Stealthy Lines and Excessive Colour

Children's book illustrations to accompany the text of the forthcoming "Greedylocks" from Ransom Book Publishers. 

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I've drawn the illustrations for a new book coming out soon from Puffin.  It's a parody of Treasure Island, featuring everyone's favourite twitty-birdys and piggy-wigs.  

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Who is that man next door?  What is he doing?  What does thissSZZZZZAPPP!!

My new book coming out from Watts publishing in the Autumn.

Front Cover.

Interior page illustration.

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Presumably called the Daily Buccaneer or Swashbuckling Times or similar, here's another illustration for the Pirate puzzle book I'm creating for Usbourne Publishing.

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A drawing for a forthcoming children's book for Usbourne Publising featuring two pirate talking to each other on neighbouring ships.  

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"Wooooooo-ooohhhhhhh"

Sadly some projects get consigned to the graveyard before they're ever given the chance to get fully off the ground. I was very pleased to be working on a Haunted House Pop-Up book, but for whatever reason the project was cancelled and will never get to see the light of day.  However!  All's not entirely lost, as I've still got a rather snazzy cover to show you all.

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Lots of love, Rory x

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Another Hans Christian Andersen piccy to join the collection. 

Here's the original story if you want to read it Little Claus And Big Claus.

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I'm going to start a series of old fairy tale illustrations.  First up, Billy Goats Gruff by Hans Christian Andersen.  

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A few images from my one of my childrens books for Watts Publishing called "Captain Rainbow".

Interior page.

Double page spread.

Mock up of the cover.

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Cover design -

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I'm working on a series of illustrations for a book on poetry written by a wonderful chap called Bill. All of the poems are about butterflies and all the varying degrees of mischief they get up too! This is for a poem entitled "Butterfly Airforce" to accompany the following lines -

"The Duke of Burgundy looks quite a dandy,
And when in combat, drinks vintage brandy."

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Get in! A whole pile of my latest book, "Dad's Van" has just been delivered, what joy! It looks splendid, and I'm exceedingly pleased with it. More more more!

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A selection of interior page art for your pleasure and delight.

Captain Rainbow receives a parcel in the post -



Captain Rainbow's boat is in a spot of bother -



Captain Rainbow's pride and joy -

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Here's some drawings to show how the Cap'n developed.

Originally he was quite fresh faced, and looked a little like a train driver -



A bit of tweaking here and there filled him out a bit -



The addition of a big beard finished the look off -

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This shows how a cover for one of my books gets developed.

Firstly, I draw a cover rough -



Once it's approved, I put it in place on a mock up so that I can that everything fits properly -



I then get approval to ink it in, and colour it, and here's the finished art -



And here's a mock-up of the finished cover! -

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As the title suggests, Captain Cool really is the greatest hero in the world. Nuff said. This was my second book for Watts Publishing, and I'm very proud of it. It looks ace! Still available from online book retailers - and well worth every penny spent on it.





Here he is in all his hardcover glory.



Also looking extremely dynamic on an inside spread. Go get 'em Cap'n Cool!

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This was a mammoth project. All in all I illustrated 5 books in a series based on pirates. Each story was effectively a backup bit of colour and text to maintain the readers' interest and add to the slightly more academic stuff that occupied the first half of each book.

Simple line work and bold colours were the order of the day for this series. Little was I to know that this was the very beginning of my pirate drawing career.

As a (partial) result of my work on this, the series won a book design award, which was nice.




Here's a "team shot" of all the covers.



An internal spread.

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My first childrens book! OOOH, what memories! I remember it being terribly cold, I was colouring the whole book in by hand, and couldn't hold the brush properly because my hands had frozen. Then all the images stuck to their backing boards and I had to carry the whole lot up to London in a huge backpack. What a palaver. I don't think I've ever used traditional colouring methods since, which is a shame, as you get so much from it. Maybe one day I'll get back into it. Here's a number of internal pages scanned on my home scanner, so the colours aren't particularly accurate. You can still get a copy of this from various online book sellers I believe.

Note of interest, I think this is the first book that features my fat cat, Polly, albeit in a non-leading part role.

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Here's a couple of spreads and the front cover from my latest book for Watt's Publishing, entitled "Dads Van".

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