• Yesterday, I showed you how I’d been reading the winning stories from the Welsh Books Council Dahlightful schools writing competition and how I decided how I was going to illustrate each story.

    Today, in part 2, I’ll show you how I go from a rough sketch to a piece of finished artwork.

    This Story, by Catrin Watson-Jones, of Aberconwy High School, tells the story of Nai, who falls into a virtual reality game where he meets Gareki an Ai character who wants to be a real person.

    The two team up against Segatendo, who is making the game impossible for them. If they win, Gareki will become a real person and Nai will have a real friend. I felt that we needed to see Nai wearing his Oculus Rift headset, being zapped by Segatendo, so I did some research on on the headset and based the illustration on a sketch I’d previously drawn in PC World, while watching a kid dancing about in the Vive demonstration area!

    Segatendo is described as a 3 foot tall sprite, with fairy wings and a pair of blue shorts and red shirt. A large gold crown was placed on his messy blonde hair. There’s not much description of the other two, so I decided to make Nai look a little shy and Gareki I felt should look like the cool guy Nai would really like to be friends with.

    In this video I show how I go from sketches to finished sketch to final artwork – oops! There was something I didn’t like about it, so I started again!

  • How do you set about illustrating children’s books? Well, in a new series of videos, I’ll show you what goes into my process.

    Recently, I was asked to illustrate a book of prize-winning short stories, written by children, inspired by the style and themes of Roald Dahl – in the .

    Illustrating a single story involves one set of characters, I had 17 stories to illustrate and some were written in Welsh – a language I don’t speak too much of. This video shows how I set about the project.

    You may also like to see my illustration and publishing techniques playlist

  • Wales is a land full of Castles. many were built by the English King Edward I to keep the Welsh under control. Most are now in ruins, but visiting them in the beautiful Welsdh country side is always a great day out. Co to the Cadw website to learn more about Castles in Wales

    I went to Castel y Beer, near Talyllyn then up to Criccieth, stopping along the way to have a closer look at the Trawsfynedd Magnox Nuclear power station that used to appear in my nightmares!

    Find out all about Fish and chips too – the absolute most British food you can get – yes even more that tea!