Professor Stitch-Wicket comes into focus...

Welcome to my first new post for 2015! A great deal of progress was made over the holidays, particularly on a couple of long-form poems for the book, which I will reveal more about in due time. This blog is officially a year old now, so yay!

Most recently I also had the opportunity to read some of my poems to my daughter's Brownie troop as part of their "literacy day" which was lots of fun. Hope to do more things like this as the book keeps brewing to completion and beyond.

Here is a little sneak-peek into the initial drawing process for one of the new illustrations, for The Great Epic Journey of Professor Stitch-Wicket. I've been waiting for over a year to start working on these drawings, since he first showed up in my sketchbooks over a year ago.

Sometimes I will lay out a full illustration in my sketchbook, which is the best place to make mistakes and experiment. If I like the drawing enough, I will simply scan it in, blow it up, print it out and use it as a base to trace the actual drawing from.

(Click the images to enlarge and see better...)

The next stage will be inking....I'm sure my cat Boris (or his sister Natasha, the other super-spy kitty) will be watching closely. I hope you will be too!