This week I was painting a tree frog. I think I’ve written about frogs in my blog before, but that’s how it is, sometimes I just draw the same thing again and again. I don’t mind, I like frogs. Here are some of the sketches

and the final picture.

I have also new pictures of frogs in my little sketchbook.

This is “The Frog Hunting”.

“Swimming Frog”

The other thing I’ve been doing is getting ready for my trip to Prague. The city where I was born.  After publishing about thirty books, I’m finally going to have a book published in the Czech Republic in Czech! It’s very exiting.

“A New House for Mouse” is called “Novy domek pro mysku” in Czech.  Vydava ji nakladatelstvi “Portal”.

I’m also visiting “Svet Knihy” a book festival in Prague. I’m going to do a talk about my work and about my books on Saturday the 19th of May at 1pm in Pavilion L810.  I’m now quite used to doing talks about my work in English, but I have to get ready for this one. For example I have to read the books in Czech,  even though only one has been translated so far. It may look easy, because I’m Czech, but it’s not, the English version which I know the best  keeps jumping in to my head. The  talk  is organised by “Anglictina-hry cz.”   Mrs Netusilova, who is the owner of this internet shop, is the lady who’s been selling my books in the Czech Republic in English for some time now. It was her who help the publisher Portal  discover my work.

I’m looking forward to seeing the Czech version of the book, my family, friends, beer on the table and dumplings on the plate.

This week I visited the lovely Mousehold Infant School in Norwich. I talked about my books and together with the children, we made a nice picture. I didn’t take  a camera with me, but if I get some photos from the school, I’ll put them on the blog next time.

It’s also time to put the final touches to the book on which I’ve been working recently.  As I mentioned previously, it will be a book full of animals and pop ups. Here are some sketches for the pop ups.

The porcupine in the book should look like this.

There is also a pop up of the peacock.

Richard, the designer from Walker Books is working on these pop ups. He is very clever and I’m very lucky.

In the book is also a meerkat, but he does not pop out. He just stares.

The last picture is a sloth. Sloths are great. I would love to do a book about a sloth one day, but it’s  difficult, because sloths don’t do much.  They spend most of their life  on one tree. They climb down from the tree only when they need a poo. I like that. Actually is there a story?

It’s raining and raining. I’ve been finishing pictures for my new book “Animal Opposites”. The final touches always take longer than I think they will.

Here is a peacock which will appear in the book.

It’s hard to paint big colourful paintings when is cold and rainy, so here are some smaller pictures. They all have something in common – an umbrella.

A similar picture with different birds.

Here is one with a hippo

and one with a tapir.

A similar picture, but this one is painted on a little canvas.

This picture isn’t mine. I wish it was. It’s one of my favourite paintings. It’s painted by Edgar Degas. You can see it in The Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House in London. Go and have a look. It’s great!

My new book “Jonathan & Martha”, published by PHAIDON  is out NOW!

“Junior Magazine ” choose “Jonathan & Martha” as  book of the month in their May edition. This is the article published in the magazine.

This is the picture of the apple which inspired me to write the story about Jonathan & Martha. The picture is painted by Leonie and it’s hanging on the wall in her family’s house in Greece. I like the apple and its reflection.

Here is one of the first sketches for the book.

You see, Jonathan and Martha use to be called Wilbur and Berta. Don’t ask about the names.  I honestly don’t know why Jonathan, Wilbur, Martha or Berta…I don’t know. Mind you, they are rather good names for lovely little worms. This was the first mock up of the book.

The second mock up looked like this.

One of the black and white sketches

and some of the inside spreads.

I enjoyed painting two little worms ready to eat a whole watermelon.

This picture is from the scary part of the book. Painting the bird was fun. I actually do like painting birds…hmm I never thought about it before.

The book itself is really well produced. Cover sleeve and nice thick paper…inside are holes and shaped pages…..have a look.

I’m back at my desk working on my new book. These days I’ve been mostly drawing hippos.

I like this one the best, but it turned out that children may be quite scared by the size of his mouth.

I could try this one. He looks more friendly.

Or this one?

Or may be this one? I don’t know. I think I need to take a brake from hippos and look at them later. Here are more hippos from my sketch book.

and the last one.

The other thing I was doing is rather exciting. I was editing a Czech translation of my book ” A New House for Mouse”. It’s going to be published soon in the Czech Republic. It’s very exciting, because it’s going to be my first book published in my home country and that’s not all. The Czech publisher Portal bought rights for four of my books and they should be published this year and next!

Last week my family and I were skiing in Austria. We went with our friends Jane, Linda  and William.

This is me skiing, drawn by William, who is 6 years old. I love skiing!

This picture of William drawing is done by my younger daughter Cecilia.

Another picture by Cecilia is from the plane. I love this drawing.

My older daughter Tereza drew the village from our window.

It seems that everybody was drawing but me. I did NOTHING. No drawing, no working I had a HOLIDAY. On the way back home we visited our granny in Somerset and stayed for Easter. Oh yes, there was another activity I like the best – eating cakes. This masterpiece was created by my lovely mother in law.

Yum!

On Tuesday, the shortlist for “The Kate Greenaway Medal” was announced.  The great news is, that “Puffin Peter” is one of the eight nominated books. Click here to see the complete list of nominated books.

It’s always nice when a book gets noticed, but being in the company of such good books makes me smile.

I also feel very happy for my publisher Walker Books. They have five out of the eight shortlisted book titles. It’s a great achievement and it says a lot about the publisher.

With a nomination like this comes a bit of publicity, so I was asked a few questions about “Puffin Peter”. I had to dig out some old sketches and drawings. It was good fun, because it brought back memories. The book was published last year, but of course I finished it some time before it got published.  I forgot a lot about the process of working on the book and  perhaps also some difficulties which came with it. Seeing the sketches again made the memories all come back.

This is one of the first notes.

I new straight away, that Puffin Peter will get lost on the sea.  The hard work started from there. Here are some more sketches.

And first colour sketches.

Sketches and final illustrations.

Here is a picture which you won’t be able to find in the book.

And this is one of my favourite pencil notes. It’s a sketch for the last page.

I’m working on new book. The working title is “Animal Opposites”. I realised, that animals we are supposed to know well, are the animals which are the most difficult to draw. For example the gorilla. The gorilla is a beautiful animal. Its behaviour reminds us often of our own behaviour, therefore it makes us think that it looks more human than it actually does. When gorillas walk on all fours, it looks to me more like a big dog than a human being. Also when you draw its feet, you realise how different they are from your own feet. Anyway, here is my gorilla.

Here is a gorilla talking to me. Well, unfortunately the guy doesn’t look like me at all. I’m probably more similar to the gorilla than to this man. Oh well.

My friend Mark had his birthday and as I was in the process of drawing gorillas, I did one for his birthday card. It’s called “Walking with a Gorilla”.

Spring outside is beautiful. Everything is coming out green and bright. My wife Claire is painting. She is working on three paintings for “Sustainability”, an exhibition  you can see between 6th of April and the 19th of May at the Botanical Gardens in Oxford. Here is the invitation

and here are the pictures.

Claire’s paintings are always bright and colourful, but these paintings are even brighter than usual. It’s because they are painted on perspex. I can’t wait to see them hanging in the botanical gardens.  You can see more of Claire’s paintings on her website. Click here.

This week I’ve been working on my new book. The book is going to be a pop up book and there will be lots of animals. I only started this week and will probably change the pictures a few times before I’ll be happy. I started with a giraffe.

I like drawing giraffes.

This one is from the book Animal Counting. It’s a book which is going to be in the shops soon. It’s being printed at the moment.

This giraffe is from my book “Silly Suzy Goose”.

I also found some sketches in my sketchbook.

This picture is quite interesting. Not so much because of the giraffe, but because of the stork.

Here is a falling giraffe.

I think the giraffe is an amazing and rather strange looking animal. I’m not exactly sure what the picture is about, but I like the giraffe doing something unusual. In this case falling.

Now this is also unusual. A swimming giraffe. I’m quite sure that giraffes can’t swim, but I like the idea that they can. I did a few pictures of swimming giraffes.

Here is one of them.

The last picture is “Kiss from Giraffe”.

The text in Czech says: Tamara (it’s the name of the giraffe) likes her keeper.

I’m not going to more schools this week. The busiest time of year is over.  I visited two more schools last week. I painted a mural on the wall in a local school – St George’s Church of England Primary School.  I used the children’s drawings of animals combined with mine to create the picture. It was fun and a rather inspiring few days, but it was also very tiring. Now I can’t wait to start working on my new book. It is going to be called “Animal Opposites”.

I was also thinking, that in last few days I drew quite a lot of elephants. Here is one I’ve shown before.

I think I always liked drawing elephants. Here are two older pictures of elephants I found in my draw.

I also found these two sketches. The elephants are far from perfect, but I like the drawings.

In fact I like the elephants so much, that I wrote a book called “Elephant”.

This is my favourite picture from the book.

I think this illustration says everything about the book.

This is the final picture from the book, without the text, as it would give away the ending.

Oh yes and here is The Mammoth as promised in the title.