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Exciting! The marvellous Gosh! Comics, across the street from the British Museum, is selling an exclusive, limited edition bookplate run of Vern and Lettuce! I recently bought a bookplate version of the DFC Library's Mezolith, and the bookplates are very lush. I had fun drawing this one, it's based on the scene where Serge the ferret tailor is getting V&L kitted up for their talent show appearance. Get details and read their review of Vern and Lettuce here!



Also good news, I just heard from comics reporter Matt Badham that David O'Connell and I feature in an article about the small press that he wrote in the latest edition of Comics Heroes magazine. Thanks, Matt!

Look, we made ourselves a studio sign! Yesterday we had an appointment with Steve Pill from Artists & Illustrators to interview me and photograph our working space to feature in their magazine. Steve said not to do any tidying up, that they wanted to see us in our element, but then he sent through this earlier article about a guy's studio in Chelsea that looked like rooms from the Wallace Collection. After we'd all rolled around on the floor wetting ourselves with laughter at the comparison, we decided we at least needed to hoover and then thought we should make that sign we'd been talking about for at least six months. So here it is! That's Steve on the right, looking shocked at the state of our tiny paper and yarn sweatshop.



I hadn't read a copy of A&I for a couple years, it always seemed more of a Sunday painters kind of magazine than a cutting-edge journal on illustration. But Steve gave me a recent copy and I was pleasantly surprised to see a three-page article about one of my favourite printmakers, who's become a bit of a British icon, Angie Lewin. She follows on from a rich tradition of artists such as Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden (and loads of '50s and '60s textile and ceramics artists that I vaguely know of but have lots more to learn about). Good stuff. Steve said my interview and studio photos should be in the October issue.



Last night Alex Milway rallied a bunch of writers, illustrators and publishers who will be involved in the upcoming Crystal Palace Children's Book Festival (Oct 23, book now!) to meet each other over drinks at the Royal Festival Hall. What a great evening! I'd never met Lerryn Korda before, and was totally taken with the aesthetics of her Little Nye books. I managed to come home with a signed copy of Rocket to the Moon, and I'm sitting here oo-ing over her colour palettes and nicely shaped blocks of colour that don't rely on outlines. I need to get all four books and read the stories, but the artwork is superb. Here's a version of Little Nye's house that you can print, cut out and stick together.

Once again, this morning I was out and about in Greenwich Park doing hard coursework for my Philip Reeve/Alex Milway Landscape Drawing 101. I was besieged by pigeons and reckless squirrels, and I was very tempted to draw them in. But the whole point of the exercise has been to draw the greenery because it's my weakest link. I only slipped up once with that pigeon in the corner.



Very glad to get an e-mail from the Greenwich Phantom, to say she's happily following the sketch progression. (Hello, Phantom!) Someone (a lovely person) made a funny comment the other day on the phone; they said they'd seen my blog and saw by my sketching that I wasn't busy, so thought it must be a good time to call. And I've had a couple people recently say things like 'if you have time to do that, you must have time to do [insert worthy activity]".

The truth is, I'm almost panicking with how much I have to do before a whole host of events: Sunday's Hypercomics family workshop in Battersea Park, Wigtown lit fest, Bath kids lit fest, Ally Pally Knitting & Stitching Show, four days of comics workshops in Ireland, the British International Comics Show in Birmingham, Cheltenham lit fest, Crystal Palace kids lit fest, two days live painting for Nottingham Game City, three days of London MCM Expo, Oxford FCBG conference, SCBWI Winter Conference, Leeds Thought Bubble and the Sheffield Children's Book Award ceremony (Morris the Mankiest Monster is up for the award). And that's not mentioning the Scholastic book illustrations due in January that I haven't even started yet.

The thing is, those all involve a zillion e-mails, and if I sit in my studio trying to answer them all day, never drawing or going for a walk or anything, I will go completely mental and fat. I had to quit the rowing team because I couldn't keep up with the training and races since I was doing so many weekend events. I'm rubbish at doing exercise just for the sake of it, so I've put on a lot of weight this year. Going to a gym in the morning makes me feel like a hamster on a wheel and makes me crabby all day. So getting up at 6am to cycle a ways, then draw in the park isn't a bit of frivolous free time, it's absolutely essential to keep me from going twitchy. And I'm new at this, too, so I don't always know the best way to divide my day into perfect regimented segments.

The other thing is that, when people ask me to make children's books and do events, they're not asking a person who sits and does e-mail all day, they're asking someone who can draw pictures and has experiences to tap into so the books are filled with life and joy and hope and all that good stuff that makes stories. And sitting all day in front of a computer just doesn't make that happen. I like that bit in Neil Gaiman's article, George RR Martin is not your bitch:

I remember hearing an upset comics editor telling a roomful of other editors about a comics artist who had taken a few weeks off to paint his house. The editor pointed out, repeatedly, that for the money the artist would have been paid for those weeks' work he could easily have afforded to hire someone to paint his house, and made money too. And I thought, but did not say, “But what if he wanted to paint his house?”

Hehe, don't even get me started on housework, that has gone way, way by the wayside and no, I can't yet afford a cleaner. Which doesn't thrill Stuart one bit. Blogging is another thing that isn't a spare time thing, it's how I remember what I did ever

A solid blanket of grey clouds this morning made the light in the park less than inspiring. But after all my big talk yesterday, I was determined not to wimp out of drawing a bit of landscape without using my standard crutch of having one big central thing in the foreground filling the whole page.



I'm so used to using landscape to frame buildings and close-up trees, that it was hard for me to pick out a good alternative composition. (Figuring out what to draw must be half the battle.) In some of his drawings, Philip Reeve used the boundaries of fields as compositional lines (here, for example), so after walking across the whole park, I ended up using layers of footpaths for my leading lines.



I got very frustrated drawing this. I didn't really know what I was doing, particularly with the trees. When they're too small to pick out individual leaves - just little cotton balls - I'm not sure what kinds of lines to use to set out the different shapes, and it feels like I'm just scrabbling around. There were some lovely willows in the centre, but I didn't really capture their downward-hanging branches; they just look a bit muddled. I really need to get some books of landscape drawing and actually take them along with me, so I can use them for reference while I'm drawing.

That's the Millennium Dome and Greenwich Power Station in the background. Quite a few little dogs came over and made studies of me when they saw me sitting in the grass. I should get some tips from Alex Milway, he trained first as a landscape painter and he has a gorgeous canvas he's working on sitting in the middle of his front room. Speaking of which, Alex is the key organiser for the Crystal Palace Children's Book Festival on 23 Oct, and bookings are now open! Lots of free workshops, author readings, comics, fun to be had. (Do you like my dinosaur poster?)

I just spotted this great animation over on the FPI blog, by Lane Smith (creator of The Happy Hocky Family and loads more):

YouTube link - It's a Book, by Lane Smith

And don't forget to keep an eye on the Super Comics Adventure Squad blog, the DFC team keeps popping up with loads of amazing stuff, including several new drawings by Monkey Nuts' Lorenzo Etherington.

A bit quiet in the studio today. Lauren and Gary are off at the Prince's Garden Party again. This time Lauren brought along her giant squid.

I was inspired by Philip Reeve's recent landscape drawings to get up early this morning and draw in the park. (I have a bit of a love affair with the trees there, they're so full of personality. Go visit them if you're ever in Greenwich! Say hi for me.)



I hadn't made a landscape drawing in ages and, in a way, I kind of chickened out. This is really a drawing of a tree (my favourite tree), not a landscape. And the tree is more of a life drawing than a study in light or anything. Basically, it's a portrait of a tree, just like I'd draw a portrait of a person, and the other bits are just there to frame the tree and put it in a bit of context. In that way, it's a bit like a medieval paintings, where the people or religious scene are the main focus, and the nature just decorative or symbolic bits around the edges.

I find it much harder to draw nature without some big, obvious chunky thing in the foreground, unlike my favourite so far of Philip's drawings, which takes in the whole field and plays with its overall composition. I'd love to learn how to do this. When I was at Bryn Mawr, I took an art history class in Flemish landscape painting from a professor named Christiane Hertel. Sadly, I don't remember a lot of the details, but I do recall her pointing to several of the Dutch painters, who were innovators in making the landscape a character in itself, with fewer man-made or human focal points (often just a little windmill somewhere, or a tiny figure of a traveller or hermit saint). They painted dark, angry, windwhipped trees, deep shadows, heavy forests. At the time, I got some books from the library of landscape etchings by Rembrandt, whose line work still fascinates me. I really want to track down another well-printed book of his etchings and make some more studies of them.

Another thing I've been thinking about a comment Mark Stafford made while we were looking at drawings in the Cartoon Museum's Fougasse exhibition. Mark said how rare it was these days to see illustrators putting small characters in landscape compositions because we're so conditioned by television close-ups and mid-range shots. I don't watch much telly at all (don't even own one) but I know that when I take photos, I almost always zoom as close to the figure as I can go, with little regard for the larger sweep of space around them. And I think I do the same with drawing. When I draw wider landscapes, I struggle to get a good range of tonality, and my textural lines are tentative. I lived in rural Lancashire for a year when I was much younger, and I remember being hugely impressed by the way the clouds made moving shadows on the hills, and the purplish look of the night-time fog. But I never managed even slightly to capture it. I'd like to think that now I can draw more skillfully, and I might have a better chance of it, but I still need to get in some practice. ...Adding that to my to-do list.

One of my three studio mates, Gary Northfield, just wrote a post about clouds on his brand new blog; I need to link up with this and try drawing some. Maybe we could make a cloud mini comic. Except we need to finish Sheep Swap, we've left that one hanging.

The Royal Observatory at Greenwich is a magical place. It houses London’s only planetarium, together with some great spacey exhibits. It’s also where east properly meets west at the Prime Meridian, and home to a wonderful array of telescopes, as well as a splendid earthly view looking out towards Canary Wharf. Finally, you can get there via the Docklands Light Railway which means, if you’re very lucky, you can sit in the front of the front carriage and pretend you’re driving the train out to it.

The daytime view from the Royal Observatory

On Thursday I was lucky enough to be invited there for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year Awards 2010 (thanks to my friend Anna who worked on a series of astrophotography Tutorials to accompany the exhibition). I’m fortunate that in my day job (when I’m not writing Johnny Mackintosh books) I get to travel the world, going to many scientific conferences, so can reveal that all the other scientists are jealous of astronomers because of their beautiful photographs and the way they can capture the public’s imagination.

Fuel Cell Photo, courtesy Avni Argun and Nathan Ashcraft, MIT

The Horsehead Nebula

Would you rather look at this MIT photo of a new fuel cell membrane (of course enormously important research) or of the Horsehead Nebula? However important the science, it’s no contest really. This Horsehead Nebula image won the 2009 Competition for amateur astronomer Martin Pugh. It helps show that, even now in the twenty-first century, amateurs can and do make a great contribution to this particular science.

There were several categories:

Earth & Space

Our Solar System

Deep Space

I couldn't resist after yesterday's visit to the Toy Boats exhibition; I combined getting some morning exercise with cycling back to the National Maritime Museum to do another morning sketch. More lovely boats!


Cut me a bit of slack on this one, I drew it while being watched by a group of about 30 French school children. I heard one of them say 'bande dessinée', and suddenly there they were. I think their teacher got a bit cross with them because they didn't look at the exhibition, just stood there watching me draw, and telling off each other for jostling me.



And this is one of my favourite landscapes in London, but it's too wide to photograph well. Sometimes the light hits the creek and the boats and the buildings and it's absolute magic. And I like the rusty old workings of the cargo boats.



Lots of new buildings going up around here, it's fun to watch.




Just in case you missed it, Darryl Cunningham (tallguywrites) is on a roll with his excellent comic about the MMR vaccination scare. You can read it here, along with a huge amount of Live Journal reader feedback. Hot controversy! And there's some more feedback over on Blogger.
You can read a review of his latest amazing book Psychiatric Tales over on the FPI blog, as well as his interview with comics reporter Matt Badham.

And the Queen Mum is back! Another FPI review of a mini comic by David O'Connell (tozocomic).

Okay, I have a new obsession, it's the amazing exhibition of toy boats in Greenwich right now. Here's me back at the studio playing with the boats I brought back.



Here's a quick sketch I made of the world's cutest battleship, and a side photo of said vessel. (Look at those little red gun turrets, aren't those the best thing ever?) I'm going to try to make a better drawing of it tomorrow.



I am so going to go back there and do some more drawing! The exhibition runs until 31 October, Toy Boats at the National Maritime Museum. Steam-punk fanatics are going to go nuts over this.




















And the little tin boats I bought for just over a fiver in the shop:

Here's a drawing I just did of me and my friend David O'Connell, who also had his birthday this weekend. Happy birthday, Dave! (That's tozocomic.) He is my favourite person to write stuff with, and he's been sticking by me on our project even though it's been a bit frustrating lately.



After the studio party on Saturday, King Cupcake and I spent Sunday going for a lazy walk in Greenwich with Darryl Cunningham, through the park (I had to show him my favourite trees) and then through the market, where we picked up some fab Nigerian food for lunch on the lawn of the Royal Naval College. Here are a couple pictures we took in the Painted Hall, in the mirrors they put out so you can look at the ceiling without getting a crick in your neck.



The lovely Tulip Staircase in the Queen's House:


I like the way the people on the lawn are dotted about in a pattern like a Lowry painting. Darryl said his work's very influenced by Lowry, as well as other woodcut printmakers, it was fun talking with him about that.

I popped down to Greenwich and seeing the Urban Sketchers website put me in mind to do an architectural sketch. I didn't have much time, so I went straight in with pen, and scruffed about a bit to give it more contrast with a fat marker I lifted from chamonkee. It looks more classical than my usual drawing, but I guess the building's partly to blame for that.

Before I cycled home, I nipped into the shop and ran into eruditebaboon and his girlfriend in the checkout queue, just as he was deciding he was surviving enough not to pull a sickie from work today. (Have you seen the brilliant and utterly confusing comic he made yesterday?) Oo, and some lovely photos of the stairway in the library of Brandenburg University, thanks to a link from architect Robert Morrison.

Now I'm back and work and thinking how much I totally, totally miss my sister and can't wait to see her in just over a week. She's a die-hard Dolly Parton fan so I am in a cheesy mood and have this song playing at the moment. I really ought to draw Dolly next. Oh, here's another... and one more.

Today I finally managed to get to the post office to collect my new manga pens from Dinkybox. Thanks, chamonkee, for the recommendation! I will get back to you about them after I've had a go.
Deleter, that's a funny name for mark-making tools. It reminds me of my favourite joke when I was a kid:

There's a guy sitting on a tombstone in the corner of a graveyard, scribbling away at a musical score in a notebook. But when I look closer, I can see that whenever his pen touches the paper, instead of writing, it erases the lines of the score. I ask the groundskeeper, 'Who is that guy?' The groundskeeper replies, 'That's Mozart. He's busy decomposing.'

I liked that joke way too much. It was the only one I could ever remember, argh. No, two jokes: the other one's coming up in this week's Vern and Lettuce. It's one I used to tell ad nauseum. (Readers on Friday, feel free to groan.)



And I have become a big fan of the prune, fig and spelt-flour bread from Rhodes Bakery. It's turning into a bi-weekly ritual, that I cycle over to Greenwich, pick up a loaf, then go have coffee with Jeff-the-barista at The Beehive (which is also where I bought Stuart's fabulous shirt and sweater vest, in their little vintage clothing section, next to the records).

Every time I hear these names on the news I think, they must be joking.



And the Greenwich Phantom and I did a little collaboration this morning. I love the Greenwich Phantom.

I got whiplash on my way to the post office when I saw the most amazing assemblage of bread loaves in a window. I didn't mean to stop, except maybe for a quick coffee with Jeff-the-Aussie-barista, but some overwhelming force stopped my bike and dragged me in and then I had to sample one of their scones as well. It's too expensive to go very often, and I won't abandon Jeff at the Beehive, but it's awfully nice to try something new.



Garen Ewing is now providing quality printouts of his A-Z of Comic Strip Characters here, possibly because he can't ever sell them because they'd break every copyright law in the book. But it's nice to have something so nice for free, thanks, Garen!

And here's a funny little animation I just discovered: