LiveJournal just sent me a message to let me know I've been on this blog for TWENTY YEARS!! Thank you, livejournal, this blog has been a major part of my growing up and becoming a professional artist and writer! Really appreciate you for hosting me for all these years.

I registed for an LJ account when I was in art college, and totally unaware of how to talk about myself and my work. (Gosh, I looked at my earlier posts - here's my third post - and you can already see things happening that took off much later... here's a monoprint that foreshadowed the creation of Fledermaus, in the Adventuremice.)

My blog here became a record, both of what I've been getting up to, and a chronicle of much of the London publishing scene from about 2007-2020 or so. I think I lost a lot of steam during Covid, when the Internet got more toxic; it wasn't really toxic here, just that everyone I knew had dispersed to different platforms.

I'm keeping parallel blogs now, here and over on my newly-designed website, jabberworks.co.uk. You can see my latest (non-book) artwork, a poster for the Exeter Blessing of the Bikes. Slightly outside my usual kind of commissions!

Hmm, for some reason, LJ isn't letting me post the image, that's not good. Here, I'll cross-post the image URL from my new blog:

Most things I've been posting have been work-related, but here's a painting I made just for fun (well, for a birthday card, but I'd been wanting to draw it for awhile). The photo doesn't perfectly capture the gold paint, and scanning it would fare even worse, but the gilding sparkles nicely on it, in real life.



And here's the original inspiration, a thousand-year-old manuscript illumination. It's always fun to give ancient drawings a reboot!

I drew a logo! I don't normally draw logos, but this bookshop - First Draft Books - is twenty seconds down the road from my studio in Bovey Tracey, Devon, so I couldn't resist. The festival will feature my fab comics friend Neill Cameron, amazing artist-writer Mikey Please, writers Serena Patel and Zohra Nabi, and yours truly, Reeve & McIntyre.

Visit the jam-packed First Draft events page to find out more!

The eighth Adventuremice book is poised and ready to launch! Adventuremice: Of Mice and Mummies will start hitting bookshops any day now, officially launching on February 26th. My co-author Philip Reeve and I have been coming up with activities and a video, and I hope to make another drawing video soon. But I wanted to make sure I wrote a blog specially about this book because the setting is very near and dear to my heart. When I was between, say, 11 and 15, I really, really wanted to be, not a writer-illustrator, but an archaeologist. I kind of knew an archeologist wasn't really a tomb raider like Indiana Jones (in fact, tomb raiding is bad!), but I was still wrapped up in the glamour and excitement of those films.



I went along to some archaeology classes and realised, if I did it for a living, I probably wouldn't be discovering amazing Egyptian tombs, I'd probably be digging up a petrified piece of a wood in a cold, muddy bog somewhere. And that made me realise that what I was most excited about wasn't the digging and cataloguing, it was simply getting to look at extraordinary tomb paintings, and even painting something similar myself. I love the flat aesthetic of ancient Egyptian art, the elegance, the way the pictures are made of lines, coloured in, much like a Tintin comic book. I've wanted to do this Egyptian-style book from the beginning of the series, I knew it was coming, but Philip and I waited until we had just the right story for it.



If you go onto the Draw & Make page of Adventuremice.com, scroll down to find the Maze sheet, and another Mouse Hieroglyphics sheet so you can write in code (or simply use them to decorate your drawings)!



This book pushed my watercolour paintings skills, and I was particularly proud of this double-page illustration, with the lighting on the ruins:



I like to keep one of the paintings from the book for myself, for a sort of home gallery, and I haven't yet decided if I'm going to keep that one or this other title-page illustration of Pedro and Fledermaus having a lark:



As with earlier book, the original ink & watercolour illustrations from the book will go on sale in the Adventuremice.com shop from 9pm on launch day, 26 Feb, UK time. (Set a reminder if you're keen, to get in quick so you get the best pictures or lowest prices! Usually there are pieces from as low as £5 up to £350.)

This book's dedicated to Stuart, a hardworking member of the Adventuremice team; without his help with the business side of things, doing this job would be nearly impossible for me. Thank you, Stuart!!

I've recently returned from a trip to Dubai, my fourth visit there for the Emirates Festival of Literature, and I was going to write one blog post about the whole visit. Except I quickly realised that a particular Adventuremice school visit was going to need the space of its own post to do it justice! This was a visit to Hartland International School by Philip Reeve and me, accompanied by Maleeha Saad from the festival's Reading for Pleasure team.

Philip and I have both visited many schools, and occasionally we encounter a school with a dynamic school librarian or a teacher who absolutely understands how to communicate a love of reading to their children. They prepare the children for months in advance of a visit by an author, and by the time the author arrives, the children have read the author's books and are excited to meet them. Hartland is one of the best-ever examples we've encountered; when we arrived at the school, the children, staff and parents made us feel like rock stars!



Let's start with this incredible big mural of the Adventuremice Mousebase that we saw when we first arrived. Look, there's Fledermaus's seaplane! And staff dressed as our characters! School Librarian Mary-Rose Grieve is dressed as Juniper, Assistant Librarian Gemma McCormac is Millie, and Library Assistant Barry McAlpine is Skipper!



Not only that, but the mural has opening doors, as modelled here by Gemma and Mary-Rose:



Hang on, let's zoom in a little closer, so you can see the incredible details here. The mural was painted by an amazing team of parents, and children found the mousetails hidden around school, joined them back up with their mice, which then inhabited their Mousebase.



Check this out, it has a working lift!! And a water wheel that goes around, and twinkling lights!!



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