Frances McKay Illustration

The Boy and the Globe

I'm delighted to say I have illustrated 'The Boy and the Globe', it's written by the dashing bard that is Tony Bradman and published by the lovely folk at Barrington Stoke.

 

The Bookseller wrote "This entertaining novel, for readers aged seven to nine, features drawings throughout by Tom Morgan-Jones which have a touch of Ronald Searle about them: it also includes a section of 'Funne Activities for Boyes and Girls'. Perfect for reluctant readers and youngsters new to Shakespeare."

 

 

 

 

Whilst the author Philip Ardagh has since thoughtfully 'corrected' the bookseller and has written "...features drawing throughout by Tom Morgan-Jones which have a touch of Ronald Mcdonald about them…". I have to say that I'm happy that either have anything to say about this new book. And can't decide which comments I prefer.

A great way to celebrate the release of our book was a visit to Stratford Literary Festival. They invited myself, Tony the author, and Mairi, the top cheese at Barrington Stoke, along to the festival. We were chuffed. Not only was this a chance to wear a new dress (for me) it was also a chance for us all to share our love of Shakespeare with Stratford and Moreton Morrell Primary schools.

 

 

 

 

I live illustrated Tony's talk and then went on to do live draw alongs, encouraging the pupils to flex their own marvellous pencil skills. Pupils at both schools voted to draw an angry Shakespeare. Who doesn't like a villain after all? It was moving to see a sea of Shakespeare faces looking back at us at the end of each session - and due to the childrens excellent skills a little terrifying too.

 

 

 

I had a ball at Stratford in my dress and I'd like to thank Stratford Literary Festival, all the teachers and all the pupils. Also special thanks to Mairi at Barrington Stoke for making it such fun, and very importantly for the choice of my dress. And of course not forgetting Tony, he was a pro, a gent, and he did write the book after all.

 

Barrington Stoke have also produced a "Make a Globe and stage the Tempest" with Boy & the Globe puppets, downloadables. If this intrigues you, have a look and give it a pop by downloading it here: 

http://www.barringtonstoke.co.uk/books/the-boy-and-the-globe/

 

 

And one last thanks, I'd like to big up the clever designer Julie-ann at Barrington Stoke, she did a great job on the whole book. I particularly liked the endpapers she created from my inkings. So for those of you that love an end paper, and in this case you'd be mad not to, here are the lovely endpapers…

 

  

Tom 'Nibs' Morgan-Jones
dip pen inker of ink, inker thinker, illustrator & cartoonist

 

 

 

Painting The Haunted Farm Window

In aid of Books Are My Bag an unsuspecting bookshop in Colchester called Red Lion Books let me paint all over their shop window. For my glass-based artistic debut I decided to depict a scene from my latest literary masterpiece, The Mystery of the Haunted Farm. In this book ghost stories meet agriculture to give you zombie ducks, ghost cows and a Frankenhorse. 

I began the window design by realising that I’d done my preparatory drawing the wrong way round and that I would have to wing it. Here’s me filled with panic doing a speedy redesign:

As it turns out painting on glass is rather tricky. Before setting out for Colchester I found myself doing some extensive googling to figure out how exactly to do this. I discovered that there’s whole forums dedicated to shop window painting (which once again confirms to me that there’s something for everyone on the internet). It seems that the best way of painting on glass and then being able to remove it again is to mix powder paint with washing up liquid instead of water so that it’s thick enough to stick and then do multiple coats. This worked fine on my french doors at home but took a bit of getting used to because painting on vertical, slippery surfaces is frankly silly.

Once I got to this stage I thought everything was going swimmingly but that was not to last. The brown and pink paint started to flake off like a kind of colourful, soul destroying dandruff. Instead of bursting into tears, which was my initial option, I added some PVA glue which thankfully stopped the flaking. I must try it on my scalp.

From then on I started to succeed and with a constant supply of tea and fancy sprinkle covered biscuits I was done just before closing time.

I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone at Red Lion Books for letting me deface their window and being so lovely about it. I’m assured the Haunted Farm window is going to stay up until it falls off, which hopefully won’t be too soon. 

 

Elys Dolan

 

The Mystery of the Haunted Farm by Elys Dolan is published by Nosy Crow and out now. You can find out more about Elys and her work at elysdolan.com and elysdolan.tumblr.com or follow her on Twitter and Facebook at @ElysDolan and facebook.com/elysdolanillustration

 

 

 

Bear Can't Sleep

My latest picture has arrived - ‘Bear Can’t Sleep’ written by Marni McGee and published by Little Tiger Press is out on 10^th September 2015.

It’s a bit of a departure for me as the illustration style in which it is painted is not my usual one. Known predominantly for my opaque acrylic painterlyness, I was encouraged by the Little Tigers to apply the acrylic paint in a looser way to take advantage of the line work produced at the design stage. 

I had to learn a whole new set of skills, buy an A3 printer from Argos and spend several happy months illustrating by the seat of my pants.

The plot of the book involves a scooter, a grumpy bear, a thermos flask, some blueberry and onion sandwiches (there was some snails in the sandwiches too, but they were reprieved at the last minute), some needlecraft, lots of jam, underwear and an accident prone hare.

 

Sean Julian

 

The Mystery of the Haunted Farm

Today is the publication day for my new book The Mystery of the Haunted Farm. If you like ghost stories and agriculture then this is the book for you. Farmer Greg is having a few problems down on the farm with things that go ‘BAAAAA’ in the night. So who’s he gonna to call? These ghost hunters of course:

Once at the farm the Ghost Hunters run into all kinds of strange monsters, ghosts and ghouls but there’s something odd about them. Here’s a few of those creatures as seen through the Ghost Hunters field notes:

 

 

 

Can the Ghost Hunters figure out where all these spooky animals are coming from and solve the mystery of the Haunted Farm? Maybe, but not without a bit of a surprise along the way.

In the process of making a picture book sometimes bits get cut out, a bit like outtakes. As a FMI exclusive I will now reveal to you the most scandalous of all the Haunted Farm outtakes, Farmer Greg in a towel! 

Perhaps it was for the best that it got cut out.

 

The Mystery of the Haunted Farm by Elys Dolan is published by Nosy Crow and out now. You can find out more about Elys and her work at elysdolan.com and elysdolan.tumblr.com or follow her on twitter and Facebook at @ElysDolan and facebook.com/elysdolanillustration.

The Unlikely Outlaws

The Unlikely Outlaws, written by Philip Ardagh, illustrated by Tom Morgan-Jones and published by Barrington Stoke has just been released.

Here the brilliantly bearded Philip talks about the release of this book.

"The Unlikely Outlaws, illustrated by Tom Morgan-Jones is an interesting book for me. It's made up of three books: two previously published and one about to be published, all about The Green Men of Gressingham and all illustrated by Mike Phillips. The Green Men of Gressingham are a bit like Robin Hood's merry men, except that they wear brown -- the Green Men that is -- because it's cheaper and hides the dirt better. And their boss is a lady called Robyn-in-the-Hat. With me so far? Good.

Anyway, I was well used to Mike's interpretation of the characters. Then along came Tom who made them all his own. Of course, Big Jim had to look big and Friendly had to look friendly and the evil Marshal Guppy had to look evil, but Tom's style is very different to Mike's, so The Unlikely Outlaws has a very different feel to it. It's loose and crazy and zingy and zappy and all those other terms which are useless unless you've got the Tom Morgan-Jones illustrations in front of you but, if you DO have them in front of you, you'll know exactly what I mean.

 

 

Tom's fab pics add to the pace and comedy of some very silly adventures indeed. What a pleasure doing business with him."

Here's a link to the Barrington Stoke page (just look at those end papers...)  

 

Philip Ardagh

Illustrations by Tom Morgan-Jones

 

 

Three Cheers for the Extras!

To mark the publication of their new book The Clockwork Dragon author Jonathan Emmett and FMI’s own illustrator Elys Dolan have written about the little ‘extras’ inside this book.

Jonathan says:

The Clockwork Dragon is about two children who come up with a clever plan to rid their kingdom of a greedy, man-eating dragon. The children are called Max and Lizzie and the dragon is called Flamethrottle. But this post isn't about them or any of the other characters that I wrote about in the story. This post is about the book’s extras, the unnamed characters that appear in the background or in the corners of Elys illustrations.

A good illustrator doesn't just illustrate an author’s story, they extend and embellish it. One of the things that make Elys’s illustrations for the book so appealing is the wider world she’s created around the textual story. The extras in The Clockwork Dragon look every bit as engaging as the story’s main characters. And they all look like they might have their own stories to tell!

Take this first spread for example:

The action described in the text is taking place in the foreground, but there is so much more to look at and enjoy in this illustration: the kite maker entangled in string or the distracted carpenter sawing through his workbench. However my favourite extra on this spread is not, strictly speaking, a proper character. It’s this little pink elephant toy on the workshop floor.

It has such a magnificently supercilious expression, as if it feels that its involvement in this slapstick scene is beneath its dignity. This next spread, showing the town square, is teeming with characterful extras…

… but the ones that immediately caught my eye are this family with the polar bears.

Who are they? And why do they have such unusual pets? These characters are part of a visual subplot that unfolds over the following pages. When Max and Lizzie make a nighttime visit to Flamethrottle’s cave, we see the dastardly dragon asleep with a polar bear tucked under his arm like a teddy.

When I first saw him, I assumed that this teddy substitute was one of the bears from the town square spread, but at the end of the book we discover he is a third member of the polar bear family who Flamethrottle must have snatched before the story started.

Pete Marley, the book’s editor, was also a fan of Elys’s extras and asked me to give some of them names so that they could be credited on the book’s endpapers.

So the polar bears were christened Fahrenheit, Celsius and Kelvin and their owners are the intrepid mother and daughter explorers Elma and Thelma Amundsen.

The supercilious elephant is not featured on the endpapers (I suspect it might have made more of an impact on me than it would most readers) but, in case you’re wondering, I think it’s a he and his name is probably Augustus.

The endpapers also have a map of “Rodney” the playfully anachronistic kingdom in which the story is set. If The Clockwork Dragon proves popular, Elys and I are hoping to revisit Rodney in another Max and Lizzie book. We already have a plot in mind and if you study this last spread of the book you might spot a new character that’s sneaked in from that story.

Elys says:

Sometimes when I’m in my studio adding polar and supercilious pink elephants that no one asked for into picture books I wonder if this is helping the story or if it’s just the behaviour of a crazy lady. With this in mind you can imagine how pleased I was to discover that Jonathan, the author who has given over his story to me and was no doubt praying that I wouldn’t ruin it, actually liked these odd details. To celebrate here’s a few of my original character sketches from my Clockwork Dragon sketchbook where I came up with all these extras. I’ll give 10 points to anyone who can spot where in the book all these folks ended up.

The more eagle eyed of you may notice the very first incarnation of Augustus the supercilious pink elephant. Now that he has a name I’ll have to give him a cameo in any future books. I just don’t think it would be the same without him.

Jonathan and I did put quite a lot of effort into developing the world in which The Clockwork Dragon takes place. I’m a firm believer that a good story needs to happen in a convincing world that obeys it’s own internal logic. I spent many a long hour designing the geography of The Kingdom of Rodney and Jonathan seems to have written its entire eccentric history (perhaps we got slightly carried away). So to mark the publication of The Clockwork Dragon I’ve done a full colour version of the Rodney map for your viewing pleasure.

If you want to know more about the places marked on it can download the official Kingdom of Rodney Visitors Guide here.

http://www.scribblestreet.co.uk/pictures/dragon2/RodneyGuide.pdf

 

The Clockwork Dragon, by Jonathan Emmett and Elys Dolan, is published in paperback by Oxford University Press on 5th February 2015.

You can find out more about Jonathan and Elys at their web sites scribblestreet.co.uk and elysdolan.com or follow them on Twitter on @scribblestreet and @ElysDolan

 

 

 

 

 

A monkey, fishing and elephant poo!‏

I’ve recently trotted over the bridge of illustration to feed on the grass of young fiction. And to celebrate I thought I’d pass on some of the wisdom my work has given me.

No matter what your occupation work can get stressful, and sometimes it feels as if you could work every hour of the week and you’d still not achieve everything you want.  At times like this, it’s important to have a little down time with your friends and family. There is nothing more efficient than a clear calm head.

Some tasks can seem daunting and unappealing from the outset, but if you really muck in and get your hands dirty you will soon be smelling the roses of your success!

 

Sean Julian

 

Fidget and Hamish

Bee Willey is launching her new book project done in collaboration with a Clown Doctor friend called Dr. Fillie Fidget. Dr. Fidget writes and performs stories based on her adventures with her sidekick dog, Hamish. 

The Clown Doctors work on the children’s wards and are funded by Suffolk Artlink who work to improve the quality of life of people of all abilities through taking part in engaging and inspirational creative activities. Suffolk Artlink’s Clown Doctors bring fun and laughter to children and young people in hospitals and hospices.

 

We have created a colouring book to complement visits on the ward, and the launch is on the wards at Ipswich  Hospital. We are also putting together an app/interactive book, as well as a blog developing further adventures…Coming soon…