I have some lunchtime reading for you in the form of February’s Pictonaut Challenge, hooray! This picture screams fantasy, I’m sure you will agree, so I cracked out some silly names and had at it. Enjoy.
“Fancy a bit of banana loaf?” Razir said hopefully. He really wasn’t looking forward to trying to cross the ravine, but the other two were eager to press on. There again, both of them could swim.
“It’s got nuts in,” he added lamely.
Continue reading “Pictonaut Challenge – Faces in the Woods”
And so it is the 28th of February, which means the end of 28 Drawings Later for this year (the clue is in the name, people). What with one thing and another the past few days have been really quite annoying (crisis of confidence during book five editing and Ryanair are the main culprits, here) but it has genuinely cheered me up to look at the photo gallery of other people’s 28 drawings on the facebook page. I particularly enjoyed the dude who just posted about twenty pictures of Pokemon in one go – what a legend.
My last piece is a digital one, a flyer idea for the show. I drew it freehand in the sense that I drew it straight into PhotoShop using my super cool graphics tablet… So it’s not exactly cheating. It’s pretty purple, though.
I have been editing away over the weekend to the extent I’ve pulled my shoulder a bit, but I don’t think my book is ready for that competition yet. The quality of writing is OK but I have reservations about the plot. It needs a bit more time to sit, essentially.
In other news, 28 Drawings Later is nearly finished! Drawings for the last few days are quite quick wee things due to all the novelling, but here they are anyway.
Continue reading “28 Drawings Later – Days 25, 26 and 27”
It’s been a busy couple of days (mainly with editing, although I did also get to go to the Scottish Children’s Book Awards yesterday – more on that in my article on The Edinburgh Reporter) so I’ve done a couple of mixed media doohickies.
Continue reading “28 Drawings Later – Days 23 and 24”
I can’t quite seem to get into a habit of posting every day (methinks the book editing is to blame), but so far I’ve managed to keep up with the 28 Drawings Challenge without causing myself undue stress. Over the past few days I’ve been thinking about witches, because like all good fairy stories East of the Sun and West of the Moon incorporates a few of them.
There is also a horrible troll princess with a really long nose, so I drew a page of noses, thus: Continue reading “28 Drawings Later – Days 20, 21 and 22”
I tried to post this yesterday but our internet wasn’t having any of it so I gave up and watched Under Siege 2 instead. I had a fairly busy weekend so just did a few quick doodles focusing on things the young girl is given by three random old ladies to help with her quest to find the prince in the castle.
The gifts are slightly unusual – a bit like when your granny starts to lose it a bit and gives you things where you’re like ‘wow, what a lovely… what is that?’ One is a spinning wheel, which seems like it would be slightly unwieldy, or at least my one is as it’s a full size one with foot pedals. Presumably there are more portable versions which I will discover as my research progresses further.
Then we have some more carding combs. You may remember the other day I did a golden hair comb, without actually referring back to the text of the story, only to discover that the gift wasn’t a hair comb at all but the kind used for getting icky bits out of sheep’s wool when you’re going to spin it into thread. This makes sense in the context of the spinning wheel, but it’s not the most magical looking item… nowadays the things used for carding are a bit like giant hair brushes, but I managed to find a couple of more old fashioned looking ones to sketch.
I think this is the style I’ll probably use in the event I develop any of these into something approximating promotional materials for the play. It’s not that dissimilar to the hair comb, but I think it’s a nice shape and probably easier to stick in the pocket of a raggedy dress than some of the others.
12 Books in 12 Months 