How to use this Page

Even though two of my three publishers are based in Oxford and I go there often for meetings and such, the town has a special magic to it that never really goes away.



This year for Oxford Literary Festival, I got to stay in Exeter College and have breakfast in their dining hall, which was pretty awesome. (Also slightly embarrassing because I didn't have time to get into costume after breakfast, and the few people in there were too polite to ask questions.)



The very first event I went to, I got to sit in the audience to hear Philip Womack interview Philip Reeve and Frances Hardinge.




Here they are, getting papped by festival photographer KT Bruce. (You can see her photos here on Facebook.)



Philip talked about his new Railhead book and Frances, about The Lie Tree, which deservedly has got lots of press lately when it won the overall Costa Award. They're both brilliant books, I recommend them to adults and teenagers alike.



Respect to Philip Womack: moderating an event is much harder to do and takes more time with research than talking about one's own books. I wish I could have heard him talk a bit more about his book The Broken King but at least I managed to nab the bookseller's last copy.



On the way out, I finally met Katherine Rundell, author of Rooftoppers, which beat out Oliver and the Seawigs for the Blue Peter Prize.. and I didn't mind, because it turned out to be very good! (If it had been bad, I would have been FURIOUS!) ;D



I was too caught up in my Pugs of the Frozen North event with Philip to get any good photos of the Story Museum setting, but we had a good crowd and a great time, and I recognised a certain pug hat from World Book Day dressing-up photos I'd seen on Twitter:



The pugs in the back of our book all have names, but Philip and I loved how these girls found the unnamed pugs at the beginning of the books and gave them all their own names!



Here's a little close-up. Pimples, Macaroon and Sticky Tack are all very fine names.



Another girl had started writing a sequel to Pugs of the Frozen North, called Pugs of the Special Spring. We hope she keeps going with it!



Ah, and evidence of another World Book Day Pug costume. Love the pug costumes.



After our event, I changed out of Pugs gear into something a bit more comfortable and ran into James Mayhew back in the Green Room. James does live drawings at concerts with full orchestras backing him, which sounds incredibly daunting, but he pulls it off with panache.



Oo, and it's Cathy Brett, who was waiting for Jo Cotterill to arrive to do their event about Electrigirl, their book that's not quite a comic, not quite a novel, sort of a mix of several things.



My second event was right next to the awe-inspiring Sheldonian Theatre with its mad-looking heads.



And right there at the base of the theatre, it was so great to see people reading my Dinosaur Police book.



Inside the Blackwell's Marquee, I read from Dinosaur Police and then taught everyone how to draw silly T-Rex characters. We got some good ones from people of all ages!



Here's Andrea Reece who organised the children's part of the festival and invited Philip and me. Thank you so much, Andrea!!



We had dinner with Andrea, our fabulous OUP publicist Harriet Bayly, Philip Womack and Seonaid MacLeod (pronounced 'Shona'), who was at the festival bigging up a Reading Ambassadors scheme, promoting reading for pleasure. Besides the great company at Brasserie Blanc, we got to order a Baked Alaska, which we hadn't had since Philip and I first signed our contract for Oliver and the Seawigs. And it was JUST AS TASTY.



Right before I headed back to the station, I stopped by the Eagle & Child pub (where the Inklings used to meet) to see friends Sally Nicholls and her new baby, comics friends Jenni Scott & Richard Buck and their kids, and my amazing OUP designer Jo Cameron. The kids were very excited and sitting is hard in a pub, so we ended up doing lots of drawing, which always suits me just fine!



(You can find out about more of my events over on the events page of my website.)

This year's been a busy one! I thought I'd do a roundup of the books I've worked on this year, and a little peek behind the scenes, and who made them happen!

Here's my second solo picture book with Scholastic UK, Dinosaur Police:



I'd had such fun drawing sharks with BIG TEETH for There's a Shark in the Bath that I thought it would be fun to do something else with BIG TEETH. And dinosaurs were the obvious choice because I was dinosaur-crazy as a kid. And I also liked to build little worlds out of LEGO. So I got to build a dinosaur world! Here's some of the original artwork on my desk, painted in liquid coloured inks:



Combining dinosaurs with police was my editor Pauliina's idea. Her son was really into cops and robbers stories, but she hadn't seen a lot of recent books on the subject. And we were getting so much bad press about cops from US news stories, that I thought it would be great for kids to see cops in a good light, doing what they should be doing, so we get good sorts of people going into the police force, not people who as kids learned that it is a free place to be a bully. Here's how a page happens, from a 'thumbnail' doodle, to a pencil rough, to a finished painted page.




And here's just a small part of my Scholastic team! But these are the people I worked with most often: designer Rebecca Essilifie, editor Pauliina Malinen, and publicist David Sanger, who was wonderful on stage at festivals in Hay and Bath as DINOSAUR DAVE. (Click here if you want some free Dinosaur Police activities from my website.)



My friend and former studio mate Lauren O'Farrell (aka Deadly Knitshade) is always great with the extra fun stuff! Not only did she make an awesome dinosaur fascinator for the launch of Dinosaur Police, but she designed, knitted, and wrote the pattern for our Pugs of the Frozen North pug! (You can download the pattern from my website here.)



My artist friend Eddie Smith was a big help with costumes, designing my Dinosaur Police hat! (Full costume photo by Jay Williams for The Telegraph.) And here's tailor Esther Marfo sewing my costumes!




Which leads us on to... PUGS OF THE FROZEN NORTH! Everything to do with this book has been pretty epic.



There was a crane. There was a stage show. There was a Pugs Roadshow tour.


2nd photo by Jody Lawson, third photo by Anna Gordon for The Guardian.


And the Oxford Children's Books team was massive. Together with the foreign rights team and the sales reps and the printers, there must have been well over 100 people working on this book, very possibly more. Here's our designer Jo Cameron, publisher Liz Cross and editor Clare Whitston. And I have NO IDEA who these masked people are but they tweeted a very eerie photo(!) ...and let's just call them the rights team. Because I don't have a picture of them, but they worked SO HARD to get us published in a zillion languages. (They include Valentina Fazio and Anne-Marie Hansen, among others!)



Publicists Elaine McQuade, Keo Baxendine, Harriet Bayly, Sarah Howells:



Alesha Bonser, Liz Scott and, of course, my fab co-author PHILIP REEVE/a> (and a team of excellent pugs).



And the final book I worked on this year was quite a small job, because so many people were working on it! I only drew two pages, but it's a lovely book.



Confession time: I actually drew these pages for the Puffin Post magazine... just before it was discontinued! So I had these pages, and when Macmillan asked if I could contribute something, I was pleased as punch that they fit the format. Hurrah!



Two other people have been very involved in all these books: my amazing agent Jodie Hodges, and my lovely and supportive husband (who's soldiered on through some crazy work schedules), Stuart. Thank you so much, guys!

I love how the town of Kendal in the Lakes District puts on a good display when it's time for its Lakes International Comic Art Festival!



One of the highlights for me of comic festivals is when I see young comics creators publishing their own work and experimenting with fun ways to market it. Check out this great stand by Zoom Rockman! (He's been publishing since he was eight years old.)



Here's his Skanky Pigeon character and, hey, a few friends and I have little cameos in The Zoom comic!




When I first saw Zoom at LICAF, he was drawing grumpy faces onto the spuds he put into his Unhappy Meals (shown here). He's @The_ZoomComic on Twitter.



And hey, two more familiar faces!



Here's Jordan Vigay, whom I first met at Animated Exeter festival, and then again at The Phoenix Comic festival in Oxford. He publishes The Red Crow comic. (He's just joined Twitter as @JordanVigay.)



And here's Jonny Toons, whom I first met at Thought Bubble festival in Leeds. His comics magazine's called Crystal Orb and you can follow him on Twitter at @JonnyToons.



And this week The Bookseller reported that both Jordan and Jonny will be contributing to The Phoenix Comic, which is very exciting!



The other awesome thing about LICAF was being there when Philip Reeve and concept artist Ian McQue met for the very first time! Ian's art is hugely inspired by Philip's Mortal Engines quartet, and I think Ian's artwork has helped shape how a lot of fans see that world now. (Here's an early image of the traction city of London.) I had dinner with them and it was fun seeing them be such mutual fanboys. Philip's Railhead publisher, Oxford Univerity Press, commissioned Ian to do several book-related images, and here's his digital painting of a Hive Monk:



I wasn't able to go to their Railhead event because I had an event at the same time (gah!!) but I hear it was packed-out and amazing, with Ian doing live drawing while Philip did readings from the book.


Photo by Sofi Croft on Twitter

Philp and I felt honoured to be asked to features our new book together, Pugs of the Frozen North, for the festival finale show. Here on the Reeve & McIntyre Sofa of Mystery are some top snow scientists we discovered in the audience.


Photo by Jody Lawson on Twitter

It was fun meeting people after the show; check out this beautiful crocheted pug! (Here's a free pattern if you want to try knitting a pug!)



And we even had our portraits drawn by a couple member of the audience! (Thanks to Forbidden Planet for hosting that signing.)



Other exciting things: seeing Skipton-based comics collective Team Ketchup and their second comic anthology.


I think Jody Lawson took this photo, too!

Hey, spot the yeti from when I illustrated the Summer Reading Challenge! So fab!



I didn't have a lot of time to run around buying comics, but I really, REALLY wanted to get copies of the 24-Hour Comic Marathon publications. I took part in the 24-Hour Comic Marathon last year (you can read my comic here) and it was a gruelling thing to do - make a 24-page comic book in 24 hours - but a lot of fun, too, and sort of therapeutic to pump out a book that fast, and then have it printed and ready to sell the very next day. (Publishing can feel so SLOW sometimes!) And here are all six comics from this year, completed the day before I bought them!



Emma Vieceli was one of the artists who took part (and she's also a LICAF Patron):



Here's John Allison's comic:



And Jade Sarson's!



Here you can get a peek of some of the interiors...



Check out this page of Jonathan Edwards (Jontofski)'s 24-Hour Comic, and its pencil rough! He painted the pink tones first, then drew the black ink on top. Such beautiful compositions. Hopefully all six comics will be collected into a book, like the 24 by 7 book that Fanfare published of our comics last year.



Dan Berry and Richard Short also made 24-Hour Comics. But not all the comics that weekend were drawn on paper; Joe Decie (who took part in the 24-Hour Comic Marathon with me last year) painted a comic with acrylic pant on a wall in the walkway between two pubs.



You can see more photos here on Joe's Tumblr page.



The other terrific thing I saw at the festival was The Three Rooms in Valerie's Head, a performance by writer David Gaffney, comics creator Dan Berry and musician Sara Lowes. I had no idea what to expect - Dan gave me the tickets on the street - and it was FASCINATING. Dan, David and Sara were like a band, immersing us, the theatre audience, into their weird and wonderful story. We could see them looking to each other for the timing, and it was fun watching Dan's face as he could see and hear people's immediate response to each panel of his comic on the screen while David Gaffney gave a dramatic reading of the text. There weren't any speech bubbles in the artwork, David supplied all the words, which made it almost like watching a rough animated film. The story was, in turns, creepy, mysterious and very funny.



Like last year, Dan had been in charge of this year's 24-Hour Comic Marathon and taken part himself again. He also teaches, and hosts the incredible Make It Then Tell Everybody podcasts, and I don't know where he found the time to make SO MANY images for this peformance, but it was wonderful. I really hope they take it on tour, to places such as the Edinburgh Book Festival; people will love this show.



Oh, and another highlight was meeting Nev the Pug, together with his devotee Laura Sneddon.



There wasn't a lot of dressing up at this particular festival, but I did spot a few ace costumes, including this Batgirl in my signing queue in the Page 45 room. (Spot my Jampires book with David O'Connell - which started with a Comic Jam! - and my picture book There's a Shark in the Bath.)



Page 45 is a terrific Nottingham-based bookshop, hosted by the hugely knowledgeable Stephen Holland and Jonathan Rigby. And Stephen was having a big birthday! Philip and I drew him a card with lots of cuddles from pugs and Sea Monkeys. (You can read Stephen's highly illustrated review of Pugs of the Frozen North on the shop website. They ship internationally!)



But I wasn't just doing Pugs events, I also hosted a Dinosaur Police event, along with a handy local police officer.



Check out the T-Rex drawings kids made!



I wasn't sure what age the audience was going to be, but we had five-year-olds, teenagers, adults, and it was good fun.



Oo, there's one by a mum, on the right. I love it when the adults get involved and draw, too.



I had everyone create a profession for their dinosaur:



And this guy started turning his Football Dinosaur into a comic. I hope he kept going with it!



Philip Reeve and I also led a Comics Jam session in Kendal Libary. (Here's a selfie with the people who took part in the background.)



The great thing about a Comics Jam is that everyone comes away with a comic, and they all take exactly the same amount of time to create!



Here are a couple of the comics people made.



Hey look, it's Dr Mel Gibson, a genuine comics doctor! And she's brought her suitcase of recommended comics for her own workshop.



I could tell a lot of these kids in our sessions had comic-creator parents; the level of drawing was very high!



And it was great to catch up a bit with people I hadn't seen for ages, including the small-but-very-remarkable Felt Mistress, Louise Evans.



Felt Mistress and Jontofski are such a power couple: Jonathan draws creatures, Felt Mistress sews them, and we all get to enjoy them.



It's Supercrash author Darryl Cunningham!



And Canadian artist Kate Beaton! I love her history comics SO much and she has two new books out: a picture book called The Princess and the Pony and a collection of comics called Step Aside Pops!.



It's Asia Alfasi! I first met her at Hi-Ex festival in Inverness, but I hadn't seen her in years, and I wish I'd had more time to catch up with her. (Can someone remind me of the name of her tablemate? I used to know and I've blanked!)



Great to see Sally Kindberg and Steven Appleby:



In the pub, it's French creator Boulet, Nora Goldberg, Joe Decie, Warwick Johnson Cadwell and John Allison:



My former studio mate Ellen Lindner, over from New York City with her husband Stephen Betts:



Andrew Ruddick (aka Pud) and Emma Vieceli (who often has a hard time getting all her books at comics festivals, and Page 45 had ALL THE BOOKS. Wahey!)



Ed Hillyer (aka ILYA) and Jontofski:



Stephen Holland and Jonathan Rigby:



And, of course, a HUGE THANKS to the red-shirted team who ran the festival so beautifully! Julie Tait, Carole Tait, Angela Diggle, Phil Welch, Katie White and everyone who helped out! And my wonderful hosts at Ash Meadows Guest House, Philippa and Peter!



You guys were amazing. Follow LICAF on Twitter at @comicartfest!

Once a lonely hunter ventured out upon the ice
The wind was howling fearful cold
It wasn't very nice
Then out of the swirling snow some tiny dogs burst forth...
PUGS.... OF THE FROZEN NORTH!


Photo tweeted by Tom Gates author Liz Pichon

They said... YIIIIIP! yip YIIIIIP! yip YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP!
...And thus begins the theme song of the new Reeve & McIntyre book, which launched at this year's Edinburgh Book Festival!

Now, Philip Reeve and I might get taken more seriously by grown-ups as Proper Authors if we turned up for events wearing black turtlenecks, stroking our chins, and taking turns giving dour gazes into the middle distance. But that's been done before and isn't half as much fun.


Photo tweeted by writer Gwyneth Rees

Last year we came space-themed (photos here), and this year we started with a handy shirt my husband, Stuart, had bought years ago in a market in Moscow, and built up the costumes from there. We thought we'd avoid blue (too much like another Frozen) or red (I'm not Mrs Claus) and I love the yellow on our book cover, a look I'd borrowed from the Japanese edition of our earlier book Oliver and the Seawigs! I seldom think foreign publishers actually improve on our covers, but the Japanese totally did.



Here's our Pugs cover evolution. (And I just saw that our American publishers have gone public with a blue cover.)


Photo by Stuart

Of course books aren't ALL about cover colours and costume. But there are millions of books in the world and somehow we have to figure out how to make ours jump off the shelves. Besides, dressing up makes going on stage much easier somehow. It's like being in a play. This time the excellent Esther Marfo sewed my dress to my drawing of it. Here she is in her workshop:



And here's the icicle tiara I made, with plastic soda bottles, a comb, scissors, a candle and a glue gun.



You can learn how to do almost anything on the Internet. Here's a tutorial I adapted to make the tiara. It was a lot of fun to make, and not too tricky, after I'd messed up the first couple icicles.



And my Aunt Joy just happened to give me this dog-paw necklace on my recent trip to the USA, so thank you, Auntie! Selfie with Stuart in our Edinburgh hotel lift:



And yes, we did look a lot like traveling balalaika players. Which is GREAT, everyone loves a good long balalaika album, or two, or twenty-two. Our Oxford University Press designer, Jo Cameron, created this terrific album cover for us:



And Philip created a special edition of our standard anti-yeti spray. Very important to take along, when you're journeying to the Frozen North.




Ah, a chance to try it out in the Author Yurt, on one of Edinburgh's most famous yeti, Philip Ardagh!



Hmm... did it work?



Oh dear. Not only did it not work, but it seems to have caused that yeti to REPLICATE. ...Or wait, is that writer AF Harrold? It's hard to be sure.


Printed photo by festival photographer Chris Close

I was thrilled to bits that illustrator Steven Lenton came along to our event and took this Pugs-in-action photo. He's the first speaker in Nosy Crow's Illustrator Salon, hosting its first event in London on 14 Sept (with plans to feature non-Nosy Crow illustrators, too). Nosy Crow's Tom Bonnick set it up partly in response to the #PicturesMeanBusiness campaign to get illustrators credited for their work, and encourage people to take an interest in talking about a book's pictures and finding out more about who made them. You can book tickets to the Illustrator Salon here, and read more about the campaign at www.picturesmeanbusiness.com.



Philip and I can't imagine not bigging up both the writing AND the pictures in our book, and we love how kids get excited when they discover they can make a simple drawing and have it come out well. Here are some of the audience's pug drawings that we got to see when we met them afterward at the book signing.



You can learn how to KNIT your own pug over on my website here.





I love this girl's drawing of me, and Philip and me in our preferred way of arriving at book festivals.



After we finished our first event, Stuart, Philip and I popped over to Blackwell's Edinburgh to meet Fiona and sign some copies of our various books. (You might still find a few signed Pugs books there if you're quick.)



Thanks for the lovely write-up, Fiona! :)



Then it seemed appropriate to pay our respects to Edinburgh's own canine hero, Greyfriars Bobby. (You can read his story here.





But it wasn't all PUGS at Edinburgh, that was just the latest book! I also had a storming DINOSAUR POLICE event to do. Here was the view of Edinburgh Castle on the second morning, from the stairwell in our hotel.



I donned a vintage frock and yellow gloves I'd found last week in Seattle with my sister and met up with Dinosaur Dave, aka David Sanger from Scholastic UK. Dave made a great dinosaur, roaring, rampaging around the tent and falling asleep on the floor and snoring loudly, right in the middle of the stage. Thanks, Dave!



I wore my lucky Officer Brachio badge, stitched by Sami Teasdale.



And here are some T-Rex drawings!



In Dinosaur Police, Trevor the T-Rex escapes from the pizza factory with pizzas still stuck all over his body, so a lot of these dinosaurs had food stuck to them, too.



RAWWRRR!



One of the coolest thing was seeing kids who were repeat visitors, either from previous years or from the previous day's Pugs event. Thanks for coming back, guys!



And I love it when everyone draws, not just the kids! Here's a fab T-Rex tweeted by writer Pamela Butchart. Big thanks to everyone who came along! You can learn how to draw your own T-Rex and more on my website right here.



My one big disappointment about this year's Edinburgh Book Festival was that my event was on at almost the exact same time as Philip Reeve's event with his co-author Kjartan Poskitt. They worked together years ago on the Murderous Maths books, and recently have been doing the Borgon the Axeboy books together, with Reeve illustrating and Poskitt writing. (Poskitt's name also appears as a god in the Mortal Engines books.)



Of course, I pestered them as much as I could before and after our events...



...But I saw this photo tweeted by their Faber publicist of Philip lying on the floor on stage, and was GUTTED I hadn't see it myself.



When we were out and about with Stuart, we caught sight of the bus to Clovenstone, the name Philip borrowed for the land where he set his GOBLINS trilogy.



Go read the GOBLINS books, they're ace!



A few other sightings of writers and illustrators whose names you may recognise... here's writer Moira Young with Philip Ardagh:



And writer Patrick Gale, who hosted us at last year's North Cornwall book festival!



And here in the centre is the excellent person who runs the whole show, the children's book section of the festival, Janet Smyth! I got to meet all three generations! Here she is with her mum and daughter, who was also working for the festival. Huge thanks for making it so fabulous!



Oo, it's the always-super-photogenic comic creators, the Etherington Brothers! (Who are actual brothers and make comics together, which is the coolest thing ever.)



And Naomi Alderman, who writes the scripts for Zombies, Run!, among many other things.



With writer-illustrator Steve Anthony:



Comics creator Jamie Littler, who recently illustrated a book with writer Danny Wallace:



Liz Pichon's Tom Gates fingernails:



Writer Nicola Morgan has done loads of work for the Society of Authors CWIG committee (Children's Writers & Illustrators Group) and done research into why Author Visits to schools are such an important thing in getting kids excited about reading, writing and drawing, and advice on Author Visit fees.



Amazing double-act, illustrator Steven Lenton and Tracey Corderoy (and friends):



Illustrator Emma Dodd:



And I even got to catch up and draw with some of my Scottish relatives! Here's a picture I drew of Eve and Callum at dinner:



Stuart and I were so busy at this festival that we didn't get much time to wander about, but we did take a good walk along the Royal Mile and see all the other performers, which made me feel very normal in my own costume.



Excellent elephant puppet:



Big thanks to Janet Smyth, my Scholastic team Dave Sanger and Sophia Pemberton, our OUP team Elaine McQuade and Keo Baxendine, Joely Badger and all the staff and volunteers who made the festival run so smoothly.



And biggest thanks to lovely Stuart, who read through my Pugs script with me, listened to my ukulele practicing, helped me zip up costumes, helped carry luggage, and generally made the trip more pleasant. My hero! :)



I meant to draw a nice festival round-up picture on the train, but I was so shattered that this was all I managed:



If you missed our events in Edinburgh, we're gearing up for the PUGS ROADSHOW, so check on my Events page to see if we stop near you!

You can read Philip's Edinburgh blog here, and the Bookwitch has already blogged about our Pugs event here.

Today's official launch of my new Scholastic UK picture book, Dinosaur Police, involved quite a lot of preparation, but not all of it by me. Deadly Knitshade and her crew of dinosaurs were very busy:



And I was BAKING, something I almost never do!



Then we all gathered at the Herne Hill bookshop in south London, Tales on Moon Lane, which had a lovely display of loads of the books I've worked on:



My sculptor friend Eddie Smith had been busy making my hat (for Hay Festival and the launch), and here he is with my Dinosaur Police editor, Pauliina Malinen:



And the hats were terrific! Check out Deadly Knitshade (aka Lauren O'Farrell):


Photos tweeted by @deadlyknitshade






Look at this Officer Brachio badge, stitched by Sami Teasdale! She gave it to me at the end of the day, totally amazing.



My excellent Scholastic publicist, Dave Sanger, and I did a little Masterchef cooking demonstration: how to make a dinosaur pizza.



And everyone dug in to the various Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous tomato pastes, swamp cheese, chili, mushrooms, everything needed to make a particularly sweet pizza.



Then I swapped hats because my big one kept getting tangled up in the chandeliers. I did a reading... (photo tweeted by Deadly Knitshade)


Photo tweeted by @deadlyknitshade

And Dinosaur Dave acted out some particularly emotional parts of the story:



Then we did some drawing and a song. Look, here's my husband Stuart's drawing! (You can download more drawing activities over on the Dinosaur Police webpage.)



Then we went out to the bookshop back yard for bubbly and book signing and Pauliina gave a fab speech:



Big thanks to Pauliina, my designer Rebecca Essilifie, Dave, Scholastic, Tereze, Juliet and staff at Tales on Moon Lane, my studio mates (Elissa Elwick, Gary Northfield and member-at-large Lauren O'Farrell), web designer Dan Fone, and Stuart for being so supportive! And to everyone who came along for the launch! Lauren shot a Vine video of me signing a book:



But Tales on Moon Lane wasn't our only stop! Earlier that morning Dave and I had taken part in a smaller Story Time at Dulwich Books, which was also good fun!



As Philip Ardagh pointed out, we even made the newspapers, ha ha... Young Holly managed to capture the rascal on paper:



Big thanks to everyone who came along! I also took off my big hat after the intial introduction because I think its sheer size was scaring one of the littlest guys in the front row. (It's better designed for big stage events, I think>)





This event was the first time Dave had drawn with me in public AND his first public outing in a dinosaur onesie. VERY BRAVE.



Big thanks to Sheila and Annie for hosting us!





And one last thanks to brave Dinosaur Dave.

I had my first Dinosaur Police event yesterday, at the Hay Festival in Wales! And I got to wear my brand-new dinosaur-inspired hat! My sculptor friend, Eddie Smith created it (the same guy who helped me build the giant Seawig and talking cake hat), and my local tailor, Esther Marfo, made the dress. (Oh, and I made the book!)



This photo's by Jay Williams for Telegraph Books, and I was awfully excited to be included in the gallery between Pam Ayres and Virginia McKenna, both of whom I got to meet in the Green Room. Here's a doodle of my awesome Scholastic UK publicist, Dave Sanger, bravely helping me on stage to lead the audience in a very rousing rendition of the Dinosaur Police SONG. It might not have been the most tuneful number on the day, but we all sang it with great gusto. (Thanks, Philip Reeve, for writing the lyrics, and Sarah Reeve, for teaching me some ace uke chords to play with it!)




Here's Dave, sheltering from the rain under the umbrella of my enormous hat. Oh... and I have some exciting news about David!



Not only is he a fab publicist, but he's signed a book deal with Quercus for a book for adults, All Their Minds in Tandem, coming out next spring. Yay, Dave! I can't wait to read it.



So for our event, we did some drawing, and some roaring, comics, and general mucking about.



I showed everyone my way of drawing Trevor the T-Rex, and here's one of the drawings from a girl in the audience named Grace. We discussed various possible dinosaur professions, and this one's a dinosaur astronaut. (Here are some guides on my website to drawing dinosaurs, if you want to have a try.)



And it wasn't just people in Wales drawing dinosaurs; here's a picture tweeted in from South America of Inspector Sarah Tops at the same time by Mercedes Ortiz!



And then I got to sign and draw in lots of books. Thanks so much, everyone who came along! (Photo tweeted by Steph Roundsmith at @kidsrwreview.)



Big thanks to the other Sarah, who managed our event, and Glyn Morgan (@GR_Morgan), who was working another event but made me feel very famous by pulling me aside for a photo to tweet.



Actually, a lot of us had fun with the hat. Here are authors Ed Vere, Holly Smale and Tom Moorhouse.



I only had time to go to one event, so I went to see Holly give a talk with Megan Farr and Arabella Weir. Holly and Arabella have both written stories about teenage girls very much like they were as teenagers, and it was kind of funny because I think it they'd met each other as teenagers, they would have loathed each other. Since they're both grown-ups now, they can talk about these things in a friendly sort of way, but I think the audience could still feel the undercurrent of their semi-fictional teenage selves at war. (Which made everything way more interesting than if they'd been very similar.)



The most surprising question actually came from a child in the audience, who said: "You're both obviously very intelligent women. So why are you writing books for children?" (Cue a big intake of breath from several people up front and in the audience who make books for children.) Holly and Arabella answered it well, saying that it can be even harder to write for children, because children don't let writers hide behind unnecessary literary nonsense: either a story works for them, or it doesn't. In fact, Holly didn't even set out to write for children. She made the Geek Girl protagonist 15 years old, and that's what made the editor decide it was a children's book. Both Arabella and Holly said they never dumb down allusions and jokes because they're writing for kids, and Holly pointed to Shakespeare references in her stories.

Both writers said it's harder to make people laugh than cry, which I very much agree with. It reminded me of a line tweeted recently by Ewa SR:



Being funny doesn't mean being dizzy or less talented, on the contrary, it takes more skill.



Another thing that takes a whole lot of skill is moderating talks. Big cheers to people who moderated MANY talks, including Daniel Hahn (who was compere for 18 talks during the festival!) and the Telegraph Book's Martin Chilton, who also had to read a whole lot of books and ask a lot of good questions. Here's Martin, looking lovely in the dino hat. (And yes, he DID suddenly sprout a lavish blond fringe.)



I was sad to miss illustrator Jamie Littler's event with Danny Wallace, but I hear it was a storming success. (Here he is, with the newspaper rose we were all given.)



One of the hardest things about this year has been not having enough time to catch up with friends. And this festival was wonderful for that. On the first morning, I came out of my bedroom at George House to find my great friend, writer Moira Young, also coming downstairs to breakfast. Yay! Here's Moira, with wonderful Shirley Smith, who lives in the house and turns it into a guesthouse once a year, just for the festival. I stayed with her in 2012 and was thrilled to be back.



And it was great to catch up with Moira and her architect husband Paul. Another big treat was getting to have a girly slumber party with Holly Smale, when she found she wouldn't be able to catch the last train home. After dinner, we stayed up WAY too late chatting in the pink bedroom, in our little twin beds, then came back together on the train. Good times.



And the other people who made it a fun visit was the group of Norwegians at the festival - a 'noggin' of Norwegians as I've decided they're called - and they took me out to dinner on the first night: Helga and John Rullestad (who hosted me in Norway for the SILK Festival) and their good friend Odd Henning Johannessen. (Thanks so much, Norwegians!)



Thanks so much to Mary Beard and Heather Salisbury at Hay Festival for inviting and looking after me, Shirley for putting me up, Dave for being my glamorous dinosaur assistant, the team at the Hay Festival bookshop, Dave and Harriet Bayly for the second night's dinner, drivers Darren and Mark, Sarah, the stewards and everyone who made the festival run so smoothly and be so much fun. And big thanks to Eddie and Esther for all the costume help!

It's so exciting having a picture book launching right now, but getting the word out about it is a real team effort! Here's my friend, the sculptor Eddie Smith, turning his hand to millinery to make my hat for my event at the Hay Festival this Thursday. I think it will just about fit in my enormous suitcase. Maybe! We'll see.



And wonderful Ghanaian tailor Esther Marfo has been sewing my dress, from some wonderful African material I found in a shop near my studio. I love walking into her tailor shop: so much colour and amazing patterns everywhere.



So, see you at my first Dinosaur Police event, if you're at the festival in Wales. A brand-new event for a book is always slightly nerve-wracking, but my fab publicist Dave Sanger is going to help me when we sing the new Dinosaur Police song, and I got help with that, too: Philip Reeve wrote the lyrics and Sarah Reeve wrote the music and found some ukulele chords I could manage to play. I need help, I just make books, but there's so much more to telling people ABOUT those books!



In the meantime, it's great seeing what other people are getting up to. Check out these wonderful pictures tweeted by Mercedez Ortiz (@Literati101)!



Mercedez has set herself a great project. Here's what she writes on her blog:

There are no illustration courses in my city, and I couldn’t decide on what books to pick or which online classes could offer me the training I need. Not knowing where to start, I was sketching everything I saw, picking tips and tidbits of information here and there, drawing like a headless cucaracha. No matter how hard I tried, I knew all that wasn’t taking me anywhere.

Fortunately, on January I found The Guardian’s How to Draw… series, with piles of easy to follow step-by-step guides, prepared by some of the most amazing children's book illustrators in the world, and that treasure-trove inspired me to come up with this project!

The Project: Every day for a year, from February 1, 2015 to January 31, 2016, I will make an illustration inspired on what I’ll learn from each of these guides, doing some crazy experiments based on such lessons, and post the resulting illustration on this blog.

I’ll try to find my style throughout the whole project, which means that I’ll be trying to add my own flavor to the illustrations, besides exploring and experimenting with different materials and techniques.



Isn't that terrific? Here's her drawing based on my Trevor the T-Rex doing the Charleston, and Astra, from my 'How to Draw Astra' sheet on the Cakes in Space webpage.

I love it when people don't wait to be assigned art projects and actually go looking for them. That's pretty much what it was like when I studied for my Master's Degree at Camberwell art college; the people who waited around to be told to do things didn't get very far, and the people who excelled were the ones who grabbed every opportunity. They weren't so worried about good marks: they were looking for holes in their experience and skills, and how they could find ways to plug those holes with training and practice, wherever they could find it. Mercedez looks like one of those people, setting herself projects and going for it.

And here are two more plugs for my BIG OFFICIAL DINOSAUR POLICE launch day! Saturday, 6 June, mark your diaries!

* Storytime and drawing fun at Dulwich Books at 11am (see their website for details).

* A big party with snacks (and a bit of bubbly for the grownups), story, drawing and music at Tales on Moon Lane at 2pm! (Here's their events website).

Be sure to pre-book, and hope you can come along! Here are the two different event posters:

I told Trevor the T-Rex to put on his party clothes for the upcoming launch of Dinosaur Police ...I quite like his style, I might copy it sometime!



Normally Trevor is bumbling around Dinoville in his yellow-and-white-polkadot pants. Here's how to draw him, if you get the urge! (More downloadable drawing activities over on the new Dinosaur Police web page here.)



On Saturday, 6 June, my publisher Scholastic UK and I will be taking part in not one, but TWO Dinosaur Police events! One in the morning at Dulwich Books and one in the afternoon at Tales on Moon Lane in Herne Hill. The one at Dulwich Books is free (but you'll need to book) and will be a smaller session but lots of drawing fun, and the one at Tales on Moon Lane will involve drawing, singing, snacks and a bit of bubbly for the grownups. You need to book for that one, with a £2.50 ticket that can come off the price of the book if you buy one.



So see which one suits your family's schedule, and hope to see you there! :) Dressing up VERY welcome (but not obligatory). Thanks so much for hosting, lovely indie bookshops!

RAWR!!! Join me and Scholastic UK for the launch of my new picture book, Dinosaur Police!



Tales on Moon Lane, a lovely indie bookshop in Herne Hill, south London, is hosting the big party in the afternoon (2-3pm, with a signing after), and if you can't come to that (or it's more convenient), pop over to Dulwich Books at 11am for a smaller storytelling, drawing and signing session. A full day of dinosaurs! And it's optional, but if you want to dress up dinosaur or police themed or both, that would be FABULOUS. There is a small booking fee for the big party (£2.50), but if you buy a book, they'll deduct if from the cost of your book. I hope you can come, and if you have any friends that might enjoy it, please let them know! Here's the Facebook Event Page, if you want to let me know you're coming.


Photo by Elissa Elwick

My web designer Dan Fone has just posted the free activity sheets on my website, so now there are fun things built in that librarians, teachers, parents, adults who like to colour, can print out. (You could even use the colouring sheet and drawing tutorial to make a Pin-the-Pizza-on-the-T-Rex for a Dinosaur Police themed birthday pizza party!)



Here's a close-up of How to Draw Inspector Sarah Tops:



I tested this out on Twitter, to see if the steps were too complicated. So big thanks to these people for helping: @sillyweeowl, @alexthepink, @froyoho:



@helenclarkjones, @nelliejean, @crgn:


@paper_teacher took it to school and got her class to try!


And @MehsiLovesBooks went the whole way to lovely colour:


Please to check out the new Dinosaur Police web page, and if you have any friends who love dinosaurs or police stories, point them in this direction! If you want to tweet or Instagram your drawings, I'd love to see them, and use the hash tag #DinosaurPolice!

My brand-new picture book with Scholastic UK, Dinosaur Police, isn't scheduled to come out until the beginning of June, but it's already starting to pop up in the shops! Here's a sighting by writer
Jeff Norton:



And the dinosaurs are EXCITED! If the books aren't in the shops yet, that's okay; they will hover by the doors and make nuisances of themselves and terrify the more faint-hearted customers until the boxes arrive.



My web designer Dan Fone has just posted the free activity sheets on my website, so now there are fun things built in that librarians, teachers, parents, adults who like to colour, can print out. (You could even use the colouring sheet and drawing tutorial to make a Pin-the-Pizza-on-the-T-Rex for a Dinosaur Police themed birthday pizza party!)




Here's a close-up of How to Draw Inspector Sarah Tops:



I tested this out on Twitter, to see if the steps were too complicated. So big thanks to these people for helping: @sillyweeowl, @alexthepink, @froyoho:



@helenclarkjones, @nelliejean, @crgn:


@paper_teacher took it to school and got her class to try!


And @MehsiLovesBooks went the whole way to lovely colour:


Please to check out the new Dinosaur Police web page, and if you have any friends who love dinosaurs or police stories, point them in this direction! If you want to tweet or Instagram your drawings, I'd love to see them, and use the hash tag #DinosaurPolice!

I'm excited to say that I have a new picture book coming out with Scholastic UK very soon! In fact, it might even start hitting shops in the next week or two!



When I first met up with my editor, Pauliina Malinen, I'd been wanting to write and draw a book about dinosaurs, and she had the idea of adding the 'police' element to it; her son loves cops-and-robbers stories, and she could think of hardly any recent books on the theme. Part of me thought, Yay! Fun action adventure! And part of me felt nervous. There have been a lot of horrifying police stories in the news lately (such as this one), about police taking advantage of their power and abusing or killing people. I wondered, are nice grandmas really going to want to buy a police story as a gift for their grandkid, or are people going to shy away from the theme? I thought, well, I can just focus on the dinosaur side of thing and brush the police element under the carpet when I try to promote the book. Hmm...



But then I had second thoughts. Actually, we NEED stories about police who are better than the ones in the news stories. Kids need to realise that police brutality isn't the norm, and if they want to be a police officer, they don't go into it to beat up people but to look after the community. If kids only hear stories of police shooting tasers at people, it won't draw the kind, caring ones into the profession when they grow up, just the bullies. Bad police officers need brought to justice, but good stories about good, professional police offers are important, too.



Dinosaur Police isn't an 'issue book'. It's a fun romp, with chases, and construction equipment and a Pterodactyl air squad. It's something I hope will get kids excited so they can go play Cops & Robbers inspired by this kind of story. The baddie T-Rex isn't an evil mastermind, he's silly, and very naughty when he gets over-excited and hungry. But his actions cause a lot of damage and problems for the community and he needs to be stopped.



The Dinosaur Police have a history with Trevor the T-Rex: he's been naughty before, and so they know what works with him, even though they still make mistakes. When they catch him, they don't send him to jail, he ends up doing community service to make amends for his crimes. But this is a lively picture book, and I hope kids will like to see the creative way the mayor comes up with a work plan for him!



My studio mates and I actually work right next to a police station - close enough to holler out the window if we need them - and we've often heard their sirens and seen them in the station eating their little pots of yoghurt. Our building is the former police station, but it wasn't equipped for modern policing, so it's full of artist studios now. In fact, the building itself doesn't have a very nice history - bad things happened in decades past, particularly to black people - and I'm glad it's not used for that any more.



The building even still has the old jail cells. Here's Gary Northfield and Viviane Schwarz in one of them. They often get used now for art installations and one's rumoured to be haunted.



When the three of us first moved into the studio, we called our studio the Fleece Station, because it was in a police station and we were all making comics about sheep at the time (Vern and Lettuce, Derek the Sheep and The Sleepwalkers).



And animal police pop up at the end of Vern and Lettuce. So it wasn't all that surprising I came out with a book about animal police. (And dinosaurs are very cool animals.)



Here's a new banner for my public Facebook page, if you'd like to add me there and get updates. And I hope you like the story!

To find out more about #HourlyComicDay, click here to read my previous post! (Oh, and my picture book Dinosaur Police launches with Scholastic UK this spring.)























Thanks for reading! Here are some peeks at my upcoming picture book:

I've been wanting to talk about this book for ages, and Scholastic UK have finally tweeted a photo of the cover! So yes, look out for this book next spring!



Here's a look into my studio, when I was using a dip pen and ink to trace the pencil sketch onto the watercolour paper.



And here's the day I brought in the final cover artwork! Met Team Dinosaur Police! That's designer Rebecca Essilifie and editor Pauliina Malinen. We've put together a great dinosaur romp for you; we hope you'll like it.



Warning: contains pizza. Lots of pizza.