact, it wouldn't be so bad to still be there now.

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Sheffield Children's Book Award shortlist

I'm very happy to say The Girl with the Parrot on her Head has been shortlisted for the Sheffield Children's Book Award! It's especially exciting as the prize is judged by children, voting through schools and libraries. Here's Sheffield Libraries' tweet:

Now for the Sheffield Children's Book Award Picture Book shortlist - Fabulously quirky mixture of funny & heartfelt! pic.twitter.com/VTfyxeZMux

— Sheffield Libraries (@SheffLibraries) March 31, 2016

The winners will be announced in November.

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Out now: ALPHONSE THAT IS NOT OK TO DO!

My second picture book, ALPHONSE THAT IS NOT OK TO DO! has just been published by Walker Books in the UK, and in seven other languages too (please see books page for details of translated editions).  

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Original screenprints for sale

Online gallery Children's Book Illustration have started selling some of my original screenprints. Six prints for The Girl with the Parrot on her Head (from the same editions as the prints used in the book) are available now – including a few of the soon-to-be-seasonal scootering spread.

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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. Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs I also ran a monster finger puppet workshop. Photo © Mark Carline for Chester Performs 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! 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).

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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: 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...

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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.

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Advent jam the third!

Ho-HO! It is that time of year again when Becky Palmer and I start a day late on our gloopy pot of Christmas comic jam and continue posting a panel a day (sometimes with gaps and gluts) throughout advent. If your toast needs MORE jam, you can catch up with our 2013 and 2014 comics here or on Becky's blog, and ahem well I'm to go first:

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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.

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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.

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Good times for the parrot

Some exciting things have happened to my first book in recent weeks: there's going to be a Danish edition, Pigen med papegøjen på hovedet, published by Jensen & Dalgaard in February 2016; I also heard that The Girl with the Parrot on her Head is a finalist in the Golden Pinwheel Young Illustrators Contest (which means the illustrations will be in an exhibition at Shanghai Children's Bookfair this week) AND some lovely librarian has nominated it for, of all things, the Kate Greenaway Medal! The UK paperback will be out in January, and Candlewick will publish the US hardback in April.

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Prints for Material

Material of Shoreditch, London, recently began selling a range of my little screenprints. The prints feature monkeys and blackbirds – some based on the same drawings as previous monkeys and some I was trying as prints for the first time.   The monkeys come in various colour combinations and think about various things.