Frances McKay Illustration

Animating Lordship Lane

I was thrilled to be one of the artists chosen to take part in the Animating Lordship Lane art trail last month. I was commissioned by Fantasy High Street to create a window display for Just Williams toy shop that responds visually to the business. My piece, Take the 5^th Exit, is a toyshop interpretation of the road itself. I cross the roundabout where Just Williams is located daily and thought this would be the perfect place to introduce a new imaginary exit from the roundabout at the bottom of Lordship Lane.

 

 

On this road there was a unicorn on rollerblades, a pirate in a helicopter, a dinosaur riding a scooter and an elephant driving a pick-up truck. I also included possibly East Dulwich’s most famous character, the giant Walrus from the Horniman Museum. He was traveling to the Horniman in the pick-up truck.

 

It was a fantastic project to be involved in and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working on large scale artwork. Fantasy High Street also held a Family Fun Weekend on the 3^rd and 4^th of September where I ran a drawing workshop in which children created their own illustrated characters to travel up Lordship Lane. It was an awful lot of fun!

 

Nicola Pontin

Milo and One Dead Angry Druid

Neil Price has some good news.

Hi Guys, a book for which I have illustrated the cover has been selected by Booktrust for their 2014 School Library Pack.

Booktrust will now purchase copies of ‘Milo and One Dead Angry Druid’ and send one to (nearly all) secondary schools in the UK in September 2014, as part of a specially selected pack of recommended books. Milo was selected by a panel of judges for their ‘Reluctant Reader’ recommendations.

Check out the other books in the The Milo Adventures series by Mary Arrigan with Neil's distictive covers.

Booktrust is an independent British charity with the aim of encouraging people to engage with books. Established in 1992, it has received UK government funding since 2004, and inspired similar schemes in over 20 countries.

You can get more information here:

www.booktrust.org.uk/programmes/secondary/school-library-pack/

 

 

chris mould's Pirates and Pistols

Chris Mould has a great new book out, 'Pirates 'n' Pistols'. The next installment in his successful series of books, this anthology of swashbuckling seafaring stories is beautifully illustrated. 

If you like his previous titles, 'Dust 'n' Bones' and 'Fangs 'n' Fire', this is one for you. Have a look at The Bookbag's review here. Published by Hodder Children's books, it's available in all good book shops from this month.

More Pirates Ahoy!!

Well my first blog here and similar to John's blog before me it is a pirate theme, so more nautical naughtiness abounds for yee salt crusted sea-dogs! I illustrated this book, Young Blackbeard by Michael Lawrence and published by Barrington Stoke at the beginning of the year. It's my first junior fiction book so a step away from my own work which is usually big ridiculous colour spreads. It tells the tale of how Blackbeard became, well, Blackbeard and involves heartless fiends, spooky islands, buried treasure and lashings of rum.
When I was first commissioned to do it I gave a hearty laugh, as I'm apparently of pirate stock myself, the pirate queen Grace O' Malley knocking about somewhere in the O' Malley clan history. A quick google of her name and you'll see what a wily lady she was, once even being invited to Queen Elizabeth's court to parley. Irony struck again when I was recently on a trip to her home castle on Clare Island in the Atlantic ocean. I hated every second on the ferry out there. In fact I hate boats of every kind.

Donough O'Malley

Donough's Website

Buy Young Blackbeard

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Yo Ho Ho, Me Hearties!

Greetings, you scurvy swabs! Anyone familiar with my usual artwork style will recognise that this is not it. I do have a variety of different styles, but I'm always experimenting and this one is brand-new. I'm illustrating two (possibly three) books for Autumn -- that's the publishers, not the season. The first one is about pirates, the second about cowboys. The third -- which I'm really worried about -- is probably going to be about fairies. That will be very much stepping outside my comfort zone. Yikes! My usual painted style of artwork is done with a mixture of Corel Painter and Photo Shop. The pirate artwork style is drawn in a program called Manga Studio. Now, as a general principle, I can't abide Manga artwork (I think it's an age thing) but this program is phenomenal. It's very cheap (you can buy a cutdown version of it, which is all you'll need, for about $80). There is a pro version, which I'm using, but frankly most of the cool features are in the cheap version. The amazing thing about it is the control you have over the way the pen behaves. You can set the pen parameters in so many different ways, for example to smooth, straighten or have very sharp points (mitres) on corners or zigzag turns. This all may seem very small beer, but to anyone has ever attempted to make a inkpen, real or digital, do these things, it's a revelation. You can do a lot of these things in programs like Adobe Illustrator, or CorelDRAW. But they are indescribably clunky in comparison. Manga studio is a program that does one thing but does it very, very well. It is, and I've been using digital drawing programs for 15 years, the best pen and ink program I've ever come across. Dave Gibbons, the artist who illustrated the seminal graphic novel Watchmen uses it. That's a good enough endorsement for me. All the best John