Friday 13 February 2015

Hospital adventures, and drawing recognisable characters, and never using a laptop for writing my blog

Well... it has been a very busy week, and I am attempting badly to get this blog written on my new laptop. It took three attempts at sending the photos from my phone at the right size for this to work, and I still can't work out how to get the photos in the middle of the column so it may look all wrong but I am an idiot so please excuse me! Now I can't manage to add text in between the images. This is all going quite wrong. I think all the pictures may end up at the bottom of the blog annoyingly.

First of all, here is a small portion of an illustration for a new book I am illustrating for Frank Cottrell Boyce. It will be out this year (Barrington Stoke) so more about that in a few months. It was only when I was colouring it in that I realised I had subconsciously drawn a friend of mine in the crowd. She is quite pleased indeed! I think I probably usually base my characters on people I know, or have seen. 

Today was day 3 in a row at the Sick Kids Hospital. Today Linda and I ran a Valentine card workshop in the Radiology reception, and we had some great cards made by patients, parents, surgeons and junior doctors. It was quite a lot of stupid fun and I was pleased to be making use of my degree in Printmaking again, even if it was just printing letters on an ink pad. Yesterday we spent the whole day in the Lothian Health Service archives at the University library. I love going in there and reading minute books from the 1840s. Some of the writing is quite hard to read but I have traced some interesting story lines, and am starting to piece together an idea for some work. On Wednesday we worked with a lovely girl on ward 1. We wrote and illustrated the beginnings of a very good story.

I will now attempt to add some more photos of illustrations I did with Katie on ward 1. If there is only one photo here it's because I gave up and had to have a nap. Yeah...that looks a mess and I think next time I will not use my laptop. Lesson learned.