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Maybe You Might

Maybe You Might is a picture book written by me and illustrated by Anna Cunha, published by Lantana. Order here: https://uk.bookshop.org/books/maybe-you-might/9781913747862

It is a hopeful environmental fable told in rhyming text. In a world devestated by climate change, a young girl finds a single seed and, against the odds, gradually restores her ecosystem.

Kirkus starred review says: “Narrated in beautiful, uplifting, lyrical verse by the child, this lovely British import is about the glorious fulfillment of hope and supports the idea that one small person might change the world…This gorgeous book shimmers with hope and possibilities.”

I had the idea for the book back in 2019 when I was feeling very despairing about the future of the planet (as I still am). I was walking home one day when my bike had a flat tyre and started imagining a story where devastating climate change had already happened, and where a little girl found a way to restore the ecosystem. I wrote the first lines in the bike repair shop.

I’ve been thinking back over some of the books and other things that inspired the story:

Dr Seuss’s The Lorax still can’t be beat for environmental parables! I used to read it and cry. I wanted to start my story at the place where Lorax leaves off: “Plant a new Truffula.  Treat it with care…”

Of course Greta Thunberg and the many many other brave young activists of #FridaysForFuture / #youthstrikeforclimate – showing that a very small voice can make a huge difference.

The Wheel on the School by Meinert DeJong (illustrated by Maurice Sendak). An undercelebrated classic! Lina, the only girl in the village of Shora, wants a stork to nest on the school roof. Gradually the whole community comes together to make her dream a reality.

While despairing over the climate emergency, I came across the story of Sebastião and Lélia Wanick Salgado’s reforestation project in Brazil – imagine if all of us were working to restore rather than destroy the planet!

I wanted the language of the book to be very clear and simple – kind of like a folk song – I was thinking of Woody Guthrie, Simon and Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell (“they took all the trees and put them in a tree museum”).

Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin has helped me out of some low places. It’s a utopia set in a far future California – the planet has suffered many catastrophes, but humanity has rediscovered a way to live in harmony with the rest of the world.

Poetry-trees for the Poetry Society

Every year the Poetry Society runs the Foyle Young Poets competition for poets ages 11-17 anywhere in the world. In normal years, the winning hundred poets would all go to a big celebratory event, but big celebratory events weren’t very possible in 2020.

As an alternative reward, the Poetry Society commissioned me to draw a poster, featuring images from all one hundred winning poems, all growing on a tree (a poet-tree???). Luckily there was lots of evocative imagery to choose from, including animals (peacocks, squids), food (pretzels, watermelons), and all kinds of other stuff (labyrinths, washing lines, thunderstorms).

In order to fit all the images in, I drew and cut out lots of little images and moved them round to make a good overall picture.

But that wasn’t all – the poetry society also asked me to draw the same image on the window of the Poetry Society in Betterton Streeet, Covent Garden. After a practice on my living room window, I set out for London armed with a million Posca pens (special pens for window-writing).

Here are some dramatic action shots of me at work (by photographer Hayley Madden)

And here’s the finished window!

More about the project on the Poetry Society website: https://poetrysociety.org.uk/competitions/foyle-young-poets-of-the-year-award/2020-2/foyle-an-artist-responds/

Illustrating all 200 Grimms’ fairy tales

You can see the pictures here!

At the beginning of 2016, I bought a copy of Grimms’ fairy tales in German, with the intention of reading and illustrating them one by one. I can’t remember exactly why I decided to do this, but once I’d had the idea, it seemed fairly inevitable, combining all my favourite things: fairy tales, language learning, detailed drawings, and dogged completionism.

But then I realised that drawing a fairy tale a day would take for ever, given that I wanted them to be lavishly detailed, and so I never found time to get started on the project. In 2018, the Bodleian Library held an exhibition on Tolkien, including this map illustrated by Pauline Baynes (who also did the wonderful illustrations in the Narnia books), featuring small scenes in little circles: https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/news/2016/may-03. I decided to steal borrow this idea for an art project of my own – small roundlets would be less time-consuming that full-page illustrations. In early 2019, I was at a loose end, because some other art projects had fallen through, so I finally decided it was time to get started on the Grimms!

I decided to work in random order, since the more famous fairy tales are clustered towards the beginning and I didn’t want to use them all up at once. So I rolled a dice, and got the great story of a tailor who has to spend a night in a princess’s cellar with a ferocious bear. The tailor convinces the bear that it wants to learn the violin, giving him an excuse to trim its claws so that they won’t get in the way of the fiddling.

So as to make the project manageable, I made the circles tiny – 6 cm in diameter, and had a rule that I wasn’t going to do preliminary sketches, and that I was only allowed to do one “take” for each picture – that way they would just be quick little sketches, and so wouldn’t take up too much time and energy. This didn’t exactly turn out to be true! They took me ages and I wore through a lot of dip pen nibs! For example, this one where I had to fit in two brothers, ten companion animals, a princess, and a dead seven-headed dragon.

This one’s the only one that’s nearly life-size:

Some of the Grimms’ fairy tales are justifiably forgotten, but some really ought to be better known. Here are a few of my favourites:

Donkey Cabbages (cabbages that turn you into a donkey come in surprisingly useful):

The twelve huntsmen (learn all about why women hate peas!): 

Fitcher’s bird (a version of Bluebeard, where the heroine has lots of agency – though I’d question her decision to dress as a giant bird):

The Masterthief (good heists!):

The Devil’s golden hairs (featuring the Devil’s redoubtable grandmother)

The ungrateful son (he gets a frog stuck on his face – for ever!):

The nixie in the millpond (the epic adventures of a young bride to defeat the nixie, who grabs people who come to close to the pond and drags them in): 

Godfather Death (Death is godfather to a young doctor, but what if the doctor refuses to let Death have the patients who belong to him): 

I finished the first 100 fairy tales in Summer 2019, then took a break and finished the other half in Spring 2020. Of course, this was also the time of increasing realisation about the urgency of the Climate Emergency, followed by the Coronavirus pandemic. So all in all, an excellent time to be able to retreat into the realm of fairy tales.

I hope I learnt things from this project. Artistically, I tried to get better at composition – how to include lots of detail in a tiny space, while still making the relevant parts clear to the viewer. From the fairy tales, I learnt that you should be kind to old beggarwomen, think laterally when solving riddles, keep going when you think all hope is lost, and do your best to be the youngest of three siblings.

Merchant of Venice Revision Cards

I didn’t know the Merchant of Venice well until I illustrated these GCSE Revision cards for@FlipsCoCards, but I ended up fascinated by this play (and revision card author Sarah Barker did a wonderful job of exploring its many weirdnesses). Also, it was a great text to illustrate: Venice, renaissance outfits, Jewish history, complex and ambiguous characters.

The first reference point was my sketches of Venice from 2015.The picture on the one of the cards has a very very tiny self-portrait of me sketching the view from the Doge’s palace.

Then I had a look at medieval maps of Venice, like this sixteenth century panorama or this tourist’s impression from  the wonderfully named Niccolò da Poggibonsi (1346).

I also played a game of trying to find suitable models for the characters in renaissance art, like these crowd scenes from Bellini.

Then I remembered I had the perfect book for this job – “clothes ancient and modern” by Cesare Vecellio (a cousin of Titian). This is an amazing book, which depicts costumes and customs from all around the renaissance world, from China to Mexico, including some remarkable hats!

Vecellio’s section on Venice is huge (since that’s where he’s from), and gave me lots of good ideas for the characters’ outfits.

Vecellio didn’t draw Venetian Jews, though he describes them wearing distinguishing yellow caps. But I did find this book which gives a more cheerful depiction of Jewish life in Venice than the play – I love the bread baking scene.

Of course, it wouldn’t be Merchant of Venice if it didn’t feature a pound of flesh. The author of the cards was kind enough to say of my picture “I think your dripping lump is phenomenal” – this is the nicest thing that anyone has ever said about my art!

You can get all the revision cards from here: https://flipscocards.com Why not collect the whole set?

Animal Farm revision cards

The latest set of flipsco GCSE English literature revision cards, with illustrations by me. You can buy them here along with many others.

Sadly the allegory of truth-twisting and injustice felt entirely relevant, but more happily, I was able to refine my still-imperfect horse drawing abilities.

Here are Boxer, Clover, and Molly (obviously a relation of My Little Pony, but without the hearts on her bum) – along with some of my million practice drawings. The internet did get pretty convinced that I was trying to buy a horse!

I’ve got better at getting the back legs of a horse facing in the right direction. In fact, I got so confident that my housemate (already an expert horse-drawer) and I decided to tackle the ultimate artistic challenge – a horse riding a bicycle (mine is the pen one, my housemate’s is the rather better pencil one).

I definitely find pigs less stressful to draw than horses – I love their little toes. The difficulty was trying to give them the right characters. Interestingly, Orwell specifies the breed for some of them (Old Major is a Middle White, Napoleon is the farm’s only Berkshire), so plenty of agricultural research was needed.

As well as farm animals, I researched Soviet propaganda posters – I found this site particularly useful: https://www.wallpaper.com/art/soviet-propaganda-graphic-design-wolfsonian. There’s some amazing graphic design on these. I particularly love the one of the workers defeating the dragon of global imperialism (the eighth one down), and I copied bits of them in my cover design, only with more pigs.

Big Draw at the South Oxford Community Centre

As part of my artist-in-residency at the   South Oxford Community Centre, I took part in a day of drawing for the nationwide Big Draw festival.

Flipsco GSCE Revision Cards

I have a great commission going on at the moment to illustrate GCSE English literature revision cards for the wonderful FlipsCo Cards

So far I’ve illustrated cards for A Christmas Carol, Macbeth, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, An Inspector Calls, Romeo and Juliet, Power and Conflict Poetry, Lord of the Flies, Blood Brothers, Love and Relationship poetry, and the Sign of Four (coming soon).

The cards include plot summary, key quotations for each character/theme, allusions, and info about exam question. And I get the fun of illustrating some of the best stories ever, along with the thankful knowledge that I never have to sit GCSEs ever again.

For flipsCo’s website header, I also did a mash-up of characters from English literature hanging out together reading books and only occasionally getting murdered:

Prints for sale at Bounce Design

My lovely printers, Bounce Design in Magdalen Road, are selling prints of five of my pictures (along with lots of prints and T-shirts by other local artists). Here I am on their website or go and visit the shop!

These are the prints available:

Residency at the South Oxford Community Centre

I’ve been acting as artist-in-residence at the South Oxford Community Centre in Lake Street, where I get to come along to their some of their events and classes and draw pictures! This means that am learning about everything from community policing to pilates (without having to actually take part in any of the exercises).

Here are some pictures of the centre, the Big Draw event in October 2017, jujitsu, pilates, Women’s Institute, modern dance, sewing group, and ballet:

Undiscovered Voices

In very exciting news, one of my pictures was longlisted for the Undiscovered Voices competition 2018 run by the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI).

Undiscovered Voices is a competition for unpublished and unagented children’s book writers and illustrators living in the EU, that runs every two years. The winning stories and illustrations appear in an anthology. I didn’t make it that far, but here’s my name on the honorary mentions list!

There were three briefs this year for illustrators, including one to illustrate a scene from a myth – hence my picture of Scylla and Charybdis. Celebrity judges were Frances Hardinge and Alexis Deacon, so they’ve presumably seen my picture now!

Here it is:

Redesigning the medieval book (as a board game)

My medieval board game recently appeared in the Bodleian Library’s Redesigning the medieval book exhibition, and will soon be making a further appearance at the University of the West of England in Bristol – at the Bower Ashton Library from 19 April – 29 June.

The project started with a workshop at the Bodleian back in February 2017, where a group of artists were introduced to many of the wonderful manuscripts that were to appear in the Bodleian’s Designing English exhibition. We were then invited to “reimagine” one of these books in whatever way we chose. Winning entries were then displayed alongside the main exhibition.

My artwork is based on this manuscript, which explains what thunder portends in each month of the year (anything from abundant crops to the fall of the state, depending on the month), each prediction illustrated with emoji-like symbols. Here is my copy and translation of the manuscript:

I thought that this book would work well as a board game, that would allow players to experience the vicissitudes of the medieval year, and that would let me make lots of decorative cards and tiles. I admit that I was massively influenced by the popular farming strategy board game Agricola. However, my board game is completely different, as my keen boardgaming friends will affirm, in that it is entirely luck-based and has absolutely none of Agricola’s strategic interest.

In my game, a dial moves round the board indicating which month it is. Players throw a dice (the “thunderdice”) to see if it thunders for them. If it thunders, they take a card for the appropriate month, which instructs them to gain or lose tokens representing health, food, trees, or pigs. The aim of the game is not to die! If both players survive until the end of the year (not a given), then the winner if the one who has the most food for their Christmas dinner at the end of December.

Here are the cards and the tokens (all individually handmade):

The board is really just a tracker, to indicate which month you are in at any point. However, it’s elaborately decorated with pictures representing the traditional labours and signs of the zodiac for each month. These are copied from another amazing manuscript in the same collection as the thunder prediction one. Here’s the board and the seasonal labour for December (i.e. feasting) – note the gold leaf!

To my great pleasure, the board game was one of the artworks chosen to appear in the Bodleian exhibition, along with many other excellent reinterpretations (though no other board games).

Here’s me excitedly explaining how to survive the medieval year to some bemused guests at the Bodleian’s “Library Lates” event (photo by Ian Wallman):