Rainbow Class

As part of Birmingham's Young Reader's Festival recently, I got to meet some of the children from Blakenhale Infant School who, as you can see, love to paint and draw!

They had been reading some of my books and gave me a selection of lovely paintings, drawings and pieces of writing, based on When Your Not Looking! and Giddy Goat.

I thought I'd share a selection of them with you. Aren't they great?

So, a big THANK YOU to all the children at Blakenhale Infants, especially Rainbow Class - I had a lovely afternoon with you!

I will be writing about the visit on my main blog later today, where you can read a little more about the storytelling afternoon we shared.

Views in Pen & Ink

These are sketches drawn on Friday, from the windows of my current studio, in the attic.

If you've been reading my daily blog, you'll know that I am trying my hand at pen and ink. I'm experimenting with various different approaches to it, both with the linear mark-making and the possibilities for adding colour.

The sketch above was drawn while standing on a stool to look out of the velux window. I spent quite a lot of time next day experimenting with colours and textures in Corel Painter until it looked like this:

This next one is from the same window, but hanging out and looking to the right. I had to do the sketch in several short spurts as it was mad weather: every few minutes it would pour with rain, really hammering down, then clear, then do it again!



I fiddled around with the sketch in Photoshop, using different light settings with several layers. Not as successful as the last I don't think, but fairly interesting.

The sketch below is looking out of a side window in the studio, towards the front road where they are building a new house. In an attempt to return to the casual sketchbook spirit, this time I tried simply picking out areas with limited tints, again in Photoshop: