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.