Pewter Plate Winner!

I was excessively chuffed to find out last week that I'd been awarded the 2012 Pewter Plate Award for Best Cover of the Year, for a cover I did for Highlights High Five magazine in the USA!

I've been illustrating and writing for a considerable number of yonks now, but I've never won an engraved pewter plate before.

This is the cover in question...

Highlights is the biggest and most prestigious magazine for children in the States. It's been going for over 60 years and has sold over a billion copies since it started. Just so you know.

The funEverse!

Please, please with knobs on, check out the funEverse website if you can... (www.thefuneverse.com / funny blogs / funny poems). It's a site brimming over with chucklesome wonderfulness, a temple of rhyming jollification where schools, poets and illustrators come together to have a  hearty poetical laugh. This month I'm chuffed out of my socks to say that they're using a selection of my illustrations as their starting point. So far we've had brilliant poems from Alex Cragg, Kathryn Evans, Lesley Moss, Laura Louis Stewart and Maureen Lynas. And my heart is all-a-flutter to tell you that there's still more to come! Go on... have a giggle. Pirates, monkeys and bad haircuts all figure so far!

Dinosaur pop-ups

I've just received this from Corina Fletcher, the brilliant paper engineer who designed all the pop-up mechanisms for the Dinosaurs of Doom book that I finished a few weeks ago. She's printed out my files and dummied up the whole book to make sure that everything works as it should. And the good news is that it does, so no last minute tweaks needed!
To show you the levels of complexity we had to go to, the image below is the illustration I did for just one of the four back panels of the final 360 degree pop-up. A good deal of it is obscured by other features as well, but I had to put in this amount of detail because there are so many cut outs in the panels at the front. Part of the reason this was a long old job!