The last few days have been a fast – but not too frantic – whirl of checking and double checking and yesterday – DELIVERING – the final art for Ella Bella Ballerina and Swan Lake. Yes! Book three is finished (subject to any small adjustments required – and I’m sure there will be some). It’s […]
Category: Ella Bella
This is a post category for posts about Ella Bella Ballerina and includes posts imported from the original Ella Bella Ballerina blog on Google Blogger.
Boy Story
A recent posting about pastels got me thinking again about the one book I did using them. It’s a difficult story to tell, but here goes. When my son was very young I enjoyed watching his observations of the world. I wanted to capture that in a book. To him, the world and its excitements […]
Final task
The final little details are all that’s left to do on Ella Bella Ballerina and Swan Lake (unless Orchard books make me re-do something!). Funnily enough, the decorative borders that will go around the edge of the cover are proving especially hard to crack… and there’s some hand-lettering to do as well, which I always […]
Almost there…
I should finish Ella Bella this week!!! Which is just as well as my studio is shockingly untidy. One of the good things about finishing is that I can “muck out” the whole room and get things cleaned up. I always find that very theraputic after completing something big like a complicated Ella Bella book. […]
Early Ella
Sorting through some papers I was shocked to come across these very early pictures of Ella Bella. How different she looks here! These are the very first drawings I ever did, before writing a story or doing any of the considerable research I undertook before developing Ella as she appears today. While these are competent […]
Swan Lake Snapshots.
Here are some work in progress pictures of the art for Ella Bella Ballerina book three. Firstly, three layers for you to use your imagination with. What will they look like together? I don’t know!!! And meanwhile, in my darkened studio with only a lamp under my glass table, visions of castles and queens, and […]
Perfect pastel prism
Colour is a magical thing. I rarely indulge myself, but the reduced box of 48 gorgeous artists quality pastels in the local art shop was too much. I was enchanted. They are deliciously crumbly, almost (I imagine) melt-in-the-mouth Edinburgh Rock soft (which can’t be a bad thing). I don’t use pastels very often, as it […]
A bit of a struggle…
The light an artist uses is usally crucial, and I know of artists who only paint with natural light. When the snow fell there was much enhanced light, especially when the sun shone. But it was of little use to me. For Ella Bella I have to work in a darkened room, light shining from […]
Creating Ella Bella – part five
Central to the look of Ella Bella is the colour. In the scenes set in the “real” world, I wanted monochrome. Understandably, Orchard Books felt this wasn’t very commercial. But a muted palette was deemed acceptable and so I began to experiment. It took a while to work out the exact technique but in the […]
Grand finale
The final scene of Swan Lake is so magnificent (musically) that it needs some drama in the storytelling. But the ending is often rather obscure in terms of plot. Many versions exist, some happy and some tragic – although often it isn’t actually very clear what actually happens. And children can tell if you fudge […]
