So far so good… I have finished my White Cat book and made some lovely mockups. I have distributed some samples to friends with kids and got some nice feedback. Then comes the horrible part… Sending it to publishers and agents. This is where doubts start to creep in. Is it good enough? Will any one like it? And then there are questions like who is the right person to send it too? What should I send? How do I approach them? I don’t know what the answers are… This is why I need to get an agent. Hopefully once I have gone through the pain of finding one they will do all those bits I don’t like. But then how do you find the right agent? If you go for ones with famous clients are you aiming too high? If you go for someone a bit more modest will you be limiting your opportunities to make it really big? This is where it would help to know some of the people in the industry, get some advice, do some networking.

It is hard to get generic advice on this subject as what you need to do depends very much on your individual circumstances. My approach has been to send a nice hardback mock up to one agent and to one publisher who I really want to work with then I will send postcards and emails to many others (starting at the top and working my way down).

I need to get an online portfolio up and running pronto though… it never ends.

No, not the popular trials motorbike programme from the 70’s-80’s, but what I needed the other day. I was, as I said in my last post, ready to get stuck back into my illustrating my children’s book, but I didn’t know where to start.

When all your work is in a big pile it is hard to visualise what you have done and still have yet to do. Obviously I know what I have done, but I really needed to see it all at once. Not having a big enough desk I grabbed a ball of string and stole some pegs from the washing line. I strung up the string, with pegs threaded on, across the length of my studio and hung up the pages I had finished in order. Once I had done that it made it much easier to make decisions on what still needed doing.

I had got stuck (back in the summer) on a couple of pages and still had no idea how to tackle them, but I saw that I needed some end papers and a start page for my story that would be simple, so I grabbed my pen and brush and two days later had those sorted. “Now” I thought “I am back in the swing of it. Let’s tackle those difficult pages.” I didn’t have any flash of inspirations, but I set out drawing flowers (one of the pages needs lots of them and I had no idea how to make them look). I tried a few options which were good but the style wasn’t quite right. So I did them in a different style, but the colouring wasn’t working. Eventually though I cracked it – once I had I had one of those “Why didn’t I just do them like that in the first place?” moments…

page from my sketchbook

Anyway, that was last night and that page is still a long way from being done, but at least now I know what I am doing! Most of the time, as an illustrator, I rely on inspiration to occur naturally, sometimes though, I have to go looking for it and it doesn’t always want to be found. When this happens it feels like I’ve lost my drawing mojo. Perseverance was needed (is needed) and with any luck I will be finished in the not too distant future.

It is so hard working in a vacuum, especially in a Dyson – one gets so dizzy… but seriously – it is not easy to know how much work to do before starting to tout your work around to Publishers and/or Agents (which is a whole other issue itself). This is the dilemma I am currently facing myself. I have completed roughly two thirds of a book – why not finish it? Well, I believe publishers like to see work in progress so they feel they can have a bit of a steer in getting the final version to their liking? Also I have a head full of children’s book ideas spanning a wide range of ages – should I work up some of these first? Working full time as I do it is hard to find the time and I could easily spend months on this…

For the last couple of months I have been so indecisive on these issues that I have ended up doing nothing.

Eventually I did the only sensible thing and picked up my copy of the Children’s Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. It doesn’t give all the answers, but it does provide some context which really helps when making these sorts of decisions. I really can’t recommend it enough and now feel ready to get stuck back into the thick of it.

Hope you like the website – it based around a project I am currently working on – a book about a White Cat. I used a wordpress template I found on the fantastic website Smashing Magazine. The template was created by InDeziner and originally looked very different. Basically I did little more than replace the graphics with my illustrations, but the end result is rather pleasing.

This blog will be used to promote myself as a children’s book illustrator (and who knows – even author) – expect lots of ‘work in progress’ images, lots of moaning about the difficulties of trying to fit everthing in around a full time job as a graphic designer and hopefully the joys of getting something published… no, not hopefully – definitely! (Be positive!)

Ben.