a somewhat spotty triceratops...

Here's my (last minute) creature for this months a little bit bunny. Triceratops was always my favourite dinosaur as a kid (so many pointy bits, though not as many spots as mine now has)... but, for a wee while, there was some proper noun panic over whether it really existed...

mammoth prize draw...(draw in both senses of the word)

Torquay Museum are finding lots of exciting uses for the mammoth illustration I did for them. I'm led  to believe there is a Mammoth Free Museum Weekend at Torquay Museum this weekend along with a special prize draw, for which I've been asked to doodle a couple of mammoths as prizes (so long as the post arrives in time). Very relaxing drawing mammoths. Nice and scribbley! Sadly I'm too far from Torquay this weekend otherwise it sounded like a fun old time !

Aesops fable of "The dog and his bone" for Storytime magazine...

In some small defence of my slipshod blogging of late I've had one or two illustration jobs that I had to keep under wraps until they saw print. One such commission was for the grand folks at Storytime magazine who kindly asked me to provide illustrations for the Aesops fable of the dog and his bone (a.k.a the dog and his reflection) for their November issue. Y'know the story; dog finds bone, dog happy with bone, dog sees his reflection with said bone in the river and thinks it's another dog with a better bone, so dog goes to bark at this 'new' bone owner and nab the better bone... What do you know, dog loses his bone in the river... The moral of this fable, avoid rivers!

I pitched three different dog characters (named Sniffer, Banger and Spot... for ease of distinguishing them apart) for Storytime to choose between. Most gratifyingly, after the story was illustrated, they asked for a further group illustration of all three dogs (plus heads and a bone icon) to use for a game page to accompany the original story. All in all a very rewarding brief to work on.

I must say it's great to see the modus operandi Storytime have adopted for themselves, commissioning a variety of distinctly different illustrators to accompany a stimulating mix of story content in a well designed and produced quality magazine for children. Long may it continue.