April 2022
When there’s enough space in the illustration diary, I can fit in an event or two and meet the important little people who read the books I have illustrated. This is a wonderful opportunity and my favourite part of this is listening to their ideas and comments. They are funny and honest and inspiring and I always feel brimming with emotions when I leave.
Lucy Owen and I have worked on 2 books together and we’ve enjoyed putting on several events but this was a big one! In the morning we did an online session featuring our book “FlowerGirl” - Lucy read extracts from the book and I taught the children how to sketch some blossom. 500 children were watching!!! Woweee!!! And the results were fantastic!!!!!
The lovely publishers Atebol had some extra funding and so used it to buy Cherry Blossom trees for lots of Welsh schools!!!! How gorgeous!! Here we are visiting one of the schools in the afternoon and we all planted it together! This lovely school in Merthyr is going to put benches around their tree one day and make it a quiet space to sit. While we were there I got to see the pupil’s drawings from the morning online session - ( in the flesh!! ) They were so amazing!!!! Take a look . . .
May 2022
Another event we put on, took place in Waterstones Swansea. A beautiful art deco building that was once a cinema. 2 schools visited us and we loved interacting with them and seeing their response to “Flowergirl”.
Lucy was amazing at keeping the classes entertained with reading, rapping and questions about superpowers while I did a LIVE painting of the front cover of our book with a twist. . . .
I made an aperture in the painting where the face of Cherry would normally go. Instead a lucky pupil could put their face through the hole and model for us all!
Brilliant! 👏🏼 It worked!!! And the schools got to take the paintings away with them! Thank you to all those who attended our events. We’ve loved doing them and meeting you all!! Hopefully it will encourage the future budding authors and illustrators out there!