Have you been out today?

Daler, A6 sketchbook number 11, begun 2nd January 1998.

Here we go again, then. The start of book number 11. A mixed bag, this one (same as ever I suppose). At this point I'm one term into the two year MA at Brighton. There will be memories along the way (but not especially with these first two spreads).












Images are clickably enlargable.

A6, Seawhite of Brighton sketchbook number 10, begun 31st October 1997.












Oops. I hadn't realised the end was nigh or I'd have bunged these ones at the end of last week's archive post. On to number 11 next week and something a bit more interesting, I hope...

Click on images to see them bigger.

Over at artblog Scotch Corner they're having a month of guest contributions - various scribbly folk answering a brief questionnaire-type thing in an entertaining fashion - and my turn was yesterday (though whether I was entertaining is not for me to judge). Do take a look, there's some fine folk who have already contributed and plenty more to come.

My thanks to the excellent Graeme Neil Reid for the invitation.

Again, I quite liked this but kind of didn't expect the publisher to go for it. And I was right. What I hadn't expected was that they didn't really go for any of the ideas I presented to them and asked me, in the nicest possible way, to go away and have another think about it.

This is the last of these for a while. I'll give it a rest for a bit (maybe even put some new stuff up instead of constantly delving through the past) and tell What Happened Next another time.

I Knew this one couldn't be used, really, but I like it a lot. In fact I like it so much that I may one day have to write a different book that it can be the cover for.

A6, Seawhite of Brighton sketchbook number 10, begun 31st October 1997.






Ah yes, the yellow teapot...





I have no idea who Sue in Caldecote might have been.



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Another quiet one.

Almost ... too quiet...

I rather like this one, looking at it now, but I was unsurprised when it didn't find favour with my publishers. I thought at the time that they had considered it too uncommercial but, given their eventual choice, maybe they thought it wasn't uncommercial enough.

This was the one that The Main Squeeze and I both thought would obviously be the one that Ness Wood, my designer, and the folk at David Fickling Books would like best and want me to develop.

Which just goes to show what we know.

So, a good while after I drew the various thumbnail ideas that I posted a while back, there was a meeting with my publisher at which I would need to discuss, among other things, ideas for the cover. I was confident I could rattle off half a dozen rough designs in no time at all because I remembered how pleased I'd been with that spread of thumbnails in my sketchbook. Easy peasy. No urgency to do it now...

Only I was forgetting that in the meantime the title of the book had changed. A bunch of the previous ideas rather relied upon, or at least referred to, the previous title, (Here Is Where We Are, and didn't really work with the new title, A Boy and a Bear in a Boat. Oops. And, what's more, mostly it was the ideas that I liked best that no longer worked.

So I worked up, mostly, some new designs to send along in advance of the meeting.

Here's the first...



...which could have been okay, I think.

Incidentally, I write this having yesterday completed a new cover for the US edition of the book. The American arm of Random House wussed out of (or, perhaps, had the good commercial sense to avoid) going with the daringly minimal UK design. I'm very happy with both versions.

A6, Seawhite of Brighton sketchbook number 10, begun 31st October 1997.














Click on images to see them bigger.