Good Luck Jam!

My bezzie mate of over 30 years is moving to Edinburgh. 

We lived opposite each other all throughout our school years and shared a house in Brighton for a couple of years. We've laughed and cried and partied and danced and talked so much over the years - admittedly less and less since our boys came along but we've always had such a giggle!

I decided to send her a handmade silly fun pop-up card, as I'd been experimenting with pop-up card ideas lately. She's holding up a map of Scotland and a list of essential Edinburgh slang words - a very entertaining and educational bit of research! The card was cobbled together whilst wrangling 2 boys so there are plenty of mistakes and room for improvement, but it was really good fun putting it together and I felt like I learned a few things :)

BookFest 2017 poster!!

A little over a month to go until the fantastic children's book festival BookFest in Bedford! Last year I took my boys to see Julia Jarman, which they loved, and I ran a drop-in arty crafty workshop "Make your own poster book", which produced brilliant results, yay!

For this year's BookFest, I was asked alongside the Circus of Illustration by David Litchfield to illustrate a favourite children's book character for the poster. Ooooh decisions decisions! So many to choose from but I soon realised that some characters were really hard to re-imagine as their original image was so strong. 

In the end I decided to go with Cat in the Hat and Moonface from The Magic Faraway Tree. Although inimitable, I thought there was quite a bit of room for interpretation when reading Cat in the Hat and so I created a completely different version of him. Moonface, on the other hand was a fairly recent discovery for me so I had a blank slate, which made it a little bit easier.

The characters (from left to right) are:

Mr Toad by Andrew Foster

Moonface by me

Peter Pan by Kristina Bullen

Aslan by Katie Allen

Cat in the Hat by me

Gangsta Granny by Marisa Straccia

Max by David Litchfield

Alice by Emily Ross

The poster was put together by the wonderful David Litchfield, the type by super talented Katie Allen!