Fantastic post on Chris Haughton’s experience on making his own book in Korea.
Click here

Oliver Jeffers makes art. From figurative painting and installation to illustration and picture-book making, his work has been exhibited and published in New York, Dublin, London, Sydney, Washington DC, Belfast and elsewhere. His picture books, including Lost and Found, The Incredible Book Eating Boy, and most recently, The Great Paper Caper. Oliver was brought up in Northern Ireland and now lives and works in Brooklyn (hence the mustache!).

Enjoy this talk from OFFSET last year and don’t miss out this year by getting your ticket now!

Uri Shulevitz’s Writing With Pictures: How to Write and Illustrate Children’s Books has long been respected as the bible of how-to’s for picturebooks – and now thanks to the magic of the internet and Mighty Art Demos you can read some of the tome online… namely How to Make a Storyboard.

This makes for essential reading – even if you can’t draw to save your life!
(found via the folks at FPI)

Mail Me Art: Medium Without a Message is the follow-up to the successful 2008 Mail Me Art: Going Postal. With over 700 new pieces of mail art ‘Medium Without a Message’ is an amazing collection of envelopes and boxes from around the world decorated by some of today’s most talented illustrators and artists. What makes the work special is that every single piece of art was sent through the postal system, exposed and on view as regular mail. At the end of this month all of the work will be on display at the London Mail Me Art exhibition.

From Darren:
How can you help support the project and become part of it? Well… The running costs for the project are currently at around £6000($9120). We’re hoping to recoup most of that by selling the new book and we’re also hoping to make the artists lots of money by selling their work at the exhibition! We’ve just finished the book and we got as many of the mail artists into the book as possible in some way or another! So please help us recoup some of the costs by making a pledge and supporting the project! In return for a pledge we’re sending people copies of the new book. We’ve also got some really cool artwork up for grabs from the likes of Dan May & Jon Burgerman! Please check out the site for more details – http://mailmeart.com/going-postal/pledge/

I’ve waxed lyrical about the octogenarian author/illustrator Shirley Hughes before - here – and now she’s back with another new book this year.

The folks at Walker Books caught up with her to have a natter about creating The Christmas Eve Ghost.

Really loving the retro styling of these re-imagined classic comics from Steven Finch.



The CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Awards– the holy grails of UK children’s publishing – announced their winners last Thursday – with the Carnegie Medal going to Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (illustrated in dual editions by Dave McKean and Chris Riddell.)

And the Kate Greenaway winner – chosen from the mammoth shortlist of:

• Leon and the Place Between – Grahame Baker-Smith
• Harry & Hopper –  Freya Blackwood
• The Great Paper Caper – Oliver Jeffers
• Millie’s Marvellous Hat – Satoshi Kitamura
• Crazy Hair – Dave McKean
• The Graveyard Book – Chris Riddell
• The Dunderheads – David Roberts
• There are cats in this book – Viviane Schwarz

went to Freya Blackwood’s for her illustration in Harry & Hopper!

The Guardian have a slideshow of Blackwood’s work from the book – including:

Puffin Books turn 70 this year (and they’re making a lot of noise about it too!) The Guardian have invited some well known authors to choose their favourite books from the last 70 years – providing a great opportunity to see some great cover illustrations back in mainstream:

Nick Sharratt’s cover for The Hundred-Mile-An-Hour-Dog or Quentin Blake’s Chocolate Factory:

Neil Reed’s re-cover of Goodnight Mr Tom and Edward Ardizzone’s cover of Stig of the Dump:

Curators of all things weird and Soviet bloc at English Russia have a collection of wonderful illustrations from the 1976 edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, by Mikhail Belomlinsky.

Yesterday saw the announcement of The Bisto Book of the Year Awards – the national children’s book awards – with great rumpus, hoohah and othersuch celebrations!

The 2010 Bisto Honour Award for Illustration and the overall Bisto Book of the Year Award went to Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick for her picturebook There.

This alluring picturebook is one that will draw every reader, child and adult, into its charming spell. The little girl’s persistent self-questioning is a true and honest echo of the voice of a child as she comes to terms with what she knows and what she doesn’t. The harmonic interdependence of images and text is achieved with artistic brilliance and a disciplined pared-back writing style.