Blog project: The Selfish Giant - rough illustration no 2

With this project I want to switch between watercolour and black and white illustrations to fit in with the mood of the story, so here is the first pen and ink rough:

I'm imagining the giant as tired, fed up and grumpy after his long journey home, and thoroughly disgruntled to see children playing in his garden. So he shouts at them to clear off, and all the colour goes from his life!

Undiscovered Voices

This is the drawing I made in August for the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators "Undiscovered Voices" competition: I had great fun making the drawing  - those are my own casually discarded boots on the floor!

Congratulations to the eight lucky shortlisted illustrators: Kim Geyer,  Jennifer Graham,  Julia Groves,  Amber Hsu, Heather Kilgour , Shana Nieburg-Suschitzky,  Nicola Patten,  and Rachel Quarry.  I'm looking forward to seeing their interpretations of "Undiscovered Voices" in December, when the six winners will be announced.

Where do ideas come from?

Following on from my last post here, here is some of my current food for visual thought.

The drawing is a quick sketch I did on Twelfth Night (6th January) of how an outsider might see the Christmas tree being taken down in our household.

A very quick impression, but one that is staying with me mentally, so I sense that a more worked drawing up is brewing. What I like about this drawing in particular is how I've captured something of the character of Toby, who is a very inquisitive and bright cat, as well as being large, fluffy and solid! He'd only lived with me for six weeks at this point, so was still very much learning about me and what I do.

Then here is a small collection of recent acquisitions that are feeding my creative imagination!

The book is "How to Draw in Pen and Ink" by Harry Furniss, originally published in 1905, and discovered by me in the Oxfam shop in Cirencester over the new year holiday.  I've been drawing with pen and ink for years, and I found some useful tips in this book, plus interesting observations on the composing of illustrations at the point in time when photographs were becoming more frequently used instead in newspapers and magazines.

The small plastic character toy was another charity shop find, and was used as the model for all of the plastic figure toys in the "Sebastian's Sink City" I made. Being able to study the construction of joints, and exaggerations of body proportions to enable the toy to stand, etc was very helpful.

The wonderfully evocatively shaped "nest" ball of yarn is currently home some tiny owls I knitted last year