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Something strange happened this year in the New York offices of Random House Kids. Little eyes peeking around laptop screens, grabby little hands stealing cookies from editor desks. Little tails whisking through coffee cups and splashing onto book proofs. They had an INFESTATION.

...Of what, you ask? Well, they had so many lovely copies of Oliver and the Seawigs lying about that some of the Sea Monkeys ESCAPED. This happens from time to time. Here's our designer, Jo Cameron, in England, being mucked about by one of these rascally critters:



For a few hours, no one knew why so many things were going wrong in the office, but Sea Monkeys love ATTENTION and didn't stay hidden for long. In fact, they swarmed the board room, pinned down our editor and the design team and INSISTED they get full credit on the book cover. MONKEYS MEAN BUSINESS.


As seen previously in Manchester

Despite the concept of a 'Seawig' being a fine thing, the team had no choice but to give in to the wriggling hoard and accept their terms. So, in America, our book, starting in July, will be called... OLIVER AND THE SEA MONKEYS.



If you're in the USA and want the pre-monkeyed version, you'd better get on the case quickly, otherwise this is the one you'll see popping up in shops (and screeching EEP EEP EEP).

You can get lots of of fun free story-themed stuff on my website, including a pattern to knit your own Sea Monkey (designed by Lauren O'Farrell aka Deadly Knitshade):


As seen, also in Manchester


Learn how to draw your own Sea Monkey:



(Camilla's drawn a Sea Monkey, so you can, too...)



And design a Seawig!



I've also done a four-video series comics class that teachers can use with their classes, featuring... you guessed it, Sea Monkeys! Click here for all four linked videos, and do share, if you think any other schools would find it useful.



Philip Reeve and I have several videos you might enjoy:







If you're on Twitter, you can browse the #Seawigs hash tag to see lots of fun costumes, Sea Monkeys and shenanigans, or start on the new hash tag, #OliverandtheSeaMoneys.



Here's the link to our Reeve & McIntyre Facebook page! And here's the Random House page for Oliver and the Sea Monkeys.

In supporting the #PicturesMeanBusiness campaign to get illustrators properly credited for their work, I keep coming across the very similar #NameTheTranslator campaign for translator credits. And it makes sense to campaign for both at the same time, so we don't have to do everything all over again.

Translators have an even harder time than illustrators trying to build up their name as the brand for their business. Whereas most people can look quickly at an illustration and get a sense of it, very few people speak a second language fluently enough to check that an original story and a translated version both read well. It's exciting getting foreign editions of my books with Philip Reeve through the post, but I'm not fluent enough even in French or Russian, to catch any subtle nuances, and the rest could be in Martian for all I know. So unless a native speaker reports back to me, or the book wins an award, I have no idea how well our texts are translated!

But the translator's work means everything to how well the book will go down with people who read it in languages other than English. I don't have much contact with translators, other than on Twitter with Sandra Hessels who works freelance for Veltman, our Dutch publisher. So it was lovely when the Hungarian translator of Oliver and the Seawigs, Örkény Ajkay, popped up with an e-mail to say hello. I thought I'd feature him here on my blog so you can see a little bit of what goes into translating our books.




Sarah: Örkény, you're so important to our book with Hungarian publisher Móra, but writer and illustrators usually don't learn very much about our translators! We want to 'name the translator', but often that's all we can do! I wish we could do more to big you up.

Örkény: It’s so nice to hear about support for translator-awareness! We're used to saying, a bit ironically, that there are 3 true rewards for a literary translator:

1. Copyright © symbol in the colophon next to their name,

2. To read their name in print,

3. Readers’ compliments about the author of the work they translated.

The latter is the best, of course, meaning that the translator managed to convey messages and meaning of the original, and acted like a thin, transparent layer, a delicate interface of some sort, between author’s thoughts and absorbing minds. Okay, interpreters do the same on a daily basis, they are even more the unsung heroes type.

S: You say your career as a translator was kickstarted by a video game! Can you tell me a bit about that?

O: Back in the early 90s I played an adventure video game called Neuromancer with my friends. A friend of mine mentioned he had the book with the same title. This sounded exciting, so I got hold of a copy too, and after reading some chapters, I decided to translate it – without any previous experience in literary translation! It was a sudden, crazy idea, but I liked that. Translating this classic and important SF novel was extremely hard for a beginner, but fortunately I received heaps of help from the author himself! And after years of translation, I heavily revised my First Translation for reprints.

S: So you focus on Science Fiction?

O: Well, most of my translations are SF novels and short stories, yes. But many of them could be tagged as contemporary fiction. And I think fiction is the part to be emphasized.

S: How did you come across Oliver and the Seawigs? What did you think of it?

O: My then-prospective editor was seeking translators for various titles, and offered me this one. I devoured it, and thought it’s zany, it’s fun, and it’s adventure and fiction at its best. Made me recall some great funny adventure games, such as Day of the Tentacle and the Monkey Island series, so I fell in love with the book, even before I finished it.



S: Hurrah! And thank you so much for your hard work! What's it like to translate into Hungarian? Your language is so different to English!

O: Hungarian is unrelated to most European languages, and has its own quirks. For example, there is no gender in our grammar. Everybody in 3rd person singular is “ő” [o with double acute accent]. Where in English “he” or ”she” is used as needed, in Hungarian we use other words to express gender. Sometimes this requires extra creativity.

Hungarian also uses multiple suffixes extensively. Words can have various endings, depending on the given grammatical (accusative, genitive, locative, instrumental etc.) case. This can be challenging, especially when English words are used in different cases but remain the same, or when translated text should fit into an illustration.



S: What was the most challenging part to translate in Oliver and the Seawigs?

O: Besides jokes that cannot be translated directly, it was the names, I think. To find proper/common nouns for all those fantastic characters and places. The idea for proper nouns was that some names should look and feel like foreign names but should read easily in Hungarian, some should be funny in Hungarian, and all should suggest the original meaning, if any. Even the title of the book was hard to translate properly.

S: What does Olivér és a tengerkócok mean in Hungarian?

O: 'Olivér' is the Hungarian version of Oliver. The words 'és a' means 'and the'. We opted out of translating 'sea wigs' directly because it would be 'tengeri parókák' and is too long to fit in.

'Tengerkócok' is a fabricated compound in plural. It’s a pun with 'tenger' (sea) and 'kenderkóc' (hemp fiber). Latter may trigger some maritime associations like hemp ropes or traditional caulking, thus I think it suits sea adventures well. The word 'kóc' itself approximately means 'tangled fiber', but can also mean 'hair(do)', especially a tangled, fuzzy one. It is the stem of the adjective 'kócos' which is used for someone whose hair is tangled, uncombed.

S: Ah, that's perfect! The pictures have a lot of interplay between Iris's wild hair and messy seaweed.

O: The '-ok' suffix at the end contains a '–k' which is the plural indicator, while the '-o-' comes in to dissolve consonant pileup and to ease pronunciation, with respect to notorious Hungarian vowel harmony.

S: Whoa... this sounds seriously complicated. What about some of the other names in the book?



O: Some names, like Deepwater Bay, Forgotten Mesa etc. were translated literally. The mermaid 'Iris' remained, just written in Hungarian form, 'Írisz'. 'Cliff'; was transformed into 'Szirtesó', being a portmanteau of 'szirt' (primer meaning of cliff) and 'tesó' which is derived from and used for 'testvér' (sibling) but also means 'buddy'. 'Crisp' became 'VanMersze'; which comes from the expression 'van mersze' meaning 'he/she has courage'. In this written form it has also a foreign German-ish, Dutch-ish look for Hungarian readers.

The 'Thurlstone' became 'Nagycudar' meaning 'the big(and)mean'. 'Mr Culpeper' became 'Paprimorc úr'(we put the 'Mr' behind the name). 'Paprimorc' is a portmanteau of 'paprika' (red pepper) and 'morcos' (morose).

S: Ha ha! Mr Morose Paprika! I love it.

O: 'St Porrocks' was a subject of long trying. The 'St' prefix in Hungarian is written in a full 'Szent-' form (too long), and looks way too Hungarian, suggesting a fictional local town. Which would have been confusing since Hungary is a landlocked country, and St Porrocks is by the sea. So I created the name 'Ottahollax' instead. This is a compressed and phonetically written form of 'ott, ahol laksz' which translates word for word as 'there, where you live'.

'The Hallowed Shallows' became 'a Mélységes Sekélyes'. The word 'mélységes' literally means 'it has depth' and means 'deep' as in 'deep secret', 'deep thoughts'. 'Sekélyes' means 'shallows'. Together it is an oxymoron which also suggests mystery, and both words have same structure, same adjective suffixes, same vowels, and 'LY' digraphs (it sounds as 'y' in 'maybe') so it looks pleasant as well.

S: Thank you so much for all your attention to detail! Will you be translating any other of the Reeve & McIntyre books?

O: Currently I'm working on Cakes in Space, which is a similarly lovely and challenging task for me. Most of it is done, but still needs to be finished and polished. And I hear Pugs barking in the distance.



Thank you, Örkény! You can read the first chapter of the Hungarian edition of Oliver and the Seawigs online here at the publisher's website.

Here's my favourite photo from this year's conference of the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators in Winchester: debut author Kathryn Evans modeling her Seawig in front of seafaring costume judges Philip Reeve and Jonny Duddle.


Photo by Teri Terry

And check out the party costumes of organisers Dom Conlon (fish bones in the beard!) and George Kirk (giant squid, with Seawig!).


Photos by Philip Reeve, George Kirk & Candy Gourlay

The SCBWI Conference is a great chance for long-time friends and total newbies to meet up, celebrate their books, learn how to make and pitch new ones and generally muck about.



Photos by Candy Gourlay</a>

I've been to the conference before, but this was the first time I had a few hours to wander around Winchester, which looks sparkly and gorgeous in the run up to Christmas. Philip and I bought mulled wine at the Christmas market and I bought earmuffs; it was all very cosy.



Obligatory lovely Winchester Cathedral pics:



Actually, this was the view of the cathedral from my hotel room!



The cool thing about Winchester is that anyone who sleeps within a stone's throw of the cathedral gets two little elf-priests to sit at their feet all night. (Well, perhaps historically.)



SCBWI treated us to a nice dinner on the first night (and I wore my new Esther Marfo dress, love it love it).


Photo by George Kirk

We found out it was illustrator Clare Tovey's birthday so a bunch of us rallied to make her a cake.


Photo on left by George Kirk

Philip and I gave the opening keynote speech and George Kirk did an amazing job introducing us by playing a song she'd written for us on the ukulele. Wow!


Direct YouTube link

Thanks, George! Philip and I led everyone through a few of the activities we do with kids, to engage them in our books, including drawing, singing and creating and playing a giant board game.


Tweet (and pug) by @JoolsAWilson, photo by George Kirk

Then we got to listen to a talk by illustrator-write Jonny Duddle, who has a background in designing characters for computer games and who designed the pirates for the recent Aardman animated film. I loved hearing about his year at sea, when he got to crew an actual old-style pirate ship, which is sort of my dream; and how photos he took from that year became such valuable reference images for his later pirate picture books.



Despite posting those costume photos, I didn't actually get to go to the evening's fancy dress party. Philip was the Reeve & McIntyre ambassador while I kept a long-standing date with my husband Stuart back in London to go see the play Farinelli and the King. (Here's a picture of the glowing candle-lit Duke of York's Theatre.)



But it was great to see people being so creative! Well done on those costumes, guys, and it was fun popping in to see the conference illustrator exhibition!


Tweet by @SwapnaHaddow

One more photos of Nicky's Seawig; isn't she glorious? :D


Photos by Candy Gourlay

Huge thanks to George Kirk (here's her blog, Jan Carr, Dom Conlon, Candy Gourlay, Mo O'Hara, Suzie Wilde, Natascha Biebow, local P&G Wells booksellers and everyone on the team who helped to make the conference run so smoothly!

Yesterday was an exciting day for Oliver and the Seawigs when Oliver, Iris, Cliff the rambling isle and a jabber of Sea Monkeys picked up a UKLA Award! UKLA is the UK Literary Association and I've heard this award called 'the teacher's Carnegie' because it's judged entirely by teachers and it's a big honour to win it. Here's coverage in the Guardian:


(Read the rest of the article here.)

Even the journey to the ceremony in Nottingham felt a bit special when, in honour of Wimbledon tennis, East Midland Trains surprised everyone with complimentary strawberries.



My co-author Philip Reeve snapped pictures of me busily making a #PicturesMeanBusiness cover for my phone.



When we arrived at the National College for Teaching and Leadership, we ran into fellow Oxford University Press-published author Gill Lewis, our Seawigs publisher Liz Cross and UKLA's Joy Court (who's been very helpful with the #PicturesMeanBusiness campaign).




And here's writer Jo Cotterill, and Sarah Howells from OUP who was looking after us for the event.



We were supposed to be schmoozing teachers before the ceremony but Reeve was most uncharacteristically reserved.



Here's UKLA's Lynda Graham opening the ceremony with a slide of all the shortlisted books for the three categories of awards.



We got to see teachers talk about each book and how they'd used in their classrooms and how the children had responded to them.



I loved hearing from these kids about Oliver and the Seawigs. Check out the knitted Sea Nonkey, and that boy in the middle had made a clay version of Oliver!



While Seawigs won the main 7-11 award, Heather Butler's Us Minus Mum received a special commendation for dealing with death and grief. It was great to see a special award created for that book that will be very important for specific children going through these issues.

After the ceremony, teachers came up to us afterward and raved about how important the Seawigs illustrations were to getting kids in their 7-11 age group reading and enjoying the experience. They can't get enough of quality illustrated chapter books. Philip and I didn't go into making these books because we saw a huge niche in the market - we just thought it was a great way to tell a story - but it's amazing to hear all the testimonials of how these illustrated books really hit home with kids. Philip and I took turns giving a short speech and making this drawing, and I talked a bit about #PicturesMeanBusiness and urged teachers to encourage their colleagues to talk just as much about the illustrator as the writer when they read and do class projects on books, so kids could have two sources of inspiration instead of one.



Here's Philip and Chris Haughton mucking around after the dinner UKLA laid on for us.



Huge thanks to UKLA's David Reedy, Lynda Graham and Joy Court, award sponsor MLS, all the teachers and kids who read the huge stacks of books, Marilyn Brocklehurst from Norfolk Children's Book Centre who provided books on the day, our editor Liz Cross for coming along, and Sarah Howell for being so helpful and organised! Oh, and Philip, of course for making an ace book with me. That guy constantly amazes me with the story stuff he comes up with.



If any teachers are reading this, check out my website for free printable activities to go along with our books Oliver and the Seawigs, Cakes in Space, and the upcoming Pugs of the Frozen North.



Time to use that award bowl... it's strawberry time!

Huge thanks from Philip Reeve and me to all the schoolchildren from 120 schools in Lancashire who voted for Oliver and the Seawigs to win the Lancashire Fantastic Book Awards! The awards committee presented Reeve and I both with special fancy pens, so we could write a couple letters back to them:



The Lancashire Fantastic Book Awards is a great scheme that encourages kids ages 9-12 to love reading, not for any specific educational target, just to get stuck into reading because it's exciting, full of adventures and unexpected companionship, and something they can have the thrill of doing for the rest of their lives. Find out more about the award and the other winners over on their website. Sadly we were unable to attend the ceremony because we were doing a tour in Frankfurt, but here's a short video Reeve, a Sea Monkey and I recorded a week earlier, while were were doing our Cakes in Space show in Stratford-upon-Avon.



Thanks so much to all the schools, teachers, librarians and award team! (Oh, and to Oxford University Press and super-talented Reeve, of course, for creating such a smashing story with me.) Check out this great mural by Lowerhouse Junior School!



Love those Rambling Islands. Awesome.

Look! Seawigs have reached Germany! Here are some young rambling isles who we met last week at the European School in Bad Villbel, near Frankfurt.



Dressler, our German publisher, had asked us to go and visit some international schools to spread the word about Oliver and the Seawigs, or Schwupp und Weg as it’s known in those parts.






Our main host was Stephanie von Selchow who is the librarian at the European School in Frankfurt.



She’d arranged for us to do two sessions there, for her own students, and a visiting class from Textorschule, Sachsenhausen. A lot of the kids had already read Oliver and the Seawigs, so after we’d talked a bit about it we went on to Cakes in Space, which has just been published in Germany as Kekse im Kosmos. Most of the audience spoke good English, and it seemed to go down well... of course, some of the show needs no translation; the bit where I hit Philip over the head with a mandolin case goes down well in any language.



That afternoon we had a quick wander around Frankfurt, and tried to draw some of the odd but attractive nobbly linden trees which line the riverside.



They're quite tricky trees to draw, and I'd love to have another try at them. One of the school kids had a picture of this kind of tree in his Oliver and the Seawigs artwork and he got the funny shape of it just right.



Then it was off to the Literaturhaus restaurant, where we had dinner with Stephanie and some of her colleagues from ESF and other schools.



As you can see, it was very grand, and the food and company were first-rate.



The next morning we were picked up by Manuela Rossi, who whirled us down the Autobahn to Bad Villbel, where we talked Seawigs and Cakes to some of the students of the European School Rhine Main.



Utte, the librarian there, showed us some of the great artwork the children had produced, including this fantastic tower of houses. It looks a bit like a Traction City out of Philip’s Mortal Engines books.



Most amusing question of the day: Where did you get those GIGANTIC SHOES?



Then it was back on the Autobahn to yet another international school, Accadis in Bad Homburg.



We’d met Samantha Malmberg and Caitlin Wetsch from the school at the previous night’s dinner, so it was good to see them in their natural surroundings, and meet their students, who were VERY EXCITED TO SEE US.
Some of the classes had done whole whole projects on Oliver the Seawigs, complete with some great drawings.



And after that we had a little bit more time to mooch around Frankfurt...



...in the guise of Mitteleuropean crime-fighting duo Peek & Cloppenburg.



Strange things were going on in Frankfurt city centre. Nobody seemed to be bothered by the fact that the shopping mall was being devoured by a wormhole…



But we discovered a natty German-style TARDIS and were able to save the day.



And we both found excellent covers for our pop albums, should we ever find time to write and record them. Here’s Philip, waiting for the Trans-Europe Express…



Heaven knows what mine is going to sound like.



But whatever it is, it will be lovely: some things are Better Than Perfection.



Thanks to Stephanie, Utte, Sam and all the staff and volunteers who helped to make our visit to Frankfurt so enjoyable. We were very sad to leave!

My co-author Philip Reeve and I were so excited to get a message from our International Rights Manager Stella Giatrakou, saying she'd heard from French publisher Seuil that Oliver and the Seawigs had won an award in Switzerland! It's the Prix Enfantaisie, organised by Payot bookshops and the Swiss Institute for Youth, and they've been doing it for 20 years; 3,000 children voted for Oliver et les îles vagabondes from a selection of five books.



We weren't able to go to the Geneva International Bookfair to accept the award because we had already agreed to go to the Stratford-upon-Avon lit fest. But I knew the perfect person in Geneva to collect the award! She's Marie-Pierre Preece, the amazing librarian at the International School of Geneva, that I visited in 2012. (All the kids call her 'MP'.) Here she is on the left, with the picture I drew for her library during my visit:



And MP asked Philip and me if we could make a video for the ceremony, which we did. (Note the excellent sound effect halfway through, that was Philip's doing.)




Yes, thank you, Payot, Seuil, our excellent French translator Raphaële Eschenbrenner, Stella at Oxford University Press, and MP! Here's MP collecting the award at the book fair, next to the winner in the other category, Max Ducos, for Le Mystère de la grande dune.



And MP signing our books! She wrote in an e-mail:

The second picture is me signing your book. The kids asked for a signature and I said, 'Well how, if the illustrator is not here?' and then one of them said, 'But you, Miss, can't you sign our books?' and I couldn't resist! But I signed 'de la part de', so all is honest and good.



Some of the kids spoke English and were able to understand the video, and MP translated for the rest. They also had some questions. So I rang up Philip on Skype this morning and we've answered them together. A big thanks to everyone who voted for our book!



Questions from Swiss readers:

* Did you use a computer to create the illustrations?

Partly, yes! I started out by using old-fashioned dip pen and ink, and scanned those black-and-white drawings into the computer. In Adobe Photoshop, I added the blue colour (which is gray in some of the paperback versions).



* Where did the idea of vagabond islands come from?

Sarah: Philip had the idea to write a sea story, and we originally thought it might be about a dog that washed up on a beach. But I was telling Philip about how I'd been to a meeting of the Children's Writers & Illustrators Group (part of the Society of Authors), and the acronym for that is 'CWIG'. I pronounced it 'Seawig', and joked that I'd love to draw a picture of islands with stuff piled up on their heads. (I'd just been drawing a lot of monster wigs for an exhibition.) Philip said, 'AHA! That's just what we need for this story!' and it all started from there.

* Why did you choose the sea and not another type of environment?

Sarah: Philip and I both grew up near the sea and love it. The sea is also the closest thing on earth that we have to an alien planet; scientists are still discovering strange alien creatures in its depths. So it's natural to think that any kind of creature could come out of it.


Little Sarah with her sister, Mary

* Where did you get the idea of the characters in the book?

Philip: We wanted a character who could go off and have adventures so we made his family explorers. Sarah really likes mermaids, so we decided we'd have him meet a mermaid. And the other characters just popped in when they felt like it.

* Why is the boy called Oliver? is there a link with somebody you know?

Philip: We were walking along the banks of the Thames while we talked about this story and we came to a place called Oliver's Wharf...

* Where did the idea of Sea Monkeys come from?

Sarah: From comics! In the American Archie comics I read growing up, there was always an advert for Sea Monkeys, and I never believed that, for only a dollar, they would look like the ones in the picture. But I did wonder about them.



* Did you go around the world like Oliver's parents?

Philip: When I was little, my parents took me around England, Scotland and Wales in a campervan, a bit like Oliver's Explorermobile.



Sarah: I grew up in Seattle and did travel quite a bit with my parents, to places in the USA and to Scotland, England and France. Recently we all went to China together, and I made a travel comic about it that you can read here.



* Did other books inspire you?

Philip: Yes, but too many to name.

Sarah: In the beginning of creating our story, I thought a little bit about The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in the Narnia books, and the seagull in Watership Down, but by the time we'd finished creating our story, it was something completely different.

* How long did it take to write the book?

Philip: Including all the illustrations, about a year? We came up with the ideas together and I went away and wrote it, which took about a month.

* What books did you like as a kid?

Philip: Tolkien, Asterix, Tintin, Rosemary Sutcliffe.

Sarah: The Twenty-one Balloons by William Pené du Bois, In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak, collections of Calvin & Hobbes comics.

* What are your favourite books?

Philip & Sarah: We both love Geraldine McCaughrean's The White Darkness.

* Why did you become writers and illustrators?

Philip: Because there's nothing else I can do!

Sarah: I've always loved drawing and writing gives me the chance to decide what I'm going to draw.

* Since when have you been a writer?

Philip: Since I was five. But my first published book was in 2001, Mortal Engines.

Sarah: Me, too, since about five. I made a book called My Fish. (You can read it all here.)



* Did you go to a special school to become writers and illustrators?

Philip: I went to art college but mostly I learned to write by just writing.

Sarah: I studied Russian at university, with a focus on Russian language and literature. But then I lived in Moscow for two years and discovered amazing Russian art and got very inspired. Over the next six years, I illustrated quite a few books and then went to art college for two years to study illustration.



* How is it to live an author's life, how do you organise your days?

Philip: I don't organise my days, they just happen.

Sarah: Days can be so different! One day I might be working at my desk, then the next day I might be traveling to talk about my books in front of hundreds of people on stage.



* Do you have another job?

Philip: I do illustrate sometimes for other writers.

Sarah: Sometime publicising the books feels like a whole second job! I once wrote an article about how I have a fleet of clones helping me with all the work involved in being an illustrator.



* Will there be a follow up?

Sarah: Yes! The characters won't be the same - Philip and I wanted to come up with whole new worlds for each book - but they'll all be adventure stories. We've published one called Cakes in Space (or Astra et les gâteaux de l'espace in French, published by Seuil). You can learn how to draw some of the characters here on my website. And our next book is coming out in English, Pugs of the Frozen North, and hopefully in French, too!


Photo by Sarah Reeve

My friend Laurence wanted some company doing his homework today and I amused myself having a little chat with him about copyright. ...Actually, his © is completely valid! He doesn't have to register copyright anywhere to make the picture completely his. When he draws a picture, he immediately has the copyright. (Whether he can defend it, is another thing.) We got the leafy layout idea and adapted his poster from the cover of Gary Northfield's comic book, Gary's Garden.



One of the most exciting things about my job is seeing people who've been inspired by my books, using them as a jumping-off point to creating their own pieces of artwork, costumes and stories. Look, it's a Sea Monkey jumper! And the chap who's wearing it also named Oliver! Big thanks to his aunt, who designed and knitted it and sent the photo to my co-author Philip Reeve and me!



Check out this Oliver and the Seawigs bedroom wall mural, tweeted by @Brazgosuperstar. Pretty amazing!



Hurrah! A Lego Rambling Isle, wearing a Seawig, tweeted by Andy Lacey.



When the Children's Book Club met up at Booka Bookshop in Shropshire, they made their own Seawigs! (If you'd like a Seawig template, you can download one here off my website.)




And one more, a photo of a very realistic-looking Seawig, tweeted by Gareth P Jones.

If you visit the island of Utsira (the one in the radio Shipping Forecast, in the North Sea, off the west coast of Norway), you may spot a little eeping Sea Monkey on one of the rocks. And you may wonder why it's there. Well, here is its story...



If you read my last two blog posts, you'll know I've been taking part as a barnebokforfatter (children's book author) in the SILK Festival in Skudeneshavn, on the island of Karmøy. When Utsira island librarian Margrethe Djønne saw me in the programme earlier in the year, she asked if Stuart and I would like to make a detour to Ustira for a couple nights, to visit their school. So after the festival, Margrethe (Maggie) and her mother picked us up at the local cafe and drove us from Skudeneshavn to Haugesund, where Stuart, Maggie and I caught the evening ferry boat.



Whenever we'd mentioned to Karmøy people that we were going to visit Utsira, they'd suck in air and shake their heads, warning us about the rough sea passage and telling us to lie down flat on the ferry to avoid getting sick. And that evening WAS quite windy.



We didn't sit up on the deck, no one did; everyone stayed on the lowest floor of the passenger section. And I thought the advice about lying down would just be for visiting tourists, who didn't have their sea legs. ...Nope. The ship was pitching like a galloping horse in slow motion. By the end of the 70-minute journey, EVERYONE was lying down flat.

But the advice was sound, no one got sick. At Utsira North Harbour, all the passengers put on their shoes and headed out into the darkness. And gosh, is it DARK on Utsira. Island resident and artist Marit Edie Klovning picked us up and drove us to a fisherman's house, where Maggie jumped out to collect some crab he'd caught for us, and his mother had prepared. Then Marit drove us all up the hill, stopping to turn the car headlights onto a mural on the water tower, painted of the island's first female mayor. The first female mayor in all of Norway, in fact, a midwife named Aasa Helgesen, who served from 1926 to 1928. In the dark, her massive head looked quite scary.




The car beams next lit up a white house, where we'd be staying for the next two nights. Maggie and Marit led us into the house, stocked the kitchen and showed us where the linens were, then disappeared back into the night. We lit some candles to make the place feel more cosy, delved into the food bags and feasted on crab and freshly baked bread.



We weren't exactly sure where we were. As the wind wuthered outside, we did a bit of exploring, first the kitchen cupboards:



I'd been talking with a lot of Scandinavian crime writers earlier in the week, so we got a little bit too imaginative about what Kylling, Farinsocker, Finger Salt and Grillkrydder might be. Next the bookshelves, where I pulled out these two rather special books:



We couldn't read anything, but the people in them looked rather jolly. I think the one on the left might be writer-illustrator Alex T Smith in a previous life. The one on the right might be one of my great-aunts or something.



We went to bed, the wind still howling. We woke before sunrise the next morning, and in the dark blue sky, I could see an old lighthouse outside our bedroom window. I ran around outside to see where we were, getting my socks all wet.



That white house in the middle is where we were staying. It's the Lighthouse artist residence, and it's where the island hosts people who come to work with the school or put on a local exhibition.

Here's a photo of the lighthouse again, taken a bit later in the day:



And the view from the base of the lighthouse:



I got dressed up in my Jampires costume and Marit picked me up in her car to take me to the school, while Stuart stayed behind, with his own plans to hike around the island.



I thought that we'd only driven a little bit of the island the previous evening, but I quickly realised we'd already covered almost the whole place. Utsira is very small! Here's a map, with the Lighthouse marked in red. The 'Utsira kommune' is in the same building as the Library, right next to the school:


Map from Google Maps

Utsira is basically a pile of rocks with a valley down the middle, a harbour at either end. I took this panorama later in the valley, and you can see a surprising amount of landmarks from a single location: the harbours, the school, the library, the restaurant, the shop.



Marit swung by her son's house, with a big split rock out the back, which is where she gets her married surname 'Klovning', which in English would be 'Clovenstone'. (Which is also the name of a place in Edinburgh and the country in my co-author Philip Reeve's book Goblins.)



And we swung by the South Harbour for a peek. That flat white building to the right of the red boat house is where people might also stay if they were overnatting on Utsira.



Then we arrived at the library! Wow, Utsira Library is well stocked! The first thing I saw was a little exhibition of Tove Jansson's Moomin books:



Maggie had put two of my books on display - There's a Shark in the Bath, Jampires and Oliver and the Seawigs - and I spotted quite a few other familiar names, too. Here's Maggie showing their Francesca Simon section. ('Rampete Robin' must be the Norwegian variation on 'Horrid Henry'.)



I drew a little poster for the library (something I often do, to make sure the flip chart pens really work):



And then the children arrived! My first group was the younger half of the school's 22 pupils. I showed my books to them and read Jampires, then we all drew Jampires together.



Jampires are a bit like vampires, but instead of blood, they suck jam out of doughnuts. I love how ours all had different personalities:



Then we talked about our favourite foods and they invented their own story creatures:



Here's a Pancakepire:



A Tacopire:



And a Pizzapire:



When the older half of the school arrived, we drew Sea Monkeys (from Oliver and the Seawigs and I led them in a Sea-Monkey-themed Comics Jam.



The idea was that we'd all draw four panels of a comic, but between each panel, we'd switch papers, so we'd be writing each other's stories. (Here's more information on running a Comics Jam.)



Utsira Library has a great comics collection for its size, and I wish I'd had more time to browse. Here are some interesting-looking comics Maggie showed me:





And picture books, too. This first one's a scrapbook of an artist's travel books, I think:







Maggie said that people don't tend to use the comics section very much, but I hope the kids I worked with will be inspired to explore a bit more in it. I mentioned my favourite comic, Calvin and Hobbes, which is called Tommy & Tigern in Norway, so maybe they can start with that one.

One funny thing about visiting Utsira: I'd assumed my visit would be kind of a big deal because they would get less visitors than your average school. But this was not the case! They have a decent budget for their cultural programme, a school cultural officer named Knut, and they bring in people regularly. So we didn't even have time to finish the Comics Jam because they were off to see an Oslo dance troupe perform! And I got to come along.



The troupe - Panta Rei Danseteater - led them in a warm-up, then put on a quite sophisticated modern dance about an old woman's diary, mortality and the passage of time.



After their performance, four of schoolchildren (who'd been working with the dancers) performed their own choreographed dance. And then the dancers sat on the floor and did a Question & Answer session. (And we all took a photo.)



The school theatre was new-built and gorgeous; apparently the community had been campaigning hard for the budget and won. The dancers had brought their own flooring, which rolled away into their van; then they pulled away the black curtain backdrop to reveal enormous windows overlooking much of the island. Amazing.



Lunch time with Maggie with Knut, the cultural officer, catered by the island's shop.



Maggie also asked if I wanted to meet the kindergarten children, and I said yes. But I was expecting they'd be four or five years old, and they turned out to be infants as young as a year old. (More of a day care, really.) They looked at me in slight bewilderment when I pulled out my ukulele. But they seemed to like it best when I drew a Jampire for them, and I left them, happily colouring it in.



Here's one of the mums, Katrine Klovning, collecting her son in a little onesie she'd knitted for him:



Stuart wasn't back when I returned from school, so I thought I'd set out by myself to explore the island, and went around behind the Lighthouse. Apparently Utsira is a birdwatching paradise; in peak season, there are more types of bird there than people. Oh look, North Utsira and South Utsira beach huts:



Even though I was wearing wellies, the ground was incredibly rough, and I have sudden visions of pitching onto my face and not being discovered by anyone but the birds and sheep before nightfall.



So I went back onto the main road, and met a fresh-faced Stuart coming up the hill. Hurrah! He'd already walked all the way around the rough parts of the island, but he came out again to walk along the roads with me.

I love this barn:



Such great textures and colours.





I made Stuart go all posey in his lovely new Norwegian jumper. (We actually bought it at a second-hand shop in London, still with the tags on. But we saw very similar jumpers being worn there, so he didn't feel like a silly tourist and wore it almost every day.)



Check out this Warhol-inspired barn:



And speaking of soup cans, we had to visit the shop, to see what sort of things would be on sale when it's the only shop on the island. It was a wonderful shop, with loads of fresh produce, pretty much anything you could want. But I thought the canned food section was the most interesting because of the mysterious (and occasionally funny) labels. (What is 'Snurring'? A herring that snores?)



I recall a childhood song that went, Fish balls, fish balls, yummy yummy fish balls/ fish balls, fish balls, eat 'em up, YUM. (Or was it 'fish heads'? Anyway, I got the song stuck in my head for awhile.)



Lots of Lapskaus.



Kjøttkaker and Sodd. Heh heh.



But we didn't eat out of a tin that evening, it was much better than that. Maggie had talked with Daniella De Vreeze and Hans Van Kampen, who run the island's restaurant, Dahmsgård Utsira. They weren't planning to be open that evening, as it's not peak season, but they opened just for us and Danielle made us one of the most tasty dinners I've ever had.



Not that it was overly fussy-fancy, it was just perfect; Daniella knew exactly how to prepare the mushroom sauce for the monkfish, and the vegetables were so tasty; the ice cream meringue dessert had some sort of special texture that was incredible.



And lovely wine to go with it. Not at all what we'd expected to find in such a remote place! Here are Marit and Stuart:



And we were also joined by Arnstein Eek and Atle Grimsby, who work for the Utstira Kommune administration. It's funny asking people there what they do for their job, because everyone ends up doing a lot of jobs on an island, so nothing's entirely clear. Atle first came there because he loves the birdwatching, and then never left.



The only reading preparation that Stuart and I had done was on the airplane, from a book by Charlie Connolly that I'd had kicking about the house for almost ten years, called Attention All Shipping: a Journey Around the Shipping Forecast. I'd never managed to get through it, so I ripped out the pages that we'd need (which was perhaps a bit naughty, but there you go). It was quite illuminating, and I learned that people from Utsira are called 'Sirabu' (not Utsirans). And, of course, our dinner companions knew all the people mentioned in the book, and Atle's Facebook-friends with Charlie.



We didn't get to see Daniella for most of the meal because she was busy cooking, and Hans helped her serve. But Hans disappeared for awhile to help with the washing up, then we got to see both of them for awhile. They're Dutch, and bought the old school house about four(?) years ago to do up as a restaurant. They'd never run a restaurant before, just an art gallery, but Danielle had done a lot of catering for the gallery - over a hundred people at times - so she knew lots about cooking already. I think they said that they visited Utsira, found out the site was up for sale, and came up with a business proposal, right there on the island, in three hours. They're pretty awesome. They remind me a bit of a Danish film called Babette's Feast, about a French woman who brings fine cuisine to a rugged little island in Jutland. There's one other place on the island you can eat out - a pub that serves pizza, chips, sausages, that sort of thing, but it's definitely worth popping into Dahmsgård Utsira, even if just for cake and coffee.



The next day was Art Day; I'd been talking with Marit about her work over dinner and really wanted to see her paintings and studio. And Maggie and a few others had mentioned that they wanted me to add to the mural collection of the island, and I said I'd be up for that. So Marit took Stuart and me to her place, where we met her family and had some lovely breakfast.



It was such a cosy house and table, her daughter was warm and friendly, and her grandson was super-cute. I love this photo, it looks like some sort of half-remembered Nordic painting.



Marit's husband used to work as a carpenter (and built their house, studio and workshop) but turned his hand in later life to becoming a fisherman, which he now does with their son.



Here's some lovely cinnamon cake Marit made:



And more nice packaging (this time it's pâté).



While I was talking with Marit's daughter, Marte Eide Klovning, I asked about her job, and it turned out that she's the island's mayor right now. She travels quite a lot, to go to meetings and things, so Marit juggles being a babysitting grandmother with making her artwork. I love the theatre poster hanging in her studio loo, with Marte on the left. I think she said it's a play about Aasa Helgesen, Utsira's (and Norway's) first female mayor.



Marit showed me a few of the paintings and drawings she had on display in the main part of the house:



This one in the kitchen's called The Maker, and has a real bit of lace stuck into it. Marit likes the idea of 'making' as much as 'painting'; she sees herself as much as a Maker as a Painter. I think I'm like that, too.



And here's a large one in the lounge. Until this trip, I never thought of Norwegian beaches as beautiful places, but they have soft white sand as good as Hawaii's (just less sun).



After coffee, we went around to the side of the house, to the separate building that's Marit's studio. You can see it there on the left, through the trees.



The first things I noticed were all the portraits on the back wall. Utsira had a Jubilee celebration of and Marit set herself the task of painting a portrait of every single woman on the island, from the youngest baby to a very old woman (104, I think). Many of them bought their portraits from her after the exhibition, but she still has some of them. I can't remember the exact number of portraits, but it was near 100.



The boxes were another part of the project; Marit likes looking for interesting driftwood on the beaches and she made these boxes out of bits she found. Again, there's one for each woman on the island, and it represents having a little space of one's one. Marit explained that a lot of people don't stay on the island, particularly women, and to keep living there happily, one really needs hobbies and a rich inner life. So these boxes are a bit like the things each one of them treasures around herself.





Marit had already sold this painting, but she showed me a postcard of it. I love the northern light on it; so atmopheric.



And this one, too. I once took a class at university on Northern European Landscape Art, and true to form, I've forgotten almost everything. But I have vague memories of other Scandinavian painters who use this sort of light in painting, and there's something very magical about it.



Here's a peek into two side rooms.



Marit's used some antique linens and lace effects in her paintings.



I was so pleased that Marit came to my talk on Skudeneshavn, and then took the time to show me around. Thank you so much, Marit!



The island prides itself on its mural artwork that's been springing up during the past few years. You see this light bulb as soon as you get off the ferry:



And there's a Norwegian video with a bunch more paintings shown here. I was starting to think I'd run out of time to paint a mural (which was okay with me) but in the last two hours, Marit kicked everyone into gear and raced me over to the school to paint a Sea Monkey on one of the rocks on the playground. I was quite happy with how it turned out, despite the rush, and I liked the location, where the little kids would be able to see it.



Then Marit and Arnstein Eek escorted me to another place to do a second mural, in a housing development by the North Harbour, and I expected to paint on one of the big blank walls. But that wasn't what they had in mind. Another artist, inspired by the Gaza conflict, had painted a sniper pointing a gun at a child with a balloon. And while the residents didn't mind the politics so much, they didn't like coming up the stairs in dim light and being confronted by a gun man. So they wondered if I could do something with it.

...Yikes! I didn't know what to think! Would the artist be angry with me for defacing his work? (They didn't manage to record the name of that particular artist.) What might I be saying, politically? I didn't know! And the ferry was leaving in 40 minutes. Marit helped me and we got to work.



Oh boy. What had I done? Well. Marit and Arnstein and another guy there seemed much happier about it.



The politics of Sea Monkeys. I don't even know; don't ask me to write a paper on that one. Also, we caught the ferry.



I was sad to leave. The Sirabu were so kind, and looked after us so well. The island is beautiful. I hope I can go back one day.



Big thanks to Maggie, Marit, the teachers, Arne, Arnstein, Daniella & Hans, Borislav the Bulgarian and the Englishman who both gave us lifts, everyone who pitched in to make the trip so wonderful. You can follow Utsira Kommune on Facebook if you want to follow their news. (I think the community is more active on Facebook than Twitter.) And they also keep a blog here.



The ferry ride back to Haugesund was much quieter, only about a quarter of the passengers were lying down, and some were reading and chatting. John Rullestad from the SILK Festival met us at the dock and took us back to the Viking Museum at Avaldsnes, which I'd visited on my first visit. (Stuart did a quick run around.) We had coffee there with John's wife Helga Rullestad and my new Danish friend from this year's festival, writer Lene Kaaberbøl. Oh, and of course, we dressed up.



Stuart's gone completely native.



Just before we left, Maggie handed me a bottle to put into my luggage. So this evening back in London, I took down to our neighbours gifts of Risebrød (chocolatey rice thingies) and brown cheese, and also brought along the bottle so we could all have a taste. Good stuff, Utsira Akevitt. Very strong. Thanks, Maggie! :)



(And well done, reader, if you got this far! I know this is WAAY too long of a blog post, but I did it, really, for myself, as a souvenir. I didn't want to forget anything!)









Goodbye, Norway. We miss you already. x

Do you have those occasional moments, when you're looking in the mirror and you realise you have blue hair and sparkly gloves and look like Dame Edna, that you think, how did I ever start doing this? If you'd told me I'd be doing things like this, even ten years ago, I never would have believed you.



The number one thing that struck me about the Manchester Children's Book Festival was... THE SEA MONKEYS. They were everywhere!!! Here are two that my co-author Philip Reeve and I drew for Simply Books indie bookshop just outside of Manchester, in Bramhall.



Kaye Tew and James Draper who run the festival asked us early on if it would be okay to use the Sea Monkeys from Oliver and the Seawigs for their mascot and we were thrilled to see them popping up all over the Internet before we even arrived!



The chief instigator of the Manchester Sea Monkey Invasion was Ann Lam, who's here (bottom left) with her two kids (her daughter helped her out with quite a bit of the knitting). She used the knitting and stitching pattern that my studio mate Deadly Knitshade (aka Lauren O'Farrell) designed and can be downloaded free from my website.



Check out all those awesome Seawigs!!! Loads of people made them for the Grand Seawig Parade. Here's Manchester librarian Debra Conroy looking incredible... and more Sea Monkeys!




Having the parade indoors was a great idea, as the rain couldn't put off anyone or ruin their fabulous headgear.



And I got to feel like Grace Kelly, or Evita, or the Queen, doing the balcony waving thing, ha ha.



Philip and I also visited Manchester Children's Hospital, which runs its own on-location school, and the staff had absolutely thrown themselves into the spirit of things. They said it was amazing, how many different things they could make out of a paper sick bowl!





We visited as guests of ReadWell, a wonderful charity that provide books to children in hospital. They go around with their rolling shelves (shown here) so kids can choose what they want to read. And the books are new, so that there won't be problems with infection for the kids in the isolation wards.



We led an event and a Seawigs Parade in the big lobby, and then went around visiting kids in the wards, and we could see how they'd light up when it was their chance to pick out a book. The school had enjoyed bringing Oliver and the Seawigs into the curriculum and it had inspired a lot of craft projects besides the Seawigs, including this diorama of Cliff the Rambling Isle.



It was fun seeing kids of all different ages - and their parents - getting involved and having fun, despite having some major physical setbacks. You can follow ReadWell on twitter: @ReadWellUK.



Great Seawig by Tracey Gallier! She's Assistant Head Teacher at the Manchester Children's Hospital School.



So much creativity! You can read more about our visit to the hospital over on the festival blog.



Janet and Maisie Chamberlain, both sporting fine Seawigs:



And little Joseph, who had our big flip chart Sea Monkey named after him and somehow managed to get back and make quite an elaborate lion thank you card for us before we visited him in his room. The glue was still wet! This guy was awesome, and had loads of good questions and comments for us. He had a full Seawig of decorations on his roving medical stand, which was named Mr Robot-Man.



The Sea Monkeys followed us wherever we went. When my husband Stuart and I checked into our hotel, there was one right there at reception!



And when we arrived in our room, there was a magazine with a big picture, which made me feel a bit giddy. (Thank you, Lancashire Magazine! Click on the pic for a larger image.)



When I saw that, I realised just how much costume the organisers were expecting, and they weren't going to get the six-foot Seawig, as I'd have to have arrived by forklift. And I'd forgotten my fancy gloves. So Stuart and I paid a visit to Afflecks Palace and stocked up.



Look, another great Seawig! This one's by the excellent Rachel Bruce.



A huge thanks to the team for making the Grand Seawigs Parade day so much fun! And thank you to everyone who waited patiently for Philip and me to sign and draw in your books; we hope you like them.



The night after our hospital visit and before our Seawigs Parade, we went to the opening launch event, where local drummers and dancers did some great performances for us.



The festival was also raffling off some of the Sea Monkeys, which disturbed me greatly, as I wanted to take them ALL HOME WITH ME.



Check out Ann Lam's notebook; she made some lovely sketches planning out different themed Sea Monkeys to go with different events.



And each Sea Monkey had its own profile!



Rachel Bruce and I joked that it was really an early version of a dating website, and that Zom doesn't care about looks, only brains.



Poet Laureate (and original instigator of the festival) Carol Ann Duffy officially opened the festival by reading one of her poems. This is the third year the festival has run, and organiser James Draper said they might go from doing it every two years to doing it every year, which is exciting and will take LOTS OF WORK. We passed by her office when I was looking for a mirror to fix my wig, and she works with James, teaching at Manchester Writing School, part of Manchester Metropolitan University.



I showed you the Sea Monkey picture that Philip and I drew for Simply Books; here we are outside the lovely shop, with owners Andrew and Sue Steel. They've been running it for ten years, and had no experience in running a bookshop. But Andrew was tired of his job, they brainstormed what they really wanted to do, and took the risk to do it. They really focus on being part of the community, and we saw lots of people come in for a chat and a cup of tea or a piece of cake in their little cafe, as well as buying books.



They had illustrator art everywhere. Here's a stairway painted for them by Emily Gravett as their reward for a competition:



And pictures on their wall by loads of illustrators we knew! See if you can identify any!



Sue took us to a school in Cheadle, Lady Barn House School, and we talked about Oliver and the Seawigs with them and led them in drawing Sea Monkeys. One quick teacher even managed to have a whole poster finished, made up of some of their drawings, before we left!



Thanks so much for hosting us, Lady Barn House! (And for the packed lunch you sent along with us!)



The festival's running for quite a long time - 26 June - 6 July - so we only overlapped with a few of the other guest speakers. But we were very glad to have the chance to spend time with writer Cerrie Burnell, author of a picture book called Snowflakes. Do you know the Evil Emperor Penguin comic strip in The Phoenix Comic? It's written and drawn by Laura Ellen Anderson, who also illustrated Snowflakes! We got to have dinner and breakfast with Cerrie and talked about books, including how we both felt it was important to show mixed-race families in picture books. (Her Snowflakes and my There's a Shark in the Bath both include parents from different races, but it's just an incidental detail in both, not part of the story.)



Huge thanks to everyone who made the festival possible, to wonderful Manchester-based publicist Liz Scott, who liased for us and made everything run smoothly, and to Kaye and James, who have been working their tails off for this. They're a great double act! You can follow the festival on Twitter at @MCBF2014 and be sure to keep an eye out for daily updates on their blog.



The festival's only just begun, and the Sea Monkeys are itching to try out all sorts of new shenanigans. Here's James, keeping a very close eye on them.



Goodbye, Manchester! Huge apologies to people I didn't manage to catch up with while I was there - the whole thing was a bit of a whirlwind - and I hope to see you again soon.

Wow, Manchester Children's Book Festival has gone mad for Sea Monkeys! And it's culminating in a glorious Sea Monkey explosion this weekend! Check out all the stuff happening at this Saturday's Family Fun Day.



They put out a call for knitted Sea Monkeys (knitting pattern created by Deadly Knitshade, here on my website)...



And the Super Monkey Shout-out resulted in lots of super monkeys!



If you're anywhere near Manchester this Saturday, don't miss drawing a Sea Monkey and taking part in the Grand Seawigs Parade at 1:30. (Just grab anything you can find and stick it on your head; that's what the Rambling Isles do.) Then join us at 2:00 for Oliver and the Seawigs fun! (Booking details here.)



But back to those wonderfully cheeky Sea Monkeys, I just can't get enough of them.



My co-author Philip Reeve and I will be visiting Manchester Children's Hospital with a great charity called Readwell, who supply books to children in hospital. They even raise money to buy fresh, new books for children in isolation units, who aren't allowed to touch regular library books that have been handled by other people.



Hopefully the Sea Monkeys can bring some good cheer. It looks like they're bringing it already!



Philip and I will also be stopping in for a signing at Bramhall indie bookseller Simply Books at 9:30am on Friday, and then to Lady Barn House School for more Seawigs shenanigans. Which the Sea Monkeys have been busy organising!



What could possibly go wrong?



WHAT? A ZOMBIE SEA MONKEY???



They have MEETINGS.



And they love drawing pictures of themselves.



Oo, look, one of them's making a Seawig!



And they've been going on outings! I wonder how good their driving skills are.



Oh dear, a Sea Monkey and a police bike might not be a good combination. Look out for further monkey mayhem.



If you want to see more Sea Monkeys or find out about the festival, check out their website, their blog, and follow them on Twitter at @MCBF2014, Sea Monkey wrangler Ann Lam @apytown and hospital children's book charity @ReadWellUK.

I just discovered this Oliver and the Seawigs-inspired artwork by children over on the Booktrust website! Check out Oliver and his parents, trapped in glass fishing balls:



When I saw this next one, I thought it was going to be detailed review, and then I looked at the words more closely. Ha ha! The Sea Monkeys would be SO PROUD. :D



Here are some reworkings of the front cover:




And you can see the rest of the artwork on this page (scroll down to the bottom). You'll also find artwork inspired by the other two shortlisted books for the Blue Peter Award (Whale Song and the winner, Rooftoppers).



Gosh, the Sea Monkeys have been BUSY! They're up in Manchester, getting ready for the Manchester Children's Book Festival, 26 June - 6 July. Check out this little guy they tweeted, making cupcakes!



The Sea Monkeys will also be bringing a bit of cheeky chaos into Manchester Children's Hospital School, as part of the ReadWell campaign to bring clean, new books to children in hospital and in isolation units.



There's so much happening in Manchester on Family Fun Day on Sat, 28 June! Check it out here!


And, of course, Philip Reeve and I will be leading the SEAWIGS PARADE, followed by our Oliver and the Seawigs event! Lots of chances to make your own Sea Monkey and build your own Seawig! (There's a Seawigs template here and Sea Monkey knitting pattern here, if you want to print them.) Hope to see you there. Manchester, ahoy!

I don't normally design wedding invitations (please don't ask me to do one!), but I made an exception for an wonderful old friend from university days. Her Japanese fiancé is an avid fisherman and she thought a variation on Iris the mermaid from Oliver and the Seawigs would be fun.



I did a couple variations on the line art. Here's one with a bit of colour:



Other news: did you see the collaborative comic by Audrey Niffenegger and Eddie Campbell in last Saturday's Guardian Weekend magazine? Audrey drew it, Eddie adapted it into comics form, then they both drew elements of the final panels. You can read it online here! (It's really for adults; includes boobs and stuff.)



And here's an essay by Audrey about how they made the comic. You can follow Audrey on Twitter: @AANiffenegger.

Speaking of comics for grownups, there's also going to be an exhibition of British comics, Comics Unmasked, at the British Library, curated by Paul Gravett, from 2 May - 19 August. Photo tweeted by writer-illustrator Liz Pichon. (I love the fact the exhibition are proudly calling it 'comics', not 'graphic novels'. Liz is a great example of someone who makes excellent graphic novels which aren't comics, in her highly illustrated Tom Gates books.)



I'm rather sad they haven't chosen pieces of work to display that would be family friendly, so they're not allowing in people under 16, and recommending parental guidance to accompanied people under 16. (See the website for further details.) But I'm still hoping it will be a good exhibition, and I'm pleased about how much publicity it (and comics) have been getting.

Big congratulations to Lucy Yewman, age 6, for winning Moontrug's top prize for describing and drawing her own Seawig! This one's a corker! Keep an eye on Moontrug's website as she's always running good competitions.



I just remembered, for a dinner at the Bologna Book Fair last year, I designed this Draw-Your-Own-Seawig sheet for all the adults to draw at the table. But I can't remember if I posted it on my blog, so here it is, if you'd like to give Cliff a Seawig! You'll make this Rambling Isle very happy. WHAT can you pile on his head? Use drawing, magazine collage, whatever you like! Download the PDF here. And do tweet me your results (I'm @jabberworks) or post them on my Facebook Author page, I'd love to see them!)

This weekend the Federation of Children's Book Group conference had an infestation! Two Oxford University Press publicists, both named Charlotte, both have mothers who can knit and both mothers made wonderfully cheeky Sea Monkeys. Here's Charlotte Armstrong, with the Sea Monkey who kept cracking jokes, asking how to get this lady off its bum.



We had several people ask where they could get a Sea Monkey, and the answer is... you can knit one yourself! Or find a friend who can! Free pattern on my website, developed by my studio mate Deadly Knitshade; do click over if you want your very own Sea Monkey.



When Philip Reeve and I first started doing Oliver and the Seawigs events, we focused more on how we met, and decided to start writing books together. But these days we're having more fun talking about the actual story. Here we are, enacting the scene when Mr and Mrs Crisp meet at the top of Mt Everest.


Photo tweeted by @FCBGNews

Now I saw this 'Going Down' advice in last Saturday's Guardian, and I'm setting out to prove them wrong.



Anyone can rock glasses and a frock if they can draw, they're wearing a squid on their head and playing a ukulele. True fact.



One of the great things about the conference was getting to hear other authors give presentations. Here's a drawing I did in pen of illustrator and writer Cressida Cowell, talking with Caroline Horn about her book series, How to Train Your Dragon.



Cressida also talked about having big films made of her stories, and how she was offered the chance to write the screenplay, but turned it down so she could focus on her books. You might have seen the first film already, and here's the trailer for the second film, coming out this summer:



Another fascinating thing was listening to her talk about her childhood holidays on an uninhabited island in Scotland, where they were able to run completely wild and encounter weird and wonderful wildlife:



The next day, after our event, Philip and I got to hear writer Meg Rosoff talk about writing, about how our brains are a sort of colander; we experience lots of things, and most of the things we forget. But some of the things mash down inside and begin to form something as they liquify and ferment, and start to create something new. She said she took comfort, years back, in something Philip said about writing books and throwing many stories away before hitting on the one he's happy with; she'd struggled with periods where she just couldn't get a book to work. But looking back, she'd realise that this time was important, is was when the story she really wanted to tell was quietly arranging itself in the back of her head. I should add that Meg also has a recent film adaptation of her book, How I Live Now, which I definitely want to see:



I didn't manage to get a photo of Meg, and the drawing didn't really turn out (I drew a colander on her head and it didn't look like her at all.) But I bought a copy of her latest book, Picture Me Gone, which I'm very much looking forward to reading. Marilyn Brocklehurst was running a great bookshop on site, so I also picked up a copy of Alex Milway's brand-new Pigsticks & Harold illustrated book, which is a lovely cross between a chapter book, picture book and comic. And Letters to Klaus, which is going out of print and contains a lovely gallery of illustrated envelopes by Satoshi Kitamura, David McKee and others. (You can have a peek at it over on Booktrust's website.)



Thanks so much to FCBG for inviting Philip and me, to Louise Stothard and Damian Kelleher for introducing us, to Marilyn Brocklenhurst for selling our books, to Hattie Bayly and Charlotte Armstrong from OUP for looking after us, to the monastery for yummy food (Worth Abbey's a gorgeous place; I'd wish I'd had more time to explore), and to everyone who made our visit so much fun!

Yesterday Oxford Lit Fest saw a sea life invasion!



Check out this wonderful Iris the mermaid costumes! It was made by Helen (@helen_geekmum on Twitter) and even includes Colin the crab and Iris's pointy specs!




Writer Jo Cotterill made these two great Seawigs!



And she tweeted this drawing by her daughter. (You can follow Jo at @jocotterillbook.)



Jo also took this photo of my co-author Philip Reeve and I leading everyone in a rousing rendition of the Eep Song:



It was actually quite a star-studded audience! Here's one of my illustration heroes, Mini Grey, who came along with her son. Both made drawings!



We got to see lots of people's fab drawings while we signed copies of Oliver and the Seawigs:


Photo by Jo Cotterill

So many details in this girl's drawing! Click on the photo for a close-up:



More fabulous Seawiggery!











Even the MC for our event, The Sunday Times reviewer Nicolette Jones (@NicoletteJones on Twitter) got into the swing of drawing a Sea Monkey! Here she is at lunch, with Paul Blezard (who still had his tan from the Emirates lit fest).



Thanks so much to everyone who came along, and a special thanks to the people who dressed up!



And who put up with my singing voice, which is as clear and melodic as Iris's:



Back in the festival Green Room, Horrid Henry's Francesca Simon asked to try on my Seawig:



And the daughter of our Oxford University Press publicist Harriet Bayly turned out to be a big fan of our upcoming book, Cakes in Space and we spent some time drawing Pilbeam the robot. (This book is the Uncorrected Proof copy, not the final version.)



I got to meet NYC-based writer Polly Shulman and her husband. Polly's written a book called The Wells Bequest, which I can't wait to read.



Oxford's always great fun to visit. Here I am, chucking Lewis Carroll under the chin, and the view from my bedroom in a hall of residence in Christ Church college.



Hogwarts breakfast! The Great Hall is pretty cool.



Reeve and I also visited The Story Museum, to see what they're up to, getting ready for their 26 Characters exhibition. Reeve has an uncanny knack of looking like a perfect Doctor Who.



We met up with The Story Museum's Tom Donegan and Neill Cameron, Philip Ardagh, Nicolette Jones and Ted Dewan in the pub. We were raving about the amazing Storyloom that Ted's designed, and just as the last few us of were about to leave, he invited us back to The Story Museum and said he'd fire it up for us. It's just too awesome to contemplate. (You can read an earlier blog post I wrote about it here.) Here's Ardagh, hard at work on it:



And this photo of Reeve is just plain weird:



Big thanks to Oxford lit fest for hosting us, everyone who took part in our event, Nicolette for chairing, The Story Museum, Oxford University Press and everyone who made is such a fantastic weekend. If you missed us, keep an eye on my Events Page to see if we're coming somewhere near you!

These have been an exciting couple days, all revolving around Oliver and the Seawigs! The big news is that Oliver and the Seawigs now has a German publisher! In fact, it turned into an auction, and Dressler, part of the Oetinger group, won the bidding war for this book and our second book, too. (Hello, new German publisher!)


A peek at pages from the Uncorrected Proof version of Oliver and the Seawigs

Our Dressler editor, Marlen Bialek, wrote: I am really, really completely in love with it! I love Oliver, I love the voice, the Rambling Island Cliff and its wig, the mermaid Iris, the albatross, etc. I am absolutely overwhelmed by the incredible illustrations ... And I could go on and on like that. What an intriguing read! This lovely book would be perfect for our list.

On Wednesday Oxford University Press brought Philip and me to St Hugh's college in Oxford to present our book at the final act of their sales conference. We talked about how we met, and how the book came about, but also had loads of fun mucking about with hats and silly wigs. Hurrah!


Philip in a Seawig, head of marketing Elaine McQuade with a mockup of the final cover design, me, our editor Clare Whitston

I made my seawig out of a panettone box, a model ship and cling film, inspired by these wigs designed by Kate Cusack.



And the we gave them a puppet show! Or, as we put it, we let Oliver and Iris the mermaid talk about what it was like to star in the book and how it was to work with us. I thought Oliver and Iris would say nice things - I mean, we gave them a story to run around in - but they dished up quite a few disparaging comments, those naughty characters.




Afterward, lots of people wanted to try on the wig. Unfortunately it was a little too big for our editor and ate off her head. But here you can see it modeled by the lady who negotiated our German deal, Valentina Fazio.



We also signed a small stack of proof copies, including one for our the daughter of our publicist, Harriet Bayly. First signed book!



Here's Philip modeling his Christmas prezzie, sea monkey cufflinks. (I made them out of Sculpey clay.)



We had a lot of fun with the puppets, we even sang a song! One of the sales reps was weeping, she was laughing so hard, which either means we were good or our singing was really, really terrible. (I can live with either or those possibilities.)

Not to be outdone by Amazon (who beat me to the mark in posting them), here are the final covers for Oliver and the Seawigs! I can't believe it doesn't come out until September, but lots needs to happen before then, selling foreign rights. Philip Reeve and I will both be promoting it at the Bologna Book Fair on Mon, 25 March. And then I guess it needs to go to the printer and get made into a book-object-pretty-thing.

Hurrah! Gary just called across the studio that I might like to look at Twitter, and when I did, I saw my lovely agent had just tweeted this!



So exciting! This is the uncorrected proof copy, which is basically a preview version, but not supposed to look too much like the final book. So the cover is completely different, and the last chapter is still my sketches, not final artwork. It's all set to go to the Bologna Book Fair at the end of March ; fingers crossed that lots of foreign publishers will want to buy and translate it! (If you know any, please give them a push for us!) :)

Gosh, I'd love to see a copy in Japanese or Korean. And if it was in French or Russian, I could sort of read it, that would be ace. I'll brush up on either language to do a reading abroad if any of you foreign publishers want to take it up. (I think my very bad accent might amuse people, at least.)

I've proposed #BCBF13 as this year's English-language hashtag, just because last year there were about six hashtags and it was almost impossible to follow (as I blogged here).

Click on this Seawigs tag to see previous peeks at the book!

Here's another little peek at what I'm up to on Oliver on the Seawigs, my book with Philip Reeve and Oxford University Press (coming out next autumn). I'm drawing mermaids! This one's a bit embarrassed. I think she's my favourite character in the book. Here's the sketched drawing and inked version on my light box.



And here's the final version, with one colour. I've always liked mermaids; I used to play with plastic ones in the bath and dreamed about being one when I grew up. I even believed I could breathe underwater, and I used to sit at the bottom of pools and lakes for ages, breathing, and very pleased with my secret. I still can't remember actually making this up, but I do remember once going into the pool and sadly realising I wasn't able do it anymore.



And here are lots of mermaids! I had fun making them look a bit silly.



Are mermaids warm-blooded or cold-blooded? It'd be helpful to be cold-blooded in our studio right now, it's a bit nippy. Here's a peek at the drawing board of my studio mate Gary Northfield, a panel in his strip Gary's Garden for The Phoenix Comic. At least his fictional character is enjoying the weather. Ha ha, I love how it looks exactly like Gary. We have also solved the problem of how to keep our toes warm.



And thank you for all your lovely tweets and blog comments! Here's an encouraging tweet in response to the hullabaloo we've been making about The Phoenix. (Do subscribe! A great Christmas prezzie!)



And wow, that library sign I made for the Mass Lobby of Parliament for School Libraries has been doing the rounds! It was just a snapshot, but I was a bit stupid not to put my name on it when the New York Public Library (1,212 shares!) and the Chicago Public Library posted it but didn't mention who drew it (darn). Thanks to those of you who let me know! But I'm glad people are being able to use the printable poster.



Thanks for the comments you've left on that blog post, so many from the USA. Exciting! Keep an eye on the Mass Lobby Facebook page, run by Barbara Band (@bcb567 on Twitter) to get the latest updates on the campaign.

Now it's back to work, I have DEADLINES GALORE. Oliver and the Seawigs is due very soon, as are a whole picture book full of pencil roughs for Scholastic. Eek! (Sarah, step away from the computer...)

Here's another little peek into the weird and wonderful work-in-process world of Oliver and the Seawigs.



For this illustration, I couldn't manage it all on one piece of paper; I thought I'd treat it more like a screen print, on different layers, even though I'm feeding it all into Photoshop.



And the finished version. I needed to send this lickety-split so it could go into the pack that Oxford University Press are taking along to the Frankfurt Book Fair. (I think the Twitter hash tag will be #fbm12.) Book designers all around the world are going absolutely nuts getting ready today, so send them lots of virtual hugs and real chocolate.



Other news: Congratulations to my friend David Lasky and Frank M. Young for the launch of their long-awaited graphic novel The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song I visited David at his studio and saw him working on this last time I was in Seattle and could hardly wait to see it all printed up. It's a real labour of love.



Here's a little peek inside:



And I haven't got my hands on a copy yet, but this is an official blurb. And you can find out loads more on Carter Family: Don't Forget this Blog.

The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song is a rich and compelling original graphic novel that tells the story of the Carter Family — the first superstar group of country music—who made hundreds of recordings and sold millions of records. Many of their hit songs, such as “Wildwood Flower” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” have influenced countless musicians and remain timeless country standards.

The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song is not only a unique illustrated biography, but a moving account that reveals the family’s rise to success, their struggles along the way, and their impact on contemporary music. Illustrated with exacting detail and written in the Southern dialect of the time, its dynamic narrative is pure Americana. It is also a story of success and failure, of poverty and wealth, of racism and tolerance, of creativity and business, and of the power of music and love.

The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song is published by Harry N. Abrams and comes with a CD of Carter Family music. Hopefully you can buy it at all good book shops and comics shops (and also on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk).

Getting things made by David Lasky through the post is always a complete thrill. Here's a parcel from him which arrived last week, with some older comics he made, a piece of artwork which I bought from his recent exhibition, and a lovely collaged envelope. Thank you, David! (He's dlasky on LiveJournal.)



The first time you see a book you've spent months, or possibly years, working on, is always wonderfully exciting, and a little scary, too. Here are David and Frank, the first time they saw their new book.

I like working on a light box on grey days. I can sort of hunker down over the cosy glow. Here's a peek at an illustration for Oliver and the Seawigs, my story with Philip Reeve (due to come out with Oxford University Press next autumn). Oh, have you seen Philip's response to being shortlisted for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize? It's a cracker. And back to Seawigs, here's Iris the mermaid:



If I look up across the light boxes, there's Gary Northfield. And look, his colour proofs for his new book TEENYTINYSAURS have arrived! The book's coming out this spring with Walker Books, and people will be able to get it in several different languages. It's going to be awesome.



I wasn't going to type anything in this blog post and just have this bit of handwriting. But half the time I do a blog entry, I change tack half-way through posting it and write something totally different to what I set out to blog about.



Another peek:



I've done an interview with Jeremy Craddock over on Bookengine, which you can read here. And here's a lovely sight from this morning, when I went to get coffee in Greenwich. Very Seawiggish.




I have to be careful that I actually still get out while I'm doing inking. I've had days when all I've done is sit at my desk for ten hours or at the computer, answer e-mails, and only stand up to boil the kettle. It's totally unhealthy and I get a bit depressed, even though I love inking. So I'm going to try to get out more in the mornings, mostly to Greenwich Park. Last year I was doing daily tree drawings there, but I still wasn't getting enough exercise because it mostly involved standing or sitting for nearly an hour, while I drew. So I tried to solve this problem by taking up running, which I loathe. But gallumphing around my own neighbourhood doesn't require a membership fee, I can try to kid myself that I like it by pretending that I'm out there surveying my territory, and I don't have to sweat away next to some smug-faced whippet in a sports bra. At a gym, I feel like a hamster, especially that part when the hamster loses its footing and goes all the way around. This is pretty much what I look like on gym equipment. I don't really get it.



Running didn't really work either; I was always putting off the running, which meant I wasn't running OR drawing. Boo! So I'm going to attempt to do one morning of running (boo) and one morning of drawing (yay!). (Ha ha... because you really need to know this, reader.)

ANYWAY. Hey, check this out. This guy at La-Mian & Dim Sum in Greenwich Market today was doing this amazing dough ballet.



And these super-disturbing cat cushions at the market were made by Sam Morris of Wonderfully Weird.



I was surprised the people in charge of taking down the Olympics site in Greenwich Park hadn't made more progress. It still looks pretty much like it did during the Paralympics, and that entrance to the park is still closed off. (Come on, get with it, people!) I spent ten minutes sitting in the colonnade at the Queen's House, drinking my coffee, and supervising the operations.



Right. Back to inking.

Note: If one more person sees my ramblings around the park, photos of bananas and random silly things on the blog and tells me, 'You obviously don't have enough to do', I will throttle that person. Just saying. (Yes, I'm looking at you, John Dougherty.)

Another peek at how I'm getting on with Oliver and the Seawigs... here's a new character: Iris the near-sighted mermaid! She thinks she's found a lovely prince or something, but actually, it's just a walrus. But at least he's polite about it. This is a work-in-progress inked version, I still need to add the blue tone.




Speaking of yummy, scrummy ink (I love ink!), here's some more ink, in an exhibition I just missed, the MA Sequential Design/Illustration show at Brighton University. And here's the super-distinguished Woodrow Phoenix, whom you might know from his contributions to The DFC (reincarnated as The Phoenix comic), Donny Digits and That's a Horse of Different Colour.


Photo from Tim Pilcher's blog

Woodrow's created a comic book that's nearly a metre square, two metres wide when it's open. When I saw this, it reminded me that I'd just been talking with someone about digital books, how so far, an e-book can't recreate the picture book experience a child has, of being wrapped up by the book. Think about when you were child-size, how an open picture book was almost as big as you were. Everywhere you looked was the world inside that picture book. And Woodrow has recreated this, for grown-ups, a book large enough to fill your whole field of vision. I found these photos over on Tom Pilcher's website, and you can click over to see a video of Woodrow turning the pages of his book. Note: Tim's comics website isn't generally child-friendly, but that particular post should be all right: link here.


Photo from Tim Pilcher's blog

The show also featured a paper theatre by Rory Walker, in a long tradition of cut paper theatres. (If you've ever been to Pollock's Toy Museum in London, you can see theatres of this kind from centuries past.) I love this kind of thing, it's not something small on a flat page, but something that wraps around you and sucks you right into the story world. (Oo, and Rory's made a lovely blog post with images of paper theatres and how he makes them!)


Photo from Tim Pilcher's blog

I think the feeling of being sucked into another world is something we can achieve through very good writing and the way our imaginations respond to that. It's why I wanted to work with Philip Reeve, who builds the most amazing worlds in his books, and he's built another, marvellous world for Oliver and the Seawigs. But it makes me think about ways I've tried to do that with images, too. Here's a version of the paper theatre I made to illustrate the line of a poem in a project I was doing with another artist in China, the London-Foshan letter project.



I had so much fun creating a picture that, if I got down to the right level and looked in, felt like I could step into it.



As a kid, I loved the opening to CS Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when Lucy, Edmund and Eustace are examining a painting of a ship, suddenly get splashed by a big wave, and get sucked into its ocean. Awesome. I remember reading in one of Lewis's books, about how he spent ages building a little garden out of moss, twigs and pebbles in the lid of a biscuit tin, and looking at it made him ache, very painfully, with its enchanted beauty. (Does anyone remember which book that was?)


Illustration by Pauline Baynes for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

I tried to create something similar in this diorama I made with my neighbour friend. She made the cave out of playdough, and then we created a world to put it in. (More photos here, if you want a peek.)



I remember the same thing with expensive Easter eggs as a child, the ones with little scenes inside them. It's strange, how looking through a peephole into a miniature world can be so much more enchanting than looking at the larger world around us. Somehow it sharpens our focus. Perhaps the tiny scale makes us feel more in control, like gods or giants. And the artificiality allows everything to be perfectly placed, and reminds us of places we wish we could inhabit, but never seem to be as perfect when we're actually there. It's a sort of longing for a perfect world, or an exciting world, or a cosy world. One of my earliest memories of having this experience in a book was reading Ezra Jack Keats' The Trip. Keats is one of my all-time favourite illustrators and all his books are magic.



In The Trip, the little boy builds a world in a shoe box, then looks through the hole in its side at the fantasy world he's created. Whenever I read this, it always filled me with a sort of awe, and I immediately wanted to go away and make my own shoe box world. Even now, I still save boxes that are the right size, planning to do it whenever I get a bit of time.



I just found this video of children talking with a librarian about the book, and it lets you get a closer peek at the book's pages.


Direct YouTube link


I've drawn up a quick-and-easy guide for starting off your MAGIC SHOEBOX WORLD, just like the one in The Trip. One place to get coloured cellophane: it's that clear, coloured shiny stuff that florists put around flower arrangements. People usually throw away this stuff, but hang on to it.




From The Trip by Ezra Jack Keats

Right, back to the studio and on to world building. In the last post, someone asked me about scanning artwork, so I'll try to answer that soon. ...If you do go away and build a shoebox world, can I have a peek?

Some more step-by-step drawings from Oliver and the Seawigs work in progress. First, a thumbnail sketch. That's supposed to be Mrs & Mr Crisp and Oliver in their Explorermobile, but I hadn't decided what it would look like at that point, so I just drew it as a blob.



This one's a more detailed pencil rough. The picture changed a lot from the original thumbnail doodle; I thought I could make the composition more sweeping and dramatic, since it's the first time Oliver sees his new house.




Here's the inked version. It's not a complete drawing; I scanned this, then added more elements in Photoshop.



And here's the final version! Do you like it? I'm rather pleased with how it came out.



I tried to put in lots of fun little details to spot. And off on the right, by the house, there's a pile of rocks, known on Dartmoor as a 'tor'. There are loads of tors around where the Seawigs writer Philip Reeve lives, and they're the most amazing natural sculptures. Here's a photo from a day when we were out oh the moor, being explorers.



You might recognise the Harley-campervan mash-up from an earlier blog post about designing the Explorermobile.



I based the house on my aunt and uncle's family fishing cottage in Seldovia, Alaska. The houses on stilts there are so fun to draw:



You can see more photos and drawings from Seldovia here, it's such an amazing place.



Here's another question. Feel free to chip in yours among the comments, and I can try to answer them as I write these posts! Here's one from illustrator Alex Paterson:



Hi, Alex! When I drew the thumbnails, I just used standard A3 printer paper. But when I did the pencil sketch, I used cartridge paper from Brighton-based Seawhite. It's pretty much the cheapest drawing paper you can buy that's still good quality, and my old art college (Camberwell) sells sketchbooks of its paper in the college shop, which I still use. When I was drawing the black lines for Vern and Lettuce, I used cheap printer paper, which was thinner and therefore easier to trace on the light box. But I can just about see through this Seawhite paper. I buy it in big packs from John Purcell Paper. (They're based in Stockwell and they deliver! I didn't know this for awhile, and hauling it from Brixton on two buses was a nightmare. Especially in a high wind, it would flap like a sail.)

Here's how I store the big packs of paper, next to my messy desk. I designed that slotted red box to fit the packs of paper exactly, and my friend Eddie Smith built it for me. (I hope the paper mills don't ever change the paper size!)



Stay tuned for more Oliver and the Seawigs blog posts!

One more thing: congratulations to my friend Caroline Smith, who appeared with a bunch of doctors and surgeons and things from Lewisham NHS Trust in last night's episode of The Choir on BBC2. Fingers crossed as her choir battles it out with the Post Office singers and two other workplace choirs!

Yesterday I posted a photo of this work-in-progress illustration for Oliver and the Seawigs:



And I got a couple questions about it on Twitter:



So here's the answer! To illustrate my story with Philip Reeve, I'm using a mix of metal nibs and a brush pen; mostly the nibs so far, because I can be very precise with them, but occasionally the brush pen for thicker lines, or when I want to fill in a large area and have it dry quickly. (India ink can take ages to dry, and I'm always having to pick gloppy bits off my scanner window.) I was playing around with the big swan feather nib, for a big blobby line, but I haven't needed it yet for this book.




I don't know if the Winsor & Newton ink is the best ink, it's just the one I found at the shop and have been using for awhile, because it's a big bottle. That said, I had to throw away at least a third of my last big bottle because it went sludgy after a couple years. And I always have a little jam jar with water in it and a paper towel to rinse ink off the nib every so often, so it doesn't clog. Occasionally I'll give a nib a really good clean by putting it in a tea cup, pouring boiling water over it, swishing it around with a toothpick, then wiping off the loosened ink with a paper towel. Comics artist Will Kirkby got me using Deleter nibs, I think he may have even gone and bought me a pack because he was so sure they'd work for me. My studio mate, Gary Northfield, uses them, and I think he also draws with Deleter ink. The wider of the two nibs is the Deleter nib and the narrow, round one is a Gillott mapping nib.



Pentel's brush pen is a lovely thing. Lots of people dip brushes into their ink instead of using brush pens, but I find this particular ink goes clumpy on my brushes so quickly that it doesn't seem to work for me. Gary got me into using Faber-Castell Pitt artist pens, the 'F' pen seems to work for most things when I need a regular sort of line, not the flexible line I can get with a nib. (All these pens have waterproof ink, which is handy when I want to add paint, but I'm not using paint for this book.)

So here's an update on the artwork progress. I'll take you through all the stages on this one. Here are the thumbnail roughs, and the same roughs but with some tone added (by tone, I mean the non-black, non-white bits).



Then the pencil rough, also with tone, because I decided I wasn't going to outline the mountain, just surround it with the sky colour to make it stand out.



And the final artwork with blue tone. I still haven't picked the exact blue I'm going to use, I really hope I can get it right. I kept the guidelines around the edges to show you what's called 'bleed'. When you make an illustration, often you need to have a little extra bit around the edges so that if the printers cut the paper slightly out of line, it won't be obvious. For this book, the designer, Jo Cameron, told me that I need to leave 5mm around the edges.



The left-hand page gives you a little hint about how Mr and Mrs Crisp first met each other. Actually, Mr Crisp looks a lot like my dad, but with a beard (photo here, scroll down). Dad's always been a big mountaineering enthusiast. When I was a kid, we always had Mr Rainier looming over us, in the same way you see Mr Fuji in postcards from Japan. My dad decided that climbing Mr Rainier would be a sort of coming-of-age thing for my sister and me when we each turned 16. So we joined his mountain climbing buddies and practiced getting into harnesses and hanging from trees to simulate falling into a crevasse, and using caribiners and Prusik slings and things to haul ourselves up. I thought I could draw an ice axe from memory, but looking at this video about ice axe arrests, I realise I got it wrong. (Note to self: go back and fix the ice axe.)



Here's what it looks like down a crevasse on Mr Rainier. It's SO BLUE! I wish I had photos from mountain climbing, but I think they're all back in the USA with my parents.



I also wish I could show you photos or a video from Mr Rainier's ice caves. When I was a kid, we visited these huge blue caves, like cathedrals, they were some of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. But they melted a bit and all fell down. Since I can't show you that, here's a video from steam vents inside the crater. I don't know the guy in the video, but I've passed either him, his dad or his brother while climbing on the mountain, I remember my dad and his climbing partner pointing out the guy. I'm not sure exactly who it was, but the Whittaker family and Mt Rainier sort of go together, they're all over that piece of rock. My dad almost worships this mountain. Some day I hope I'll have a chance to make a comic about it or something.