Mysterious Traveller Long Listed for the CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal

I'm delighted to be on the 2014 CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal long list for my work on Mysterious Traveller by Mal Peet and Elspeth Graham, published by Walker Books.
I was lucky enough to win the Kate Greenaway twice in the 1990s for The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey and for When Jessie Came Across the Sea. 
There are some great illustrators long listed with me but fingers crossed for the shortlist anyway!

What "Miss Kate" Did Next

About fifteen years ago when I was looking for an actress/model for a book I was working on, my friend Ann Kavanagh introduced me to a charming young girl named Kate Brennan.
It was no surprise that Kate was already a fine actress, her parents, Martina Stanley and Stephen Brennan, are both very well known on the Irish stage and television.
Kate was perfect for the part. She showed wonderful sensitivity and worked very hard to help me bring Jessie to life.

I have watched Kate's progress through her career as an actress ever since, and was delighted to see that she is now performing as a singer too under the name "Miss Kate", and she's doing so well that she was featured in last week's Sunday Times Culture magazine.

There she is on the cover. It's just great to see Kate doing so well.

由PJ美林畫報

Here are a few more.
Greek? Chinese? I'll have to check.
"Oscar Wilde: Stories for Children" is the most translated of all the books I have illustrated.
Perhaps I'll get all the foreign editions together for a blog item.

Two Paintings from "When Jessie Came Across the Sea "

Here are a couple of paintings from "When Jessie Came Across the Sea" by Amy Hest.
These two are also going to be in the Cologne exhibition.

Jessie: Supporting Rôle in "You've Got Mail"

I have somehow avoided watching "You've Got Mail" with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, but it was on the TV last night and my attention was engaged when I saw it was all about New York bookshops, and I seemed to remember my friend Marie-Louise saying that she noticed a book of mine in meg Ryan's shop.

I still didn't watch it, but I got a shaky snap of the screen showing Tom Hanks with the cover of When Jessie Came Across The Sea in the background.

From "When Jessie Came Across the Sea"

This is a big spread from When Jessie Came Across the Sea by Amy Hest.
It was the first picture I did from that book, and I did it as a way of breaking myself into the project.
This was really going in the deep end, as this scene has so much detail and required a lot of research and working with models.
Often starting out on a new book I would tackle a spread that involves depicting the setting rather than close-up views of the characters. It means I can get some work under my belt, and so immerse myself deeper in the project before I start working with models.
I'm at that stage now with a book set in the desert in Africa, and I am enjoying drawing lots of landscapes with sand dunes and desert mountains. I'm even starting to enjoy drawing camels, which are among the goofiest looking creatures on God's earth.

"What Kate Did Next"

On Saturday night I went to see a wonderful play, called "Terminus" by Mark O'Rowe.
I was invited along by one of the play's stars, a terrific young actress named Kate Brennan.
That's Kate on the right hand side.
She is from a very well-known Irish acting family, and it's great to see her doing so well in the family business.
Kate has developed into a very powerful performer, but she was already impressive twelve years ago, when my friend Ann Kavanagh suggested she would be perfect to model for the central character in the book I was about to start work on.
It was in large part thanks to Kate, and Maya Jussek, who modelled for her grandmother, that "When Jessie Came Across the Sea" worked so well.