Two men and a frog.

Things have sort of been getting busier in the last couple of weeks and soon it will be crazy. Crazy because we are expecting our third child in about 3 weeks, but also there are couple of things on. After a fair bit of toing and froing it looks like I will be working on a series of small childrens books with Scholastic. Theres a fairly ambitious plan to turn out 26 small books in 2 years- although the new baby will slow production a little at the start. I've already done the linework and the basic shading for one but I don't think I can show it as yet.

Instead a few weeks back I began doing rough ideas with a pencil for a book called the
"The Frog Who Lost His Croak", so I'm posting a couple of those.
I think I'll do the same colouring as I did with my fox.
But in the faint sketchy lines so far theres a few good moments.






I think I'm going to settle with the little guy with the shorts and the long legs rather than the Tom Sawyerish one.







On top of that there is my ring in performance at the Ipswich Festival of Children’s Literature.
Lucia(see link at side) and I are presenters at the festival one afternoon,- and I've also volunteered to man a marquee as a sort of "caged illustrator" on display for a couple of days. I was initially feeling under pressure to produce a big presentation with little video compilations of drawings- and I'd written down some ideas and spiel, however it appears our speaking session is spectacularly under subscribed. Everyone else is wanting to see a lady called Jan Omerod-in fact Iwouldn't mind seeing her speak but I'm supposed to talking at the same time- somewhere else.
Oh well I'll push on regardless- I might instead take a computer in and the couple of people that turn up can huddle around it.
A bit like my Supanova experiences maybe.

I went to a dermatologist and it turns out my Cintiq is part of the problem affecting my hands. The heat from it is giving me this horrible eczema thing on my hands (which was very bad in January...nothing like drawing with cracked and bleeding hands).
So I have to go and buy a little airconditioner I think, and cotton gloves to give a bit more distance from the surface.
- I'll be popular in summer I think, but there you go...score 1 for using a pencil- cintiq 0 for causing me hell.