Here's one I did earlier.....

Hello again blog friends, I would like to thank all of you that commented on my last post, it was quite a moment for me, and I appreciate what you all said.
 I'm back again with the book :) Just thought you might like a sneaky peak into the inner workings of my book illustrating antics? I managed to snap some photos of my work in progress as I was nearing the end of the book illustrations. I'll try and flip between now and then to show you some of the differences that took place. It really is all in the pictures, so here goes.

My first artwork for front and back covers.

Actual front cover ended up being this lovely lilac, and I love the typeface for the title.

Sweet little bear on the back cover.

 One of the most funny pages to do was of the Big bear yawning. I practised this pose in the mirror,not that I look like a bear?? But it was tricky to make the bear look friendly, without teeth, and without looking fierce. I actually had everyone in the house yawning, to try and get this looking right. Yawns are quite infectious when you try this!! It was funny. I did eventually find an image of a bear yawning and adapted this as best I could.

A well practised pose, makes you quite sleepy!

On the actual book the colour is slightly darker.

The same thing happened with the stretching pose, but the arms were specifically asked to be curved around the head, as you can see.I'm finding this quite fascinating now, comparing the two images, although I do think my photos are more yellow than they actually were. The backgrounds I did were left white, so that the different colours could be dropped in. Each of the pages I illustrated was about A3 in size, so quite big! It was a bit of a shock to my system working at this size, as I don't usually work any larger than A4. Fortunately pastel covers quite quickly, although it was hard work and my fingerprints did literally wear down as they were my tools for blending most of the time!
I hope you've enjoyed this little insight. I will be back soon with another topic. It's been very exciting this 'Book' moment for me. Still can't believe it. Bye for now, see you all soon.

My Ta Dah lifetime achievement moment!

Hello there blog friends, well it's here, my lifetime achievement Ta Dah moment. I think it may be a wish of many Illustrators who mainly work on Greetings Cards, to Illustrate a Children's picture book. It certainly was one of mine. So when this arrived in the post yesterday, I was beside myself excited. To be honest it felt quite surreal, I remember working on the artwork, but seeing it in this book, WOW, it was/is amazing!It's just like those books you see in the shops, hey, wait a minute, It is!!

I shall post a few more images from the book today and then show you how I worked on this earlier this year. I started out by Illustrating the front and back covers. At this point I wasn't sure what the book was about. Obviously it was about bears, but I didn't have any of the words. The words are very gentle and simple, a lovely process of the bears getting ready to settle down and sleep.Margaret Wise Brown is a very well known author in America, (I'm ashamed to say I didn't know of her). I shall leave it there, as the pictures speak for themselves I think?

These aren't all the pages, just a few, I don't want to be a bore, but hope you like them.:)

Back page.

I have to say a big Thank-you to my agent, Advocate, who put my name forward for this book. It is quite difficult to break into the world of book publishing without going through an agent. So many thanks to them. Also to the publishers Parragon, who liked my first Illustrations enough to run with the whole thing, a major commitment. I feel like I may be sounding like a film star whose being presented some award now,and giving a speech, Ha Ha. I don't honestly, I'm just a bit overwhelmed at seeing this dream come true, still can't believe it. Hope you come back to visit and share in some of the work that went on to achieve this goal. See you again soon, thanks for visiting.