Illustrations / Books

A selection of illustrations and covers from some of my picture books, Private Press books,  novels, and ephemera. In date ranging from 1983 to the present. Including roughs and drawings from sketchbooks etc

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I was never a proper and assiduous keeper of the sketchbook like proper artists are meant to. As an art student, in the far off 1960s, when sketchbooks were required for marking purposes I often faked them after the event. I  would work backwards from the finished piece and forge an earlier and mostly non existent nascent state of the piece in question. This was in order to demonstrate what American students later referred to in all seriousness as their, ‘ideation’.

My forays into the sketchbook world have been patchy and intermittent. I do have several rather classy ones full of nice heavy watercolour paper which are  often a joy to draw in. I have planned several of my picture books in sketchbooks but by no means all. I am just as likely to plan them out on scruffy layout or typo detail pads as on the heavyweight stuff.

I planned my version of Edward Lear’s Owl & the Pussy-Cat mostly in a sketchbook using watercolours. I had thought that I might make the pea green boat into a steam launch with a cute funnel. This idea did not survive much beyond the first editorial meeting. It lives on though in the sketchbook.

I was teaching in America in the late 1980’s when planning a book of lullabies, Hush A Bye Baby for Doubleday, I used a watercolour sketchbook for the quite elaborate roughs as below.

Also the rough pages for the first of the  Poppy & Pip series published by Harper Collins. A set of thumbnail black and white roughs from Home Before Dark published by Scholastic.

 

A set of roughs for a tribute drawing to Edward Bawden.

 

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Partial scan of the contents page from Stories and Songs for Bedtime, pencil and watercolour OUP 2004. This will be auctioned by the House of Illustration in the autumn. A rare event as I never normally sell original artwork from my books.

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Original cover design for Round & Round the Garden, Oxford 1983.

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Cover for The Oxford Nursery Story Book

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3 illustrations for The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Folio Society 1986

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Hand coloured Frontispiece for The Dreaming House by Jeanette Winterson, Ulysses  Bookshop.

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Hand coloured illustration to Edible Architecture by Margot Coatts published by Libanus Press 1987

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Cover pattern paper for Edible Architecture by Margot Coatts Libanus Press 1987
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Lithograph illustration from Motley by Walter De La Mare published by The Folio Society printed by Senecio Press

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Hand coloured frontispiece for Cork by William Boyd published by Ulysses Bookshop

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Cover illustration for the Radio Times July 1987

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Christmas Card early 2000s

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Cover illustration for Home Before Dark 1990s published by Scholastic

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Lithograph for Merivale Editions 1980s

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Front cover of the Japanese edition of Tom Trueheart published by Shayzanshah

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Front cover for the French translation of Butterfingers by Juliet Trewellard

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Endpapers from Northern Lights by Philip Pullman

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Illustration from Butterfingers by Juliet Trewellard

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Hand coloured concert programme for my group Les Freres Perverts France July 1993

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Hand coloured concert programme for Les Freres Perverts late 198os

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Illustration of Drosslemeyer from The Nutcracker by Berlie Doherty Random House Children’s Books

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Silhouette drawing from The Secret History of Tom Trueheart Boy Adventurer Oxford 2006

Front cover of Le Grand Meaulnes aka The Lost Domain which I illustrated in 1986. 2013 marks the centenary of first publication.

The author, Henri Alain-Fournier in Lycee uniform 1905

The Pierrot at the strange fete

Yvonne De Galais

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A selection of illustrations from Aladdin and His Magic Lamp by Philip Pullman and published by Scholastic in 2011