iPhone and iPod application approved!

Our children's book application "The Bird with the Rainbow Tail" mentioned below, has now been approved by Apple and is in the store now. It will take another four weeks to get the final approval for the iPad or so it seems.Thanks so much for all your kind comments, they have been much appreciated.

The illustration above is the icon that appears on screen as a sort of thumbnail, it had to be very eye catching with strong colours so that it stands out when displayed as a very teeny weeny square. Needless to say that I have it on my iPod and have been playing it non-stop to all and sundry! I showed it to my elderly parents who were completely mystified, I had a hard time explaining how we got Tony's voice in "that little thing". I also found it hard to explain how the iTunes shop works, I am not entirely sure myself! It must be very difficult for my father (who will be 97 this week), to understand blogs and tweets and apps, his world was all about cogs and wheels and thingamajigs.

Listen to this for free!

With a great deal of nervous trepidation I would like to invite to you a preview of “The Bird with the Rainbow Tail” which I have mentioned before on my blog here.

If you follow the link you can see how the application works, it is rather difficult to explain but easy to understand when you see the demonstration. All you need to do is click the arrow and sit back and watch.You can also download the MP3 for free and hear the story from start to finish by following the link in the sidebar on the website.

My husband Tony has written the book with me and has narrated it also. James our son has recorded it and added sound and has composed the music so you see this is a true labour of love. It has taken over four months to illustrate and has been a great adventure, a voyage of discovery into uncharted waters. We have had so much fun doing the recording and testing, with many technical obstacles to overcome and new things to learn, I am almost sad not to be working on it still.

Apple is now testing the application and we have all our fingers and toes, wings and paws crossed that everything will work out as planned. If all is well it should be available in the next week or so. We really hope you will like it!

There is also a little bit about Tony and me here.

keep right on till the end of the road....

Working on this children’s book project (The Bird with the Rainbow Tail) has been a little bit like climbing a steep hill, I started off nice and lickety split but the nearer I get to the end the harder I have to climb and the slower the progress. Do you ever feel like that? I have to be very strict with myself as it is so easy to give into diversions.


This is page twelve out of fourteen, which started life as a black and white pen and ink drawing. The colour and pattern details have been added digitally with the aid of my newest toy, the Wacom tablet. I have been having fun using some of my fabric patterns where appropriate.



James has been working hard on the music, which is nearly complete. Tony has finished the narration in English and the story has also been translated into German and recorded in Germany and although I don’t speak a word of German I can make out some of the words. I say "English" but in actual fact the text has been changed to have an American spelling as our publisher requested. We now have gray instead of grey and color instead of colour. A case of you say "tomado" and I say "tomato" but let's not call the whole thing off.



It has been a joy to work together on this project and I can’t wait to see and hear the finished thing on an iPod or even better an iPad if only I possessed such a thing! (hint hint)

Working from home.

Never having ever had a “proper job” I have always been fortunate to work from my home studio – ok, my dining room/studio! This has been something of a mixed blessing, ideal when my children were little as I was always at home with them and was able to work around school times, bed times etc. However there have been times when I have thought how nice it would be to go out of the house and shut the door on the domestic chaos that so often prevails.

This week has been no exception, I have so many jobs that need my attention and life seems like one long juggling act, which I am sure a great deal of you will identify with. The weekend was spent visiting my elderly parents, supermarket shopping, catching up with my family and bargain hunting in the big city so all the jobs which were earmarked for the weekend are still undone. I sit at my desk and look out at the garden, the hedge needs trimming, the flowerbeds need weeding, the roses dead heading. I venture into the garden and decide that, as the weather is good maybe I should get the laundry done and have the luxury of hanging the sheets out in the fresh air. I go upstairs to sort the laundry, ignoring the fact that the stairs could do with a good hoovering and remember that I need to dash to the shops to catch them before they close and whilst I am in the village I might as well post the Etsy shop order at the same time, so maybe I should finish packing that first? All the time feeling that I really should be getting on with some illustration work, not to mention updating my blog and reading yours and now if you will excuse me I have to dash, there is someone at the door…. and the phone is ringing….and the dog is barking….. and where the heck did I leave my glasses?

Illustrating for the iPod.

Illustrating for the iPod/iPad is proving to be interesting if not challenging. It has always been the case in years gone by that the method of printing was the major factor in deciding the style of illustration. For example, printing from a wood block usually produces an illustration in black and white and the limitations of the process can be a starting point and sometimes an inspiration for the final artwork. When full colour photogravure printing came along illustrators responded to the challenge by producing more colourful and detailed artwork. Illustrating for the iPod is not limited to the conventions of the printing process, in theory anything is possible, the rules are “there are no rules”. In reality the restraints are of a different nature, mainly governed by the actual size of the iPod screen. The artwork has to “read” when shown on the tiny screen and in the case of the application which we are using with MCB Mobile Children's Books for “The Bird with the Rainbow Tail” (to which I referred earlier) the left hand third of the illustration is covered by text, so that part of the illustration can only be seen when the text is switched off. This means that all the action has to happen in the other two thirds of the screen on the right hand side.
As if that wasn’t enough, the same illustration cropped has to also work on the iPad, which is much larger and has a higher resolution.

In the past, all of my picture book illustrations have been in full colour. Each illustration took weeks to complete with nine to twelve months allowed for the entire book. This current project has to be completed in a much shorter time frame added to which there is another constraint, that of the story which begins in a world devoid of colour. It seemed logical therefore to do the illustrations in black line drawing and then to add patterns, colours and textures digitally. As you can gather, the whole project is experimental and a little bit daunting. The patterns and collage effect have been taken form my fabric designs, and photographic textures from wood, stone etc.

The illustration here is page one and has been inspired a little by Samuel Palmer whose work I adore.

One for sorrow, two for joy.

Work has started on my new book project I spoke about earlier, or perhaps I should say our new book project. It is in fact going to be a family project and something very new and experimental for all of us. I had a vague idea I wanted to write about and my husband Tony (an English teacher) helped me to shape the idea into a story. Gradually he added bits, new ideas, this interchange of ideas went back and forth, back and forth until it was difficult to remember how we arrived at the final version!

We submitted the completed text (without illustration) to a couple of publishers who very politely said “no thanks”. The text then languished in a drawer for months until our son James took it out and made it into an audio book as part of his final years studies in music technology. The addition of music and sound effects really brought the story to life and we were all very pleased with the result.

Fast forward another twelve months and we are on the threshold of our new venture, the work will be published as a multi-media children’s book application for the Apple iPod, iPhone, iPad, and other audio platforms. It will have fourteen illustrations, a scrolling text, music and sound effects and narration which can be overwritten by another voice, for example a parent or child can choose to record themselves reading the story. It is going to be available in English and German. The book also has a title “The bird with the rainbow tail”

The very sad magpie drawing is work in progress; all the illustrations start as pen and ink drawings in black and white with colour added digitally so it will be a mixture of old and new technologies. I hope the world will always be full of traditional children’s books, they played an important role in my life, my children’s life and now my grandchild’s life but we see this as an addition, the sort of thing that you can take on a journey without then need to carry heavy books around. I hope to explain more later; in the meantime I will leave you with one very sad magpie in the making.