Baby Elephant Walk

Finally September has arrived and Baby Elephant Walk is in the bookshops! 

I feel like I’ve been working on this for so long, but much of that was the usual lag time in between the finishing and actual release date. In that space a month feels like about six.

I knew the tune, but before this but had no idea that it had lyrics, and absolutely no idea that it had Hal David lyrics. (If you aren’t sure of his song list just Google it, there will be more songs there that you know than you think.)

When it comes to talking about my artwork, words have a tendency to escape me. So here I’m going to tell you how the endpapers/first page came to be, but in pictures.

Make believe you’re in a jungle movie –

At this point all I really knew was that I wanted to page to be green and to have a big tree, so this was how I started . . .

Then . . .

Earlier I had done some sketches of plants and leaves, and after a bit of moving around finally decided which to use and where to put them . . .

. . . 

The view from here (some hours later) . . .

Until I finally had this . . .

And now all I had to do was add the animals.

I finished off the backgrounds of all the pages before I added the animals, while it meant that a few things got painted over it made for a better image in the end.