Mirror Mirror on the Wall

Here's another one from a year or two later. It represents the wicked Queen who was Snow White's stepmother admiring herself in the magic mirror.
It was published in the Candlewick Book of Fairytales and was used on the cover of one edition of that book.

Hector Protector

It has been a lot of fun doing a once-off image on a fairy tale subject as a change from the other work I am busy with.

The final illustration will appear in an anthology of nursery rhymes for Seven Stories, Britain's National Centre for Children's Books.

Above are Hector Protector and his hard-to-please old Queen.

I can't wait to get painting them.

The National Library of Ireland's Prints and Drawings Collection

Someone contacted me recently about a picture that they had seen in the National Library of Ireland's Prints and Drawings Collection.
Under the directorship of the wonderful Dr Pat Donlon, the NLI acquired a large collection of my original work, which they have added to over the years. Pat was very keen to get hold of preliminary drawings and unused paintings from right at the start of my career.
The ink line drawing pictured here is from "WB Yeats: Fairy Tales of Ireland".

A Changeling Baby

I've been busy moving studio, and also moving house, so I have neglected the blog a bit. Sorry.
Here is another original I found during the moving process.


This picture illustrates a changeling story that was to be included in that anthology of Irish Fairy Tales that I was planning a number of years ago.
I have always though this to be a most sinister Irish tradition, and I am convinced that over the centuries the notion of a fairy being substituted for a healthy child was used as an excuse to do away with many sickly or malformed babies.
I can recommend a fascinating book by Angela Bourke called The Burning of Bridget Cleary for anyone with an interest in the subject.

The White Trout

I'm in the process of packing up my studio for the move to my new space in central Dublin's Dame Street, just a stone's throw from Dublin Castle.
Over the years we all accumulate a lot of surplus stuff that we think will be useful one day, and it's great to finally dump a load of it, and to whittle everything down to essentials.
Dredging through to the back of my shelves I have also discovered some long forgotten pictures.
Here are a couple of unpublished illustrations for a book of Irish Myths that never saw the light of day.
These illustrated a story called The White Trout.

The Candlewick Book of Fairytales

I'm always chuffed when I find that someone has taken the trouble to scan images from my books to share them on-line.
I found a whole bunch from The Candlewick Book of Fairytales on a Russian site and, as I am just now in a Fairy Tale frame of mind I thought I'd post some of them here.
The book came out in the mid 1990s and did really well, but unfortunately it went under several different names in different territories. I'm still very fond of it, and my thanks go out to the Russian blogger who scanned the pictures.
большое спасибо

The Frog Prince

The Six Swans

Rapunzel

Hansel and Gretel

Beauty and the Beast

The 2010 Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival

Gif animator
Here's a practice piece I did in preparation for my contribution at THE 2010 MOUNTAINS TO SEA DLR BOOK FESTIVAL.
I'm going to be painting a large (this one is 4 foot tall) oil painting a bit like this one over the weekend (11th and 12th Sept).
Anyone who's attending please come and say "Hi"... I reckon I'll need the moral support.
I still haven't decided on the final image I will be painting, but, given the time constraints, it will have to be simple with just one or two figures and a nice plain background perhaps stencilled like this one. I'm pretty sure I'll be using gold paint and gold leaf as I have done here. (I have tried to show the shiny effect by making an animated gif)
I've considered The Children of Lir and Gulliver but they could both get a bit complicated.
Maybe I'll do something like Cinderella or Sleeping beauty or Jack the Giant Killer.
Anyone got any great suggestions?

Happy Birthday Walker Books

Walker Books are celebrating their 30th birthday, and I'm delighted to have been a Walker illustrator for most of that time.
I found a website where someone had helpfully uploaded some rarely seen work from my first Walker book about a little bald princess called "Melisande" , as well as pictures from "East of the Sun, and West of the Moon" and "The Candlewick Book of Fairy Tales". Thanks to the mystery scanner,
Here are a few of those illustrations from my early fairy tale books.







Seeing these makes me want to do another fairytale collection.
Happy Birthday Walker Books!

The Great Oscar Wilde Rip-Off

My cover for "Oscar Wilde: Stories for Children" was another of my paintings that shows the influence of Edmund Dulac.
So maybe I should have been more understanding when I saw this book cover.
Someone named Owen Cook was credited as the cover artist on this Wordsworth Classics edition of Wilde's fairy tales.
He has taken my inside illustration of the Happy Prince and combined it with the cover image .


The only element which I am happy to ascribe to Owen is his daring use of colour.
When I discovered this I got pretty mad about it, but now I can see the funny side.
The publisher was quite good about owning up and paying compensation. They said that Owen was a student who briefly passed through their design studio.
I've since been told that this is a fairly standard excuse when unethical publishers get caught out ripping people off.
So be warned!

Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow

I've just finished reading "Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow "
by Jessica Day George.
It's a wonderful novelisation of the fairy tale "East of the Sun, West of the Moon" which I illustrated back in the early 1990s.
Jessica was good enough to acknowledge my book in her bibliography at the back of her book, and has written on her website of how my illustrations had inspired her imagination when she was younger.
For me it was the most unusual experience to be reading this terrific book and often coming across scenes or descriptions that had clearly been influenced by the work I did all those years ago.
I was very proud that my work had energised this young person's creativity, and although not many readers will go on to actually create a novel as Jessica has, it's exciting to think that my books might sometimes affect people as deeply as that.

"Making Fairy Tales" with Full Commentary Part 2

This is the second part of the Making Fairy Tales film.

"Making Fairy Tales" with Full Commentary Part 1

Here's a high quality version of a video that I posted some time ago. Part 2 will be posted soon.