Peep Bookstagram

Peep! is now out in the world and there's a Bookstagram Tour next week if Instagram is your thing.  Huge thanks to all the bloggers and reviewers for taking part.  It takes a lot of time and effort to write and post about books, when you could be doing so many other things, so I really appreciate everyone giving their time for this. 

Here is where you can find the reviewers @ReadingWithKids @TeenyReaders @Booksb4Bedtime @Home.Read.Play @ThisBookIsBrilliant and @KidsBooksToLife who I had the pleasure of speaking to.  The chat can be found on Faye's Instagram feed by CLICKING HERE

One more day to go

Peep! is out tomorrow.  To celebrate I made this little gif of Dot.  She is patience personified.  Unlike my own dog who only stares out the window to bark at passing cars, the postman and the wind.

Peep! is published by Andersen Press and available to buy wherever you get your books.  But please support your local bookshop if you have one, or take a look in your local library.  Libraries and bookshops are the best.

The View From Here

This was my #colour_collective for this week. 

It's the view from my village woods across to the Black Isle.  I made this sketch sticking to the three colours I planned to use.  More and more I prefer to draw from life in my sketch book and only work from that image, as opposed to working from a photograph.  Sometimes I will take a photo for reference but, for me, a sketch really focuses in on what I noticed and what I liked about the scene in front of me.

When I got home I painted separations in black and coloured the image digitally.  Using a black layer for each colour means that it's hard to predict what the final image will look like.  I like the surprise of this.  I also like painting the layers because I'm not very good at it.  My brushwork isn't tidy and my hand isn't steady.  There's an element of it that I can't control and I really enjoy the results of that.

You can see below how layering them on top of one another starts to create the final image.  Colouring digitally does mean I can change things and you may notice that the big expanse of white water isn't in the separations.  That's because I painted it in the blue colour layer but removed it digitally as the image looked better without it.

I wasn't entirely happy with the result but after tweaking the colours and leaving it for a while, I much preferred it once I'd had some time away from it.  Some pictures are like that. 

New cards

 I've added some new card designs into my shop this week.  You can view them here.

Here is a look at the new single card designs.

Mirror, Mirror

Season's Readings

Toot Your Horn!

These Highland Blues are based on my #illo_advent drawings 2020 and are sold as a pack of three.

Highland Blues

Feel free to have a browse around.  I also sell screen prints and risographs.

 New in my shop this week are these Wild Woods risographs.  Click here to go to the shop.

Risographs are an environmentally friendly form of printing. The image is printed using soy ink on recycled 250gsm paper.  It has a similar feeling to a screen print but the printing is done through a risograph machine and so is less labour intensive.  

Book Nook Blue

Another colour_collective.  This time they chose a colour that I use all the time.  This dark blue features heavily in my work. Trying to decide what to do felt odd because I've never noticed how much I use it before.  To do something specifically with this colour felt like pressure had been added.  Anyway, I like the beaver.

World Book Day!

Happy World Book Day!