Here is my new elephant design for Cards from Africa. Cards from Africa are a charitable company employing young, orphaned Rwandans to produce their handmade cards. This is my third card for them so I think they are going down well! This is my little elephant all made up.
I have been keeping this one under my hat for what feels like ages but finally its out and I can brag about it! This is my new book Best Friends written by none other than Julia Donaldson!
It’s a bit of a thrill to have illustrated a book for our children’s laureate and creator of the Gruffalo. This is a lovely story featuring a range of characters from a wonderfully smug little bird through to a grumpy cloud and a very old and wise mountain. Best Friends is one of the plays from a series called Bug Club which is the brainchild of Julia Donaldson and aims to encourage very young children to interact with stories by playing the different roles within them.
Yesterday I went to visit fantastic children’s wear company Grubbies at the Bubble children’s trade show in London. I was very excited to be getting my first glimpse of the new kerchiefs they asked me to design for next season. The last time I saw the designs was on my computer screen just before I hit send and now they are real! Here is a sneak peek:
Grubbies’ autumn/winter 2013 range features some rather special furry-on-the-inside dungerees as well as the two new kerchiefs Owl and Toadstools. I had a lot of fun designing these ones as they are based on woodland scenes (my favourite) with a lovely strong red and a mustard yellow as base colours.
December always sneaks up on me and it’s high time I sorted out my Christmas card for this year. But I’m not sure what to do! I always like to make my cards by hand but I’m a bit busy this year so I may have to come up with an alternative – and quick! Here are some of my efforts from previous years:
On Saturday Nicola Killen and I held a workshop at Heffers children’s bookshop in Cambridge with the aim to create an animal alphabet to put on display in the shop. It was a lot of fun for us as we took turns leading the drawing and then the colouring and collage. The children did a fantastic job coming up with a stream of brilliant ideas and brand new colours and patterns for animals we all thought were sort of brownish(!) Together with our many helpers we managed to get all the way through to N – pretty good work I think!
Tomorrow my studio pal Nicola Killen and I are going to be taking part in Cambridge’s Festival of Illustration. We will be holding a children’s workshop in Heffers children’s bookshop where we and the children will be drawing, colouring and collaging. The plan is to create a fantastic alphabet book to put up on display and considering there are 26 letters to take care of we will need lots of help! The workshop is being held between 11am and 1pm so do come along!
A few weeks ago I decided to enter Ohh Deer’s Pillowfight competition. The brief was to design two cushion covers to no particular theme so I decided to employ my studio demon Raimon as well as his skating friend of indeterminate species to adorn the cushions. Now I have to wait and see if anyone likes my designs!
All the competition entries are up for sale for a limited amount of time on Ohh Deer’s competition page so have a look at the designs and see if there is anything you fancy. If you’d like one of my cushions you will find Raimon here and my little skating creature here:
marion lindsay 