Wow we had a fabulous time at our book event in Cardiff Children’s Lit Fest on 27th April. Our audience was amazing and they listened to Lucy reading the Forest Girl story while I painted infront of them. It’s always a bit nerve racking performing when you’re used to working quietly all day on your own but it’s very satisfying when it goes to plan and you see the children’s happy little faces enjoying themselves. We rapped, made ivy crowns and jewellery and did lots of book signing afterwards.
Forest Girl is available to buy HERE
In the Studio
I’ve just found some of the very first scratchy doodles I did for the inside illustrations of this book. They are some of the initial ideas I sketched, to see what my brain would come up with. You never know what’s going to come out!! First up was the planning out of the book and what shapes each illustration might be. They needed to be varied and interesting for the middle-grade reader.
As you can see, some are round vignettes, some go across the top of the double page or frame it around the edges and some fill the 2 pages. I like this stage of designing the book.
This next one below is planning out one of those drawings that goes across the top of the pages (see no.17 above)
which then became this . . .
This tree sketch . .
became this. .
This next one is me sussing out how the characters will look in Chapter 1. It’s a bit scary drawing the humans😆 Now to tidy these sketches away. Can you imagine how many bits of paper I have after doing over 50 books 🙈
I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing some of the early sketches for this book. Thank you for reading. Please click on the 💟 below if you liked it and I will know you’ve visited!