Sneaky looks, words and pictures

Good Afternoon everyone!
I've been a very quiet little lady recently I know - it's been a very busy time indeed.


I've been working on a new children's book 'The New Year Child' with Far Far Away books. It's a great (and slightly odd!) story, very magical and full of stars and space/cloud scenes.  
I finished illustrating all the colour pages a few days ago (pending a few changes) and so now I'm indulging in my first days off in over a month and a half- there's so much time now! I'm mostly using it to climb through the pages of 1Q84 into Murakami's world.


I can't really show you any of the artwork at the moment (except these teasers teehee!), but as soon as I can I will of course! 

It's been good fun and good for my motivation. I spoke to the MD of the publishers today and we've been talking about the likelihood of other book projects shortly - which is great, great news!


We recently moved into a new little flat (as me and Andrew had been living at his parent's house for 10 months!). It's, well, cosy...but we don't need anything bigger at all. We're slowly filling the place with bits and bobs but our bed is still just a mattress on the floor (everyone comments how Japanese style it is!) and I've been working on a tiny fold out metal table for the entire book.  We did finally get a fridge last week, we'd been using a one foot high camping fridge for about a month and a half - there was an awful lot of food tetris that had to be done there.


'Shhhh!' I hear you say, 'I just want to see some drawings!'. Well, if indeed you did say that, here you go...

A few weeks ago I was contacted by Amy Millan from the band Stars (incidentally, one of my favourite bands, go and listen to them) who wanted to commission me to illustrate a painting for her daughter and nephew's first birthday.  I felt absolutely honoured to do it and it was really nice to do a full gouache painting, without a hint of digital- back to my roots!  Amy told me when she saw it she cried because she loved it so much. You can't really get a better response than that can you?
I'm really happy with it and it was a lovely commission to work on. Hurray!


That illustration is also now up on my website, as well as some new downloadable tear-sheets of my work (on the about me page) and a photo of my real life face instead of a drawing.
You can also get 10% off all the pretty postcards and sticker sets in my shop with the code SPRING10 until Friday, so let everyone know about that if you can!


Oh! I recently jumped over the 10,000 views on my blog hurdle - that's amazing, thank you all so much for supporting me.


For now, that's all.  I'll hopefully get back into the swing of other illustration work again soon.  There's some hard and very upsetting things going on with my family at the moment so I'm at least going to take a week off to be with them down in Cornwall.  I'm hoping things will get better and I'll post lots of illustration updates for you soon.


Have a lovely week, okay! x