Tuesday 24 March 2015

Surrey Schools Visits

Last week I was lucky enough to spend time with kids from St Paul's School and Furzefield School, Surrey, designing characters and discussing story-planning. Two lovely folks from Surrey Libraries escorted me to the schools, fed me, and watched supportively while I jabbered, doodled and signed books (huge thank you to Tom and Jenny!).

In Miss Booker's Year 4 class at Furzefield, the children played some facial-expression games, before launching into designing their own expressive animal characters. We then pretended to interview the drawings, asking them why they felt so angry/ joyful/ dismal, to spark ideas for stories. Here are a few examples of the kids' fantastic creations...

 Fighting the temptation to get this eagle printed onto a t-shirt! Absolutely love him.



What a conundrum! Eat your only friend, or starve?!



 Nigel the Bat. A gizmo-obsessed Rambo-type, with a most excellent name.


  
"She found something sparkly!"

 

Well done, Furzefield. Gorgeous, hilarious, inspiring work!

Tuesday 6 January 2015

A Teeny Taste of Book Three...

Things are ticking along for my ginger-tabby queen, and book three's now well underway. I've been playing with cover ideas (pic) and am coming to the end of my first draft. It still seems unbelievable that, later this year, I'll have a three book series under my belt, when it seems I was pondering the first story such a short time ago. Still, there's plenty to be done before I get there, including much KITTEN SKETCHING!!! WOOOOHOOOOOO!!! Oh, how I suffer...

Queen Sardine and Princess Persia

Book two is on the shelves! As of this month, the second in my Queen Sardine series is available to buy in paper format and digital. A couple of new characters are thrown into the Kipper Street mix (which - now I write it - sounds like some weird kind of cat food), along with plenty of daftness and cattitude.

And, hey! There's a word for irritating words like 'cattitude' (sorry - I can't help myself) and (even worse) 'chillax' (yes, that nanky old chestnut)... these are portmanteau words, apparently. 'Portmanteau' as in the suitcase in two halves. Two words schmushed together... kind of makes sense. Anyhow, that's the educational content of this blog covered for the next decade or so. Now, back to drawing cats...