Having my first embossed cover (My Sister Has a Big Black Beard)... (with raised splats that you can feel)... inspired me to write this poem:

Embossing, while trendy and cool,
Was something she scorned, as a rule.
For lumps, blips and bumps
She required no thumps,
Just soaking, till pruned, in her pool

Don’t worry, the poems which Duncan wrote for the book are much better!!!!!

My Sister Has Big Black Beard is all finished now, and here is the final final cover!!



I have a lot of bits and pieces to catch up on since being away for three weeks, and then...I wonder what the NEXT project will be???!!!!

And the winner is...........







Using this background and other odds and ends, the cover has finally been all put together and sent off...and approved...so now Duncan Ball and I sit back and wait to look at the final version of it and the internal illustrations before they are sent off to the printer who will go mad and make thousands of books.

It’s scary knowing that if there is a mistake, it turns into thousands of mistakes...so a this stage everybody is looking with eagle-eyes for anything not quite right. It’s still amazing how things can slip through, though.

So...although this is just a rough rough version and the writing on the back is not exactly what will be there and is all messy because it got wrecked with some sticky tape, here is the cover!!! YAY!!!!!

Now we are trying to come up with a good cover for My Sister Has A Big Black Beard. We’re playing with various ideas and I invented some background patterns...but they ended up being too crazy and it is hard to read the writing once the title is added. So we’re trying something different...but here are some silly patterns...

......
...

A book’s cover is really important because it has to be true to what’s inside the book, and it has to be appealing enough that you want to pick the book up and read it.

Sometimes authors and illustrators don’t agree with what the publisher’s marketing people say the cover should look like; marketing people know what’s selling in the current market but authors and illustrators may want to do something original. It can be a complicated process coming up with a cover that everybody is happy with.

Last week I went in to HarperCollins Publishers and worked with the designer to put all of the illustrations for Duncan Ball’s “My Sister Has A Big Black Beard” into place. It is all done on a computer - I had scanned the images at home and had emailed them to the designer (and the publisher and Duncan) so he could make them smaller or shift them a bit to the right or left- whatever was needed.

It is always a fascinating process. Sometimes a designer might put an illustration in the middle of a space where it looks balanced,












but maybe the illustrator wants it down at the bottom to add to the feeling that it’s a teddy bear that’s been squished flat on the ground, for example.












Or the illustrator may want it up at the top to make it feel bigger if it’s the scary door to the staff room at school,











or may want it off centre and odd because the character is a bit odd.

.

It is a delight to work with a designer who also gets a kick out of using the positioning to add to the feel of an illustration so together we can make everything work really well. The illustrator doesn’t usually, or even often, get to work directly with the designer at this stage so it was a BLAST!

Now we’re working on finding a FUNKY pattern for the front cover!

I have had several publishers ask to see my next project so I think this year it is time to write another book. But...I’m taking a little holiday over Christmas and New Year so won’t think about it for a week or so. That was easy!

If you have quick look at my blog, you’ll see paintings at different stages as I have fun experimenting with acrylic paints. The first painting below will have lots of new things added to it over the next few days, the second has already been changed, and the third I think I’ll leave as is.......

Jake the Snake made his appearance when I did the final illustration for “My Sister Has A Big Black Beard” a couple of days ago. Just the cover to do and making sure everything is where it should be and it will be about ready for the printer.

I took some scrap paper to my French class on Thursday evening.Each student has to give a little presentation and it was my turn; I chose to give a little cartoon workshop and handed out the paper for people to draw on. It was the manuscript for My Sister Has A Big Black Beard and I think my French class was very surprised when they looked on the back of their drawings and saw bits of Duncan’s crazy poems.

Yesterday I sent off almost the last illustrations for “My Sister Has a Big Black Beard” by Duncan Ball. I’m waiting for one Jake the Snake poem and a rough cover to turn into a final cover then I’ll be done...the last poem in the book is a DOOZIE!!!!

A few days ago one of the poems mentioned a tortoise shell plate that somebody was eating from. I immediately thought of the tortoise, of course, and drew him, understandably cranky having had his shell snatched for a plate, but no matter where I put him or how I drew him, unless I drew lots of arrows and signs and explanations there’s no way anybody would have the foggiest idea that he’s a tortoise* let alone the particular tortoise whose shell is on the table.

(*see today’s blog re taking a class to learn how to paint things which are unrecognisable...clearly I was already there)

He ended up being left out of the book which has made him even more cranky so I thought it was only fair to let him onto this page.






This week I also met a little person with nothing to say.

Today I was trying to keep up with Duncan Ball’s poems (My Sister Has A Big Black Beard) and was scratching my head a lot! At one stage a cheeky little dog appeared but got rubbed out to make way for somebody else...that happens sometimes. Sometimes I keep such characters and try to build an illustration around them but it doesn’t usually work if they don’t fit the idea in the first place. Sigh.

Here are a few ideas that I was fooling around with as a starting point while trying to find an idea for changing clocks and watches from Daylight Savings, and another about a rather precocious Mozart. Yesterday the challenge was to find a fun one in a cemetery. You’ll notice that sometimes the images don’t mean anything yet but are just something vaguely related to the topic. Hopefully they’ll kick off thinking in different directions.