Hello.
I’m launching this new website at the same time as my first book project is being published in the UK.
‘I’m Sticking With You’ written by Smriti Halls is published by Simon and Schuster UK and releases on the 30th of April 2020. You can purchase from your favourite local bookstore if they are still delivering.
I was fortunate to have worked with the terrific Editorial Director Helen Mackenzie Smith and Art Director Jane Buckley who patiently guided me through what it takes to publish a children’s picture book and made what is a lot of hard work for everyone involved, never anything less than pure fun.
When I first read Smriti’s story, it felt immediately familiar to me and I inwardly nodded to myself, acknowledging how it mirrored so many memories of relationships. I began to wonder who this apparently unlikely couple might be and as an illustrator, I knew I was already hooked and starting to work. Once I knew it was a Bear and a Squirrel, I set about trying to find their characters.
I was keen to emphasize how the story was largely to do with how the characters felt. I wondered if there was a way to do this that suggested that their ‘inside’ world was perhaps more apparent to them than the world around them. So I thought it might be interesting to keep background details to a minimum.
Though the story focuses on the Bear and the Squirrel, we encounter a few other characters in their world. I liked that while the thoughts and feelings of our main characters are being explored in an emphatic manner, we are left to guess how the other characters might get along.
It’s a golden age for illustrators now, with so very many techniques and working methods available to them. Some create wonderful, sensitive imagery which is entirely digital and never leaves the computer, while others like to let it all happen on real paper and invite the accidents and discoveries to form part of the final picture. While others prefer to mix it up a little.
Their craft and technique is always fascinating to me because no matter how well I understand their method, there’s still a very personal alchemy involved that gives the work a quality that is both like a signature and immediately identifiable and yet also other-worldly and unpredictable at the same time.
I like to do as much working out on paper as possible. So I stay in sketchbooks and on used envelopes, or anything that is to hand, for quite a while before I start to make final images.
Then I paint on paper as much as I can because it’s so much fun to discover solutions in the accidents. Once I’m equipped with all these ideas and images, I bring them into the computer and explore a little more.
So once we had finished all the art and put together a mock up, we made a poster to introduce it in Bologna last year in 2019.
…and earlier this year the book made it to the cover of The Bookseller.
I was invited towards the end of 2019 to contribute a sketch for the ‘Love Your Library’ campaign that toured the UK.
It seems that having spent rather a long time drawing the characters, you become quite attached. So it’s actually quite hard to stop drawing them.
These sketches were made in January/ February.
