Category Archives: Uncategorized

Bologna Children’s Book Fair, here I come!

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Oh boy! My air ticket is about to be booked for this!

http://www.bookfair.bolognafiere.it/en/home/878.html

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I can’t quite believe it. I’m letting myself be swept along and away.

Thunderstorm Dancing will be going on a holiday to meet lots of people at the fair, and one of the spreads from the book will be featured in the Hello From Australia exhibition, organised by Books Illustrated.

I’ll be helping set up the stand with Ann James and Ann Haddon and generally loitering about with my eyes out on stalks. And I’ll have a stint or two doing drawing demonstrations, which should be fun. The only shame is that the fair is for book industry folk and is not open to the public so I won’t have any children coming to visit. I love the conversations that happen with children when I am drawing for them.

There will be several other Australian children’s authors and illustrators there too (and the numbers are rising). And intriguing lectures. Some of last year’s ones were called things like:

Not for girls, neither for boys: free novels to grow up freely

The universal language of fairy tales

Stories and lines (in the Illustrator’s Café… I might spend a bit of time there)

How to Animate Your Children Story (meaning to turn it into an animation)

Illustration beyond the page (What happens when illustration leaves the book and expands to new worlds. From children’s plays on dogs and hyenas, to body painting the Book of Ester.)

The Future of Education is already here: Literature for Children and Young People in the Cloud

Writing for children, a different outlook on the world

Show us your illustration!

And many, many more. So I am looking forward to some great conversations and much inspiration.

I’ll also get time to pop down and visit my friend David Capon in Puglia, Southern Italy, here. Wow! How beautiful is Casa della Scrittrice?

Trulli houses from my-italy-piedmont-marche-and-more dot com

This is Puglia. Those trulli remind me of a scene I absolutely loved in The Horse and his Boy by C S Lewis. Does anyone remember the scene where Shasta is outside the walls of the city of Tashbaan, alone amongst the tombs and the sun goes down? A cat comes and keeps him company. (The cat is Aslan in disguise of course.) I just LOVE a magical cat.

One of the beautiful illustrations by Pauline Baynes

One of the beautiful illustrations by Pauline Baynes

Actually they also remind me of another favourite book, Tomi Ungerer’s The Three Robbers.

At the end of the book, the three robbers build an orphanage with domes the same shape as their hats.

At the end of the book, the three robbers build an orphanage with domes the same shape as their hats.

It’s a busy time. More soon.

 

 

Enter Hazel

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Hazel listens to Scott imitating cheeping noises. A pretty good impression we thought… and so apparently did Hazel.

Here’s Scott at the kids’ homework bench with Hazel, 13 week old Bantam Salmon Faverolles. Hazel belongs to 10 year old Hugo and is his compensation for my decision to re-home the Pteranodon Twins, Rose and Lily. He loved them, despite their lack of domesticity. But I think Hazel is going to be a success. She spent a lot of time sitting on Hugo’s lap today enjoying a back massage from one of his hands and choice treats from the other. She is taking to domesticity admirably.

She’s not big enough to go in with the other girls yet and she is rather lonely. We’ll have to get a little friend for her soon.

I will have to start sketching her shortly, and see what she can contribute to Leonard Doesn’t Dance. She has the same cheek fluff (muffling) as the Araucanas and the little Belgian D’Uccle. I find that I like this look very much. Yes, I’ve been through a Schnauzer fancying phase at one time… and also a Border Terrier phase.

"Border Terrier Jekku" by Flickr user Petteri Sulonen - Flickr here. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Border_Terrier_Jekku.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Border_Terrier_Jekku.jpg

No. I don’t own this dog. It’s from Wikipedia. What a cutie. “Border Terrier Jekku” by Flickr user Petteri Sulonen – Flickr here. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Not unlike my Border Terrier of years ago, she has a distinctive habit of craning her neck.

Not unlike my Border Terrier of years ago, she has a distinctive habit of craning her neck.

And look, even Scott is sporting muffling at the moment!

School starts again tomorrow. I’m sure everything will swiftly become far more sensible.

 

Galumphers and one magpie

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Doodle Galumphers at the Swimming Pool

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I’m not sure why my book projects seem to happen at the swimming pool. Pippa who modelled for Thunderstorm Dancing was at the pool, and many of the sketches I did at the pool while the boys were having swimming lessons fed into the book.

Here are some from that time, that have been posted before.

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drybrush sketches in the bombing zone of the local swimming pool. Ink on vintage book page.

Today I took the boys to the pool because it was pelting rain and they were stuck indoors. And there I happily began doodling for Leonard Doesn’t Dance, my new picture book project for HarperCollins, written by Frances Watts.

In truth, I set out to re-read the manuscript and ponder layouts, but I got as far as the first two lines and found I had to turn over the paper and doodle birds on the back. I think it was because Leonard was groaning. ‘Groaning’ is a very suggestive word. It conjures all sorts of pained expressions, and it wouldn’t wait.

Galumphing bird doodles judywatsonart lores

The first bird at the top is about to groan. Or has just groaned. He may have been groaning for some time. But after this, the others became more cheerful. I’m not worrying about style at the moment. Just going for Galumphing. That is my brief. It’s a brief brief.

It’s not hard to see the inspiration for these particular Galumphers.

Rose in the foreground... just in case the camera is edible.

Rose in the foreground… just in case the camera is edible.

Lily looking for something to step in

Lily looking for something to trip over

Here are Rose and Lily, the Terrible Pteranodon Twins (Araucanas) and Lily in particular, is the most impossibly clumsy bird you could ever meet. If you were to put a champagne glass in the middle of a football field and let Lily go and graze in that field, the first thing she would do would be to trip over the glass and spill the champagne. Here she looks like she is marching, but she is really galumphing.

My Leonard bird will, I hope, not be any species of bird in the real world. There will be plenty of those in the book, but Leonard I think may dispense with such restrictions.

In the next drawings I started to exaggerate the trousers on the bird, a thing that I’ve done before with my blob birds. It occurs to me now that if we choose to make Leonard a young bird person, his trousers might be shorts. These three fellows seem to be older bird persons.

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Here is a younger bird person wearing short trousers. And that is not a codpiece. (The bird tails might be tricky in some instances…)

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And this drawing raises the question of whether Leonard ought to be more of a Bird Person, or a Person Bird. He will have to fly at one point, but he prefers cupcakes to cockroaches. He’s a multi-layered Bird Person. I’m sure there will be many more bird doodles in the coming weeks.

By the way, my advance copy of Thunderstorm Dancing arrived on my doorstep while we were at the pool. How appropriate, given that the rain had been bucketing down all day. We have all been looking through it with pleasure this evening. It is a very advance copy though. The book won’t be in the shops until April, I believe.

A Thundery book in the cloudy evening light.

A Thundery book in the cloudy evening light.

Holiday doodles at Sorrento

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This little guy was in the Sorrento shopping strip last week. Waiting for his Dad, he was inspecting the hats on the hat stand on the pavement. I was sitting in the car waiting for my husband and boys to return and was able to sketch him. He didn’t stay there for more than half a minute, but luckily the hats did.

 

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This Strong-faced Woman was seated overlooking the sea in the park at Sorrento. My kids were running around on the playground and I was sitting on a picnic table in the rain, drawing. It was boiling hot and kids were playing in the park in their bathers, dripping wet, shiny. This woman barely moved a muscle, even when the rain got so heavy that I had to stop because the page was getting very wet.

Leonard Doesn’t Dance and Trudy loves Dodds.

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I’m excited to have two new projects to work on over the summer. One is another picture book with Frances Watts called Leonard Doesn’t Dance. The other is the beginnings of my own picture book with the working title Trudy and Dodds.

I’ll be posting here about both of them as I go along. Leonard will be about birds… something I shouldn’t have too much trouble loving! I’ve posted a couple of very early ideas about Leonard already. And you can follow the images alone if you want on my Pinterest page here. The more wordy stuff will be on my blog. (…rambling, rambling…)

Leonard Doesn't Dance

Trudy and Dodds was a concept I had just come up with at the time I was offered Thunderstorm Dancing and to my surprise, I received a grant from the Australia Council to get the project started. But I found I could only focus on the one big (Thunder) project, and so Trudy and Dodds was put on hold. Now is the time to revisit it, and I’m really excited to be booked into a masterclass in mid February with editing maestros Jane Godwin (Penguin) and Erica Wagner (Allen & Unwin) along with book design maestro Sandra Nobes. I’ll be taking my dummy book and manuscript along to that masterclass as a part of my grant project to get some feedback and help.

So, in the meantime, on with birds and…. dog-monster-thingees. Probably.

Thunderstorm Dancing – nearly a book

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Here it is! the finished cover and what you will see in the shops from next April. Currently it is away being made into a book, with paper and ink and all that stuff we like.

As with childbirth… all the grunting and groaning is fading away, and soon I won’t remember that it was difficult at all :-)

 

 

Week 50 Christmas

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peace hope dove judywatsonart lores reindeer judywatsonart lores sleeping torch boy judywatsonart lores

Week 49: SUNSHINE

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Sunshine Troll judywatsonart loresTroll caught by the rising sun.

I could also have done a vampire being extinguished by the rising sun too… But this will do for my Quota of Gruesomeness for one week.

This is done with a Staedtler Lumocolour pencil on litho paper, because I couldn’t find any black Prismacolours long enough to use. It was oily and black and nice.

 

 

Catching up

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Hello! I’ve been a bit absent! Thunder is finished and off to the printers! I’m looking forward to seeing an advance copy in early January. It’s taken a few weeks to just get myself into drawing again. That’s not something I anticipated. And there are a lot of other things that I need to catch up with now that I’ve finished that mammoth project… including Christmas!

I had a great day with Ann James and Justine Alltimes last Monday, designing a poster for Jackie French, our Australian Children’s Laureate. Her project Share a Story will revolve around the ideas on the poster/calendar which will be available for free download by Christmas.

Ann James is a well known and skilled Australian children’s illustrator. Justine Alltimes is one of the hardworking and capable Laureate Project Managers. When the three of us get together, the ideas ping about like pinballs. After Ann had drawn and painted some images, I was able to alter them digitally to make new, and hopefully intriguing combinations, that will work well together on the poster and spark the storytelling imaginations of children, teachers and parents. The challenge was to avoid the literal interpretations of words like Slurp a Story and instead to come up with images that were open-ended or suggestive. We want starting points for stories, not stories in themselves.

More on Share a Story when the poster is released.

Other work in progress includes an illustration of Phar Lap for the front cover of a colouring book for the Melbourne Museum to match the dinosaur one I did a couple of years ago. As always with work done for Museum Victoria, I learn heaps along the way as I research the topic! Glad to find out that Phar Lap was probably not deliberately or even accidentally poisoned. Not that it made much difference to the poor horse, but he most likely died of colic related to a rare disease of the intestinal tract.

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The 52 Week Illustration Challenge forges on towards the finish, but will return next year. I wasn’t feeling like drawing for this either, for a couple of weeks. So I’ve missed Week 47 New York, but I may go back to that. Although drawing New York itself holds little attraction for me, the New Yorker and its famous cartoons hold enormous appeal for me. So I think I need to do a New Yorker style cartoon. But of what?…

Tim and Tig New Yorker

A page from ‘Tim and Tig’

Above is an illustration I did for Aussie Nibble – Tim & Tig many years ago. I illustrated Tim and Tig just after receiving a copy of the Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker; a fantastic book that had a powerful influence on my drawing! Many of the illos in Tim and Tig, I’d wish to do again and much better, but this one I still like.

Now that I think of it, I did do some quick doodles for Week 46 Circus. (Oh dear. What a rambling post.)

The Twisted Princess tidies her tresses

The Twisted Princess tidies her tresses

This doodle was on the bottom of a Thunder illustration. You may see a wee peek of the washy water top right, and it ran completely off the page. It started as a doodle and then I got mesmerised by the leotard pattern. Actually, this led my mind off in the direction of a series of paintings I’d like to do…

This brings me to last week’s theme. Week 48 Fox. In a shocking twist of fate, I found that the topic had long ago been changed from Chicken to Fox! Horrors!

I did some fox doodles while I was waiting for the kids to get out of drama class and below you can see them.

Deadly Maggie

Deadly Maggie

This was a fennec sketch in an old book. I added some digital colour experimentally (even though fennecs are creamy in colour). It’s not entirely successful but there are elements of it that I like, including the scratching into top layers of colour; a Thunder habit that may continue for some time. Perhaps lead into interesting new areas.

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A very innocent young blob fox.

By contrast, this little blob fox is not deadly. This was my protest on behalf of my chickens.

Contortionist fox

Contortionist fox

I liked the tail hatching on this one, and also the two tone retro feel, but it was certainly rushed. Not what you’d call finished work.

The Fox with the No.6 Tattoo

The Fox with the No.6 Tattoo

Lastly, this fellow. The fox with the No. 6 Tattoo. I liked his eyes and expression. He seems to have a canny and sophisticated air about him. I added some very flat colour panels in Photoshop trying to keep it sympathetic to his stylised and simple form and I like the result.