I have just received a copy of "Mind Your Manners" from PEARSON publishers. They have commissioned me to work on a few text books for schools around New Zealand.
Unlike children's picture books, which takes about 6~12months to complete, these educational materials have very tight deadlines.... like three weeks to do the whole thing from the first email from the editor to sending them the final illustrations!!!
But I didn't want this to effect the work quality, the last thing kids wants to read in class would be text books with horrible half-hearted illustrations. For me some of the most memorable stories are those from my junior school years when I was still in Japan and I believe that high quality illustrations had something to do with it! So I have tried my best to put in as much as possible into this one!
I love it when artists show their process in image making, so here goes some work progress of some of the spread from this little book.
In the first round of roughs I made the girl look too young and I had to make her look older in the final illustrations. Although I do love adding details to my images I was getting rather sick of drawing jars and containers when it was 4am in the morning... and I was actually in Australia doing a Billie B Brown tour with author Sally Rippin. We got to stay in beautiful hotels so at least I had nice surrounding as I worked on these (sucked that I had early starts every day though)
Anyway, one major downfall with these works are that I cannot buy them in bookshops as they only get distributed to schools. So this one copy that they have sent me is the only one I can get hold of... mum is not happy as she want to have a copy or two of all the books that I have worked on. Sorry mum.
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