It's a long story, but briefly back in 2006 I had a book with an agent at Curtis Brown, a kids picture book which they felt they could place - alas, after a year the book was returned and the agent said she was going to concentrate on teenage fiction as picture books had become so difficult. Well, after 7 Elly the Reindeer apps me and my developer felt confident enough to bring Big Red Barn out as an app with all the animal noises and full narration, and its out today, so there is an alternative to the usual publishing roots. Elly is doing well and I'm about to back up the digital app version with a printed copy on Lulu, here's hoping BRB gets picked up ! Available from itunes here...

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It's Autumn already and I see that I've failed to post at all recently - this is because I've been, thankfully, extremely busy - the unpredictability of self employment means it can be feast or famine. Take last August for example, my first for as long as I can remember without any work, luckily I was building my new studio, so that was kind of fine - but a year later it's the opposite - my busiest August ever. Who knows why these things happen - so I've been juggling cbeebies work with 'My first Encyclopedia' and a giant world map (with quite a lot of detail on). In addition to planning a new campaign for Dinky the Dinosaur. So I've been struggling even to get Book 6 of the Elly apps out, but it's finally done and should be out in October...

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With Elly book 4 up and running, and Elly book 5 about to go live I thought I'd surf "Elly the Reindeer" on google in case there had been some postings out there. Aside from the reviews we've already had, I stumbled on a new article about Elly in the June issue of an ezine/blog/marketing magazine called Luckie. Somehow they'd picked up on Elly and written this positive piece - which made my day !

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Had this lovley review come in today from iphone4kids.net :

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So, once you've got your apps out there, aside from marketing them to app review sites how do you know how well they are doing ? Well for one my developer sends me a weekly spread sheet of sales (approaching a total of 1000 downloads a week + ago), which is great and I can also see which country it gets really popular in ! Another method is to visit say apple itunes in the states by clicking on the flag on the bottom left of your itunes (if you're in the UK like me). I did this today to get the ipad book chart as Elly book 1 to 3 all went ipad in the last week - well the good news is I'm at no 30, 56 and 58 in the top paid ipad apps (books section) - thrilled by this I'm now awaiting the sales figures for the last week - keep you posted. How else can you monitor though ? Well I also found a site called appannie.com which is currently free during open beta and provides rankings figures for your apps throughout the world on daily/monthly basis, on iphone or ipad... plus top grossing apps etc.

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Two good things happened since I last updated, 'theiphonemom' reviewed Elly Book 1, and Elly Book 2 (goes to school) and Book 3 (the windy day) are now up on itunes. Hopefully the review (I did note from google analytics that traffic was arriving via iphonemoms site to my site) will increase sales, together with the force of numbers, well three titles ! In fact an editor at a childrens publisher once said to me about one of my ideas ' bring me a series of three than I'll look at it' - so there you go. Starting another app project whilst thinking about book 4, which may well be 'goes camping'.....

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As I type, and await sales figures for ELLY BOOK 1, I am finding that to get the thing reviewed on one of the myriad of app review sites is a challenge indeed. I do get replies, mostly saying that we may get round to reviewing your app, but if you part with some readies then we'll review it more quickly (but they stress that the handing over of money does NOT guarantee a necessarily favorable review). But after much perseverance and emailing, iphonemom emailed me saying she found Elly a delight and will review the app in early April. What's interesting here is that she has an angle, that the iphone is not just a boy's toy, or adult toy for that matter. In fact in my researches I found that the Americans have embraced the childrens based app far more readily than over here, with an ever growing list of educational apps, childrens books etc etc. The french too, especially AVE! Comics have thrown themselves into the graphic novel app big time, with well over 100 titles - I find it surprising that some of the big names in childrens publishing here in the UK are not up there yet - Dr Seuss has been launched too on itunes with a fanfare and advertising banners - so are UK childrens publishers rabbits caught in headlights , or, are they about to launch big time ? Perhaps someone in the know out there can tell me....Oh, the picture is Elly Book 2 (goes to school), which is nearly ready to go - Book 3 is under way and I'm looking at getting french versions out soon.

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As I type, apple itunes has launched my first APP/digital childrens book - Elly the Reindeer. (ELLY BOOK 1) But how did this all come about ? Well, talk to just about anyone with a kids book idea about how easy it is to get publishers to view, let alone take a punt on a book these days (or for that matter ask a literary agent) and most of the time you'll hear tales of 'they never got back", 'they're not accepting any more submissions' - or in the case of two literary agents I wrote to, "the markets way too difficult right now". Fed up with emailing, posting and begging people to take a look, I took things into my own hands and found an APP developer in Mubai, Dipali Vaidya of phonetesting.mobi. Her enthusiasm and dedication helped propel this book onto the APP store in no time.

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Not content with my effort on the flash animation below - I thought I really ought to have a go at stop frame, as this is the method students at Hastings College were using on the animation module. So I downloaded a demo version of i stop motion, which was a hoot, I have no cam corder but fortunately it recognised one of my still cameras so I was able to shoot the above. I then took it into imovie to add the effects, type and the sound. The distressed/noise effect works better at high res but not so well here at this smaller size (taking away detail) - I wanted to add a flavour of those slightly odd eastern european animations that haunted my youth ! A tad short but the exercise may well inspire me to do a longer one at a later date...

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In January this year I was invited to take an animation module with first year students on the FDA course at Hastings Art College. The brief was about story-boarding a narrative and then creating a stop frame animation - refreshingly all the students created the artwork by hand and amongst the enthusiastic ideas and productions were a couple of space themed animations. Inspired by the students work I decided I should have a go and collated some images from previous commssions and used them in my own space animation. Without the stop motion equipment at home I elected for a flash movie - a fairly low res version can be seen above ! Much room for improvement me thinks but it was fun doing it. I'm now looking forward to seeing the students finished animations this week.

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I'm delighted to have my work up on MOO.com for the second year running - royalties have been modest but very welcome - but now they've expanded into the US with both offices and a dedicated US site, so who knows could go better - in the meantime, this years paperchase card (pictured) is in the shops and as you can see I introduced a slight hint of topicality into the design - hope it goes well, they've already bought another design for next christmas...but it's a tad early to be posting that one up...

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A few weeks ago Creative Review had a 'show us your work space' type article running, and I quite wanted to post my new studio up there - trouble was at that stage it wasn't finished and I was, despite building it on and off for 2 months, having serious problems finishing it, so much so Tim the builder had to come to my rescue as we battled over 2 days putting it all together in lashing rain (It weighed a ton too which didnt help, I'm a light weight illustrator after all !).

After a lot of hard work the result - a fantastic work space I'm thrilled with and better than my last studio on a farm which was a tad cold and damp and got broken into (losing all my hardware, note to all digital illustrators, back up and keep the back up elsewhere). Trouble is this is only a few paces from my backdoor so no more cycling to work - so out with the jogging gear ! That's all for now as I'm busy with Christmas commissions (before it all goes horribly quiet over christmas !)

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Cricket, paint drying material for some , passion for others - this illo I did today, as 2 quick Aussie wickets fell, should tell you where I stand on the issue ! Comon England !

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Carrying on with the robot theme - I was going through a vintage tin toys book when I became inspired to create the above illustrations. I started with the dog - which is an almost faithfull reproduction of a 50's tin toy, but from there took it off into new characters. I may well put these up on MOO.com as I think they could make a fun set of mini cards, and may add more characters.

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I was down the pub with my friend (and illustrator par excellence)  Peter Richardson and he was enthusing about a piece of software called Manga Studio - in particular the speed and way in which the software handled brush stokes - having had numerous attempts at tweaking brushes in illustrator (and not achieving what I want) - I was keen to try out something new, so downloaded it yesterday and although I am on the 30 day trial, I shall no doubt be buying this excellent piece of software. After shelling out for CS3 its refreshing to find software priced at $39.99. I'm on the initial learning curve (and I've gone for the debut version as opposed to the all bells and whistles EX version (quite a bit more expensive). Its been around for a while and there are posts on you tube about it for those interested in taking a look. In the meantime here's my very first experiments. I placed a pencil sketch on a layer and drew on a separate layer using the brush tool. This is a bitmap program (vector brushes available in the EX version) but nevertheless produces sharp clear line (the default working environment is 600dpi) and it exports to photoshop too. 

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Sometime ago I was passed a link to Moo.com, an on-line print company with a contemporary feel. I loved using it to create my business cards, as you can choose a different image for each card. They also had a great set of on-line designs by illustrators that you could use. So I applied to be a 'Moo' designer and then last month they contacted me and asked me to submit some designs. I'm really pleased to have my work up there and there's a small royalty fee each time someone uses one of my designs, here's hoping they go well, I've begun with quite a few Christmassy designs being that time of year but after December hope to update with general images. You can see them here !

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An artist I much admire is the late Jim Flora (1919-1998) , besides illustrating childrens books and magazines, he also did terrific album covers (jazz and classical) for RCA and Columbia. Check out his work, it's great fun. Here I've picked one of his album covers (his colour palette was always limited which added punchiness to the work), not because I think its his best but because the colour palette inspired me to limit mine to a similar range for my picture book, BIG RED BARN. It's a simple counting book, where the farmer enters his barn to attend to his animals, when it gets to 10 Geese Honking he opens the big barn doors and all the animals come charging out. Had this with an agent for over a year, but she couldn't place it and in fact gave up on the picture book market ('too tough right now') to concentrate on teenage publishing. Another agent I contacted also echoed the tough conditions and said she wasn't taking anything on but I still hope to get it published, or maybe self published one day...who knows !

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An illustrator friend of mine pointed out this site to me - its an illustration site for creatives of all levels just to have a bit of fun. When I looked at it I noticed this weeks theme appeared to be 'baby'. As it happens I was uploading this (unpublished)  greetings card design at the time to HAI (hireanillustrator.com, which I've just joined). Its an image which I intended as a congratulations card for a new baby, in which I used an old paperchase character of mine, ( I haven't had it published yet but then again I haven't really hawked it around). So here's my first contribution for illustration friday !

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I hooked up with a small company called Twizler a couple of years ago and we had a ball producing over 50 birthday cards in a couple of years for the shelves of John Lewis and the like. The cards developed over the period, stylistically too,  until we ended up doing knock knock jokes, which look quite different from the above. However they began as rotating cards for the young. A simple design (but a slight headache to illustrate) where you spin the centre of the card to make different heads on different bodies. I only did 6 of these for ages 1 to 6 on various themes (on the left). A few months later, a designer friend of mine gave me (on the right) this charming old Lindt chocolate box (60's at a guess though I'm not sure), with exactly the same principle called 'Lindt Merry-Go-Round'...and there was me thinking we'd thought of it first !

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I was given  an excellent book for Christmas entitled Boys and Girls A Ladybird book of childhood (after dropping a heavy hint that is). It's a nostalgia trip to a world where, amongst many activities, you were encouraged to do scientific experiments that no childrens' book would dare print now (and that's a shame). One image shows two children,  taking apart batteries, no mention of adult supervision in the text. Of course the main attraction for me in revisiting these books is the quality of the illustrations from artists such as Harry Wingfield, C.F.Tunnicliffe and many others. After I got the book, two things happened, I met an illustrator who started talking about his love of Ladybird books  and how he was collecting them, then my studio colleague (whose been there over a year) just recently piped up that his uncle was Ronald Lampitt, a Ladybird book illustrator, sadly no longer with us. I have a small collection now of Ladybird books in my three year old's bedroom, but maybe I'll start looking out for these old books at bootfairs, I think they're great fun.

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Since 2000 I've been designing christmas characters for paperchase, mainly for christmas cards but occasionally used across roll wrap (and one year made into all sorts of merchandise). Each year it's a new challenge, same old santa et al, but how to be different and contemporary each year poses a challenge, last year though I discovered printpattern.blogspot.com. This excellent blog by Bowie Style shows passionate dedication to her chosen topic, print and pattern. Updated to the point where it's hard to keep up, it's not all my cup of tea there's such a variety on show, but I always find  much to inspire if your into contemporary design and if you're thinking of designing for the likes of paperchase etc then a visit here could be a good starting point, oh and trawl through the archives it's worth it ( and she featured me too April 2008 thanks Bowie style !)

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My parents moved to France when I was 11, at the time I'd dropped off reading or buying comics in the UK but on arriving in France I was introduced to a whole new world of the French and Belgian graphic novels. At first I was hooked on Tintin and Asterix, but the illustrator who enthused my drawing more than those great artists was Andre Franquin the influential Belgian cartoonist (1924 - 1997). His Spriou & Fantasio, and Gaston Lagaffe books rapidly filled my shelves. His art looked more spontaneous than Herge's and I loved his colour palette. Still a fan today I recently ordered some books from amazon fr. I will revisit this subject in another posting...

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