all ears

This year's pumpkin effort was greeted with cries of "it's got ears! Who the hell puts ears on a pumpkin, you weirdo?" Clearly my attempt at a sinister grinning Cheshire cat has not received the recognition it deserves. Pff, I don't know why I bother (except actually I do, given that I did it while my eldest was at work and my youngest was at his party - I do it purely for my own selfish amusement, cos it is fun!). Um, happy Halloween.

black dog and barter

Hot off the press, I've been working on these. The illustrations for the winter issue of Juno. The street scene morphed (at around midnight, after a glass or two of rioja - which does wonders incidentally for dispersing that kinda hesitant "eek! Beautiful but scary sheet of stretched white paper and I'm going to attack it with a pen with no pencil sketching first" feeling) from an idea involving scales. Which was appropriate but, after a second reading of it, I decided scales didn't quite communicate the social aspect of bartering described in the article it was to illustrate. On a more cautionary note, I'm not generally recommending working while a little boozy though, there's that whole brush water/wine glass danger to be aware of for a start...The second one is my fave though, for an article on bipolar disorder. It's a fairly bleak article written from a personal perspective and I was having a teensy bit of a creative crisis wondering how to go about conveying it, until a chance conversation resulted in the fabulous black dog suggestion (I hadn't heard the expression in connection with depression before).

Meanwhile the children's drama illustrations are all editor and author approved and the publishers want to use one of them (the whistling santa) for their Christmas card this year which as well as being quite flattering, also happily means oodles and oodles of free festive publicity for me.

Finally, it's Banned Books week (In The Night Kitchen? Really???). There's an excellent post on this over on illustrator Cassia Thomas's fab blog.