The Wolves of Whilloughby Chase

I've been trying to get into the habit of doing sketches from the books I'm reading, since book illustration is my main focus. (Not that you'd know from all the comics I've been doing lately!) So here are some doodles from The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken. There's a lot more books in the series, so you can expect more pictures!

The characters here are Bonnie Green, Sylvia Green and Simon (a boy who lives wild in the grounds, raising geese). Sylvia was by far the hardest, as she's never really described in any detail. I didn't really pin her down until I drew the girls by the fire.

This is a kind of technique I've used before, where I draw with a fountain pen using cheap, water-soluble ink, then spread it with water. I think it's good for me, since precision is really important to me, and this is a really unpredictable way to work.

Broth Sea Peoples

These are four more art cards I whipped up for the farmer's market. If you got the Eat Me! anthology, you may recognise these as the leaders of the various Broth Sea tribes in my comic, The Mysterious Land of Under-Noodle. Going clockwise, these are the Wise Woman of the Noodle People, the Prime Minister of the Wonton Isles, the mightiest warrior from the Cliffs of Pork, and the Chieftain of the Lettuce Hunters.

You can tell they're the leaders because they wear the most clothes, haha.

Poppets!

Poppet is accompanying the Gransden Brownies on their Pack Holiday this year!

My Mum is a pack leader and requested a cover sheet for their diaries featuring Poppet, but as their theme is Folktales and Legends I couldn’t resist adding some little fact sheets as well. This also means that after years of confusion I finally know how to pronounce Bwbachod, which is one of the names sixes can have. Fortunately I was a Gnome, which is a lot easier.

(Gnomes forever!)

Thank-you Letters

I’m terrible at remembering to write thank you letters, so this year I decided to draw some postcards instead, in the hopes that it would make up for how late they usually are. It was actually a lot easier to get round to it when I was drawing them, so they’re not even that late this time!