Ugly Rabbit

Congratulations to Jessie!

2010-03-01T04:46:00.000-08:00

A BIG thank you to everyone who took part in the chocolate competition. It was such a fun competition to run. The chocolate I used was Cadburys Dairy Milk so a huge congratulations to Jessie, a fabulous artist/illustrator from the UK whose name was pulled out of the bowl by my lovely niece. This wonderful 400g bar of chocolate will be winging its way over to you Jessie this afternoon! Enjoy!

Chocolate give away at the Ugly Rabbit!

2010-02-25T06:13:00.000-08:00

Good morning, afternoon, evening. Wherever you are in the world, whatever time it is for you I am sure you can always find time for Chocolate!! I am giving away the stuff for free so if you want to take part all you have to do is try to guess what the chocolate was that I used in the painting above and leave yr answer in a comment. It doesn't matter if you are wrong, I'll still put your name in the hat. It's only a bar of chocolate so everyone's in with a chance. The lucky winner will be announced on Monday 1st March, so be quick! Happy guessing!

Ps. To give ALL my visitors a chance to win this offer is posted at all three of my blogs, but don't let that put you off. All names go in the hat and only one winner comes out! Closing time 14.30pm (UK time).

All we can hope for

2010-02-10T16:34:00.000-08:00

Sometimes in life there are moments you just have to take in.

Small things you have to notice....

And other things you can't ignore

All we can hope is that our days will be long, our efforts be blessed, and our pencils remain sharp...

Before the boat of life beaches for good.

Something to hold in my hand

2010-02-07T13:08:00.000-08:00

I wanted to give you a little look inside a picture book dummy I did as part of a collaboration with a friend of mine, a few years ago. She wrote the story and I came up with a few pictures then we sent it off to an agent in New York. Then it came back to us and today remains unpublished. Such is life, but not all was lost. It was the platform from which I launched my own aspirations to become a children's writer and illustrator and it was a great lesson from which I learnt that anything is possible if you focus your mind.

Getting the pictures scanned and printed and made into a dummy gave me something real to hold in my hands. Something my children could hold and read. They love looking at the pictures and notice small details every time. Like the fact that the father of the boy, Tom, is not featured in the story, but makes an appearance in the family photo on the boy's wall. It's putting in small details like that which makes illustrating so enjoyable.

In my spare art time when I am not busy illustrating or being a mother I paint seascapes, usually with stones. They are pretty intriguing paintings to say the least, when they're done well, but they are just copies of what is in front of me and I can't really say much through them. Sometimes I feel I am two kind of artists roled into one with a continual battle of wills going on inside me. Both compete for my attention and distract me away from the other. A little like having two bold children to mind. I'd like to merge the two though so we'll see who comes up the stronger. Maybe one day I'll start painting like an illustrator though.

Romeo Rabbit

2010-01-22T08:13:00.000-08:00

Here is the medieval picture still a tiny bit in progress, but I was happy to post it up. Isn't he a Romantic old Bunny giving the Maiden flowers.."it's a little early for Valentine's day, isn't it Ugly Rabbit?" He's such a Romeo Rabbit!!

A trip along the Harbour side

2010-01-22T05:32:00.000-08:00

It's been a productive week I think..here is another colour sample I started yesterday. Some days I really have a hard time trying to get an image out of my head. Sometimes I can't find a reference photo to work from, which was the case with this one. I had to adlib bits of boats from my own photo archive and bits from my imagination. With this illo there is little text so the picture really has to say more and I was trying to imagine what a child living in a city who has never been to a fishing port/village or even the seaside might enjoy seeing. There are the usual things you'd expect to see at a harbour: fishing boats, sea dogs on the harbour- side and the captain's cat eyeing up the greedy Seagulls, a small lighthouse in the distance, ropes, ice-cream and fish'n'chip shops and of course, an art gallery. I've based it on Polperro where I spent many happy childhood memories living there and re-visiting our grandparents, aunt and cousins. I always remember a Dalmation dog on the harbour side, so he is there in this illustration. That's the thing I love about illustrating...you can put anything you want into it...well, you can if its your own story..

Okay, back to the drawing board to finish this one..hope you all have a great weekend. Bye for now.

I can paint a Rainbow

2010-01-19T08:21:00.000-08:00

Edward was a boy who couldn't sleep...

Hello everyone. I'm on a roll and posting away like wildfire this week, eh? Well, making progress so I thought I'd let you see what I've been doing with my time. I am enjoying working in colour pencils at last and learning heaps about what I can do with them, though admittedly I still find their colours wishy washing in photos without a colour pastel ground. This particular illustration isn't the full picture, but only what you'd see on the right hand page, mainly because of the format I've used. It is one of the first illustrations in my book and I've taken a lot of care over concept, composition and colour. I think I've used almost every colour of the rainbow! Putting to use my knowledge of the colour wheel to get a better effect with comlimentary colours and so on. So lots of purples and oranges, greens and reds. Lovely. It speaks volumes about my own childhood: carefree summer days and a few sleepless nights. I might not have told you, but I used to lie awake for hours trying to get to sleep, telling myself stories. Until one night my mother heard me as she stood listening at the bottom of the stairs. A delivery of Disney books soon arrived and I had plenty of stories to read after that! I think it kick-started my whole love for books.
I do hope you like this one...there are more to follow...

Listen to the colour of your dreams

2010-01-17T03:57:00.000-08:00

I've been pulling fragments from the past in order to make sense of where to go in the future. One being that when I was growing up my mother told me she once wanted to write for children. She sat down and wrote a story and she sent it off. I think she might have told me the story off the top of her head as well, but sadly I can't remember it. After a while she received a nice letter back from the publisher saying they liked the story, but would only publish it if she wrote five or six more to accompany it. For reasons she never went into the stories never came to fruition and the dream of being published was lost forever. Or was it?

It seems a little strange that now, forty or so years later, my mother's dream to be published is living on in me, even though I never had any ambitions to write and the adventure of writing and illustrating children's stories has come about through the help of someone else entirely. I have no doubt that my mother's life might have been so different had she submitted more stories or tried another publisher. How many other lives might have been changed too, I wonder, if dreams were not abandoned?

Here on 17th January I have two choices as I see it. I can abandon my dream and just become a painter. Or I can submit the stories I have with a few illustrations and wait and see what happens. As any writer or illustrator will tell you a LOT of work goes into making a children's picture book come to life. So there is no way I am going to let my efforts so far go to waste. I enjoy this whole story telling adventure too much anyway!!

Rediscovering old drawings like old treasure.

2010-01-14T10:33:00.000-08:00

I was looking through an old portfolio today and came upon some charcoal illustrations for my Ellie Vator story I wrote a couple of years ago. I don't know why I didn't finish them, but looking at them today with fresh eyes I think it's worth picking up the threads of where I left off. I might even include them in my portfolio I am sending off this year. Ellie is an energetic little character who finds an interesting way of going out for coffee as you can see!

Here she is coming down on a bungee and picking up the skateboard AND a tray of coffee....I certainly couldn't do THAT! Could you?

2010 - a good year for Ugly Rabbit? .

2010-01-08T08:35:00.000-08:00

Here's my first proper post for 2010 to let you know what I've been up to on the Illustration front and to let you know how this Ugly Rabbit project is progressing. Remember this illo? (above) It was more an experiment into colour pencil as a medium for UR. I've finished the text for the story - apart from a little polishing here and there - and am working through the storyboard, picking out which illos I think will be the best to do in colour. Here are a couple of shots of one I've finished already, which is the updated version of the Toy Soldiers picture above.

Writing and illustrating my own story has given me a certain freedom within which to put everything that was, and still is, meaningful to me as a person. I believe that part of the secret of writing stories for children is to include your experiences of life - past and present, influences like people and those magical things that made an impression on you as a child. mortar of the story. It seems easy to say that now, but I never realised it until after writing and beginning the illustrations. I don't know if a publisher will accept it, but I know I have to try to get it out there all the same and for me it has been such a worthwhile project. It has dug up the happier moments of my childhood like long lost treasure: animals (rabbits), free open spaces to run and fly a kite, the insomnia I suffered as a child, ambitions to fly a plane, pirates in family history whose treasure wasn't of the gold kind...and last but not least, my fascination with the medieval period in the knights, maidens, castles and the dragons in the depths of the castle. You learn a lot about who you are when you take on a challenge, of any sort, don't you and this little rabbit has taught me a lot.

Despite being a rabbit he's really quite a Romeo by the look of it! Oh...are those flowers for me? Thank you Ugly Rabbit!!! And thank you for taking the time to stop by and read.