these too

Viv has posted some more pics from the show on her instagram site.

Beegu show - the performance...

I went to the Rose Bowl Youth Hub performance of Beegu today...

Everyone taking their places:

...and Beegu appears!

After some amazing bunny hopping acrobatics, the rabbits leave and the leaves arrive!

Is that her mum?  ... no, it's a phone box on stilts.

 The puppies and Beegu become friends:

The school playground - the perfect place!

With synchronised hula hooping!

Beegu makes more friends:

Is that another phone she can hear?

No! It's her folks!  Hurray!

^-^

total immersion

Sorry I've been a bit quiet on the blog lately.  The reason is that I am working all hours to get Jim's Lion finished in time for the book fair in Frankfurt.   I would love to show you some of the pictures I've been making.  It's really exciting to be working on such an adventurous story! However, I've thought long and hard about it and I think that showing them would spoiler some of the most important stuff... So you'll have to wait til it comes out! 

So here is something completely different!  It is a collection of drawings I made on my degree for a story set at the time of the siege of Stalingrad.

Beegu show!

I went to the Rose Bowl today.  No, not that one.  The Rose Bowl Youth Hub in Canonbury.  They were rehearsing for a show they are putting on... of Beegu!  Two years ago they did Where the Wild Things are; last year was the Gruffalo; I am in fine company!!

When I turned up they were making the costumes for Beegu and her parents.  The frames had been done:

They had tried them on:

And now they were covering them with papier maché:

I'm going back to see the performance next week.  Will be fun to see how the masks turn out.

In another room they were rehearsing for the action sequences... with hula hoops: 

and a spaceship:

Here the are practising the scene with the rabbits.  They are perfecting their bunny hops:

Their leapfrogging (don't remember that scene in the book ^-^):

And their human pyramid (or this one... feeling like it should have been there though.  Might do a special edition one day!):

The walls inside were covered with Beegu drawings:

And the walls outside had been painted with a giant Beegu mural. o. m. g.

I did my first ever bit of graffiti... I wasn't a very proper teenager:

Then I answered a few Beegu related questions.  There seems to be some desire for a sequel... And they wanted a movie ^-^.  

Will post some pictures from the performance when it happens next week.

Jim assembling

As I finish the last bits for Jim's Lion, the incomparably awesome Ben Norland has been busy sifting through the paper wake I left behind and transforming all the little bits and pieces into the finished  book.  I'm really excited to see this one get published...  But it will be at least a year away, sadly.  

Until then, here is another peek at work in progress.  In this part of the dream Jim is the ball in a rugby game between giant cats and dogs.  Being in hospital can feel just like this!

 

CBC talk

I recently took part in a talk for the Children's Book Circle.  Illustrator Heather Kilgour was in the audience and made a transcript of what I said. You can read it in full at the Big Little Tales tumblr.  Here is a section of it... It is about the illustrator/author's role in the process of making a picture book:

  I entered the world of illustration because I get a kind of physical pleasure from the act of drawing, it feels like a fulfilling thing to do, so I’m constantly chasing that spiritual fulfilment, it feels like such a right thing to be doing. It’s like whacking a tuning fork, some images, some moments, some words, will resonate with that interior sense of fulfilment and if I find something that chimes with something I hold very dear personally, then I will try and take it forward as a story. I will try and develop it to the point where I think I’ve done the best I possibly can to communicate as much of this feeling I have inside me to somebody who maybe has never felt this way, or never looked at this thing in that way, or never considered this could be the case... or even better if they have, then they have that wonderful sense of recognition that you get when you’re reading something and you think yes, I feel that way too.

  Ultimately a picture book is around twelve pages, twelve double spreads of illustration and a few hundred, maybe a thousand words of text, but in getting to that point you’ve got this huge cloud of stuff above your head. It’s so overwhelming sometimes, you’ve got so many things you want to achieve, but fundamentally when it comes to the thing itself it’s just going to be a very finite item. So I see my job as trying to sort as much of that out as I can; to take as many of all those images floating round inside this cloud and pin down as many as I can and put them into some kind of concrete form.  To me, illustration boils down to the relationship between the shape and scale of objects on a page, their lightness or darkness and their colour. When I’m making a book I’m trying to manipulate these elements to get the strongest iteration of the story that I can possibly manage.

  When I think I’ve got something that I feel tells the story I will give it to other people and try not to say anything to them and see if they get it. Because when you’re very invested, when you’re reading through something you’ve made, you’ve still got this cloud of stuff floating above your head and every page you read you kind of insert bits from the cloud to make it complete. Then you give it to someone else and they have no cloud floating about their heads and there’s a very particular facial expression they’ll get half way through and you’ll think OK, this one needs to go back to the drawing board. If I get to a point where that isn’t the case and people are looking at it and where I want them to laugh, they’re laughing and where I felt sad they seem to feel sad too – OK, good, I’ve succeeded. Then I would take it to a publisher and hope that they like it!

a new bird on the block

It was confirmed yesterday that a book I have been working on for some time, I Am Henry Finch, will be going ahead.  This is another collaboration with Viv (who is doing the pictures).  I think this is among the best things I've written so I'm really excited that it has found a home!  Should be able to post some previews and snippets as we make it...