• Have I mentioned SweetLittleBaby.Com? Some thing tells me that I haven’t.

    I suppose it’s the beginning of a publishing adventure. It’s been a long,long time coming, but all the elements now seem to be in place and I happen to have the skills to get on with it.

    Why Babies? Because I think they are fun and that whole period of babyness is so exciting. Babies are tiring, smelly, loud, and subject to many other fruity adjectives, but they are also great fun and endlessly absorbing.

    And I think babies need apps too!

    I’m not going to argue with people any more about how real books are better than e-books and apps. Apps are different from books and that’s a fact. I want to make sure that the e-books and apps that are available are really good and suitable. There won’t be advertising or inApp purchase opportunities. I don’t think young families want that and babies certainly don’t.

    If you want to see what my app, SweetLittleBabyBoo! is all about, head over to SweetLittleBaby.Com and sign up for the newsletter. You will then be given the address of a live, online version of SweetLittleBabyBoo! that you can play with.

    Enjoy – have fun!

  • The children of l’Ecole Haut Lac wrote a story for me to illustrate last week. It was about a Marmot. Two marmots in fact. One called Mickey and one called Sally. We had a lot of fun with it.

    Here’s a quick lesson in how to draw a cartoon Marmot. A longer lesson will follow tomorrow.

  • I went to Switzerland this week to visit L’Ecole Internationale Bilingue du Haut-Lac in the town of Vevey, which is the international headquarters of Nestle foods. Over two very busy days, I saw everyone in the infants and juniors and went up to the secondary department to talk to year sevens.

    I’ve returned very tired and with a head full of cold but, as so often happens on these trips, a head full of ideas too. For me, the most exciting thing was to see everyone’s reaction to my new iPhone App, more of which later. The App went live on the iTunes store while I was away. I should probably have been attending to it, But I couldn’t remember my Apple Password!

    We had great fun with Nursery, Reception and Year One, who are split into two cohorts on different sites, as it is a bilingual school. They had written a story about Mickey the Marmot, which I then illustrated for them. Over at the main school, Mickey had magically turned into Sally – some forceful girl editors involved there, I think – and had become an astronaut. So I gave her a spacesuit, earrings and handbag!

    In a couple of my sessions I found it quite hard to concentrate, as the huge picture windows looked out over lake Geneva and every now and then A huge bird would swoop past. It was a very dark bird of prey, which I’m pretty sure was a Black Kite. I saw one dive down and catch a fish later and it looked exactly like this video at Arkive.com.

    We had lots of stories and did lots of drawing and I had a great time. Many thanks to everyone for making it such a memorable trip. I shall have to do a How to draw Mickey the Marmot video soon!