Well yes actually, he is! That's why the tree is so teeny tiny...
My rough sketch for the next illustration, the Pied Piper plus mucho rats. I found it incredibly difficult to find my own slant on something that countless other fabulous illustrators have depicted already... so I decided to take my own work as a starting point (the piper bears a passing resemblance to the evil pipe playing monkey in 'Monkey and Bear'
The new project is a fairly big one; more than thirty illustrations for a book of children's dramas. It's a lovely job though, as the subject matter is so varied. So the elderly bods above appear alongside the fat hedgehog and the benign hen below. And still to come - mermaids, giants, wolves, monsters and turnips, to name but a few! Much fun!
[edit] And ooh, ooh, was nosying about on the fabulous Jon Davis's blog and stumbled on a link to this amazing Ukranian illustrator. The artwork is stunning, I just want to fall in and soak it up. And further foraging in blogland also turned up Lisbeth Zwerger, whose work is spellbindingly exquisite and who I hadn't come across before. So I have just ordered the book above (love those colours)...
...that's what I imagine, in my deeply ignorant fashion, is what someone from the West of Scotland might have said to me the other day if they had witnessed my frantic multi-tasking and ensuing panic. I have a new illustration project (the benign hen above will feature) and some straggling design projects, like the fiddle festival work below, which stubbornly refuse to end despite my best efforts. All a bit manic. Which is good I guess, but also mucho stressful.
