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Oh my, there are SO MANY upcoming exciting things, it's making my head spin. Let's start with the Saturday after next. If you can get to London, Comiket on Saturday, 12 November, 11am-6pm, will be a great time to come meet your favourite comic creators and make some new discoveries, too!



The new venue near Liverpool Street station is beautiful, at Bishopsgate Institute. The DFC Library will be well represented, with this signing schedule:

1.30-2pm: I'm signing! If it's a bit quiet, and you have your sketchbook along, I might also do a little comics jam story with you. Good times.
2.30-3pm: Adam Brockbank, the artist behind Mezolith and many of the monsters in the Harry Potter films
3.30-4pm: Neill Cameron, writer and artist of Mo-bot High and drawer of kick-ass robots

Thanks to everyone who's congratulated me for getting long-listed for next year's Kate Greenaway illustration award for my book with Anne Cottringer, When Titus Took the Train. Fingers crossed!



Here's the animation Anne and I made for Titus (apologies if you've seen it already):



It's quite an exciting list because I can count quite a few friends and good acquaintances on it, so I want lots of people to win, including Viviane Schwarz, Mini Grey, Chris Riddell (all three double long-listed!), my Monsterville colleagues Neal Layton and Ed Vere, Mei Matsuoka, David Roberts, Axel Scheffler, Chris Wormell, Tim Hopgood, Leigh Hodgkinson, Oliver Jeffers, Louise Yates, David Lucas... all of whom have appeared on this blog at one time or other. And quite a few on the Carnegie Medal long list, too! Hello, everyone! *waves in congratulatory way*

And lots of Nelson anthology events coming up, get read for NELSON WEEK! I'm taking part in three of the - Thought Bubble Festival, The Cartoon Museum launch, and the Gosh! comics shop signing, but I have so many friends involved that I'm sure I'll be at all four events. Do come along, this anthology's going to be amazing!!



Here's a single panel peek at my entry, about the main character in 1973, when she's five years old. The guy on the left is her dad, the lady is, well, I'm not telling.



Okay, a few more photos I've taken in the past few days with my new camera. Gary and I just went to the art shop near Brick Lane and there's a huge stork painted on the wall:



Here's the sweet shop that tempts us most horribly to pick up biscuits on our way to the studio. I kind of like how the photo ca

I’m so lucky, I got to make a picture book with film director Anne Cottringer! (If you haven’t heard yet, it’s called When Titus Took the Train.) When Anne and I first met up, we mentioned that we’d always been hankering to try out hand at making a little stop-motion animation. So we did!


YouTube link

It's for the official launch date of the Titus paperback, which is supposed to be on Thursday, but actually, you can already buy copies of it now. Please tell everyone about our little video, we spent waaay too long putting it together! (But it was such a laugh to make.)

Making Titus - We thought it was okay that our film was low-tech bits of cardboard and string because it matches up with the book: Titus sets off on what seems like it will be a mundane rail journey but as he’s writing and drawing little doodles in his journal, suddenly wild adventures start happening, and you’re never quite sure what’s real and what’s coming out of his pencil and his vibrant imagination. So our film starts with me plucking a ukulele that Alex Milway left in our studio. (I don’t know how to play ukulele, as you can hear.) And then we push and prod bits of cardboard and paper and pull them around with string.

Anne rode the train from Hereford to my studio in an old police station in Deptford, where we filmed the animation on the top stairway landing. (Best light there, you see, and the studio itself is rather cluttered.) Amusingly, we turned up in almost exactly the same clothes (red top, grey trousers), which must be our Team Titus uniform. (You can read Anne's version of the events here.)




Here’s Anne setting up her fancy-schmanzy camera.



I painted a bunch of stuff on cardboard before Anne arrived, but we had a lot of last-minute little tweaks and fiddles to make with scissors and pens. I think I’m cutting out a dinosaur eyeball here.



Here’s our pile of animation stuff.



Anne brought a big piece of black velvet to use as a backdrop and we marked the edges of the video with bits of masking tape.



Here’s the scene from the book where a big boulder comes hurtling toward the train. Except we thought it would be funny to have everything happening just to Titus, like we were trying to take him out. (Evil creators, we are!) Of course, Titus triumphs at the end. We even had a little voiceover thing we were going to do, but then it seemed better without.



Here’s a Titus with no eyeballs. I cut them out of paper so we could move them around.



I did a lot of scuffling around on the floor while Anne filmed.



Here’s the terrifying T-Rex. I think he actually looks rather sweet. I still have him stuck up on the wall of

So Sunday was a fabulous day because I got to hang out at the Oxford Literary Festival with two fab friends Candy Gourlay and Philip Reeve, who had an event the same day as mine. Philip and I are bookending Candy here to illustrate the theme of her novel, Tall Story.



Making things even more fun, it all took place at a super-cool venue, the Great Hall in Christ Church college (which you may recognise as the Hogwarts dining hall in the Harry Potter films). I was appalled to discover that Philip had only just been let out of prison that morning, but he kept his ankle tag well hidden. (Shocking whom they allow into the festival Green Room these days.)



You can take a panoramic virtual tour of Christ Church here if you're curious. (Here's a peek at the actual room.) My event wasn't until late afternoon, but I caught an early train to go hear Candy and Philip give a talk with the writer Lauren St John and Blue Peter presenter Barney Harwood. Philip read from his book A Web of Air, Lauren talked about being almost squeezed to death as a child by her pet boa constrictor named Samantha, and here's Candy talking about volcanoes and giants.





Philip Reeve, Barney Harwood, Candy Gourlay, Lauren St John

The three writers' books had all been shortlisted for the Blue Peter Award. Note: If you're like me and didn't grow up in Britain, Blue Peter isn't the colder brother of the Green Man. From what I gather, it's a TV show with a lot of perky people jumping around and doing stunts and making things out of bits of scrap you can find around the house. And I hear adults talking about getting the badges like they're knighthoods, or better. This time Lauren got the Blue Peter badge for her book Dead Man's Cove. Barney pointed out a kid in the audience who was wearing his own Blue Peter badge, so I'm wondering which novel he wrote. Barney even had his own team of fan girls:



I led my When Titus Took the Train event in the Junior Commons Room, where a bunch of very young kids, their parents and I made adventure boardgames. For the game we designed and played together, they helped me come up with good and bad things that could happen on a railway journey, and the kids came up with ideas such as 'Dragon fire' and finding £100, and the adults suggested things like sicking up their lunch, strikes, and delays due to the driver exploding. Then they made their own board games and I saw one boy who had his curving track go from Japan to England, and a very small girl wound hers from a rabbit hole to the Forests of Saturn.

Can I just say for the record that I am a big fan now of Newton Prep School in Battersea? I was a bit nervous this morning when I went to do a full day there because I'd never done a whole event featuring my latest book, When Titus Took the Train. I'd mentioned it previously in talks, but the head librarian wanted me really to focus on it because the Year 1 classes had been doing a big unit on transport and there were some keen train lovers in the audience.



So I came up with some new event ideas and the five-year-old Newton preppies got to be my guinea pigs. Which was good, because the first class was a bit obsessed with guinea pigs... no wait, hamsters. They liked their hamsters. Especially one on telly that I've never heard of (can anyone help me here? Is it Binky the Hamster? Something like that. According to them, he has huge eyeballs.)



The kids were great, we had loads of fun reading Titus, then I drew a simple train shape and the kids made up their own characters and I drew out whatever they told me to draw. When I scribble on a flip chart in front of a room full of kids who are almost exploding with enthusiasm and wacky ideas, I can only half pay attention to what my hand is doing, so it never comes out looking very professional. But we totally don't care because we're laughing so hard.



After we all drew an engine with wacky passengers together, all the kids drew their own carriages, which we lined up across the room to make a very long train. Then the kids helped me make a board game, and then made their own, but I didn't get any photos of those because they all took them home to play. (Oh, and hey, you can download a free pre-made Titus railway board game here.)



What made my day absolutely wonderful was the head librarian, Nelia Beyers, who spent her whole day looking after me and making me feel like a rock star. She's fascinating to talk to because she know so much about books, has a very interesting musical family, comes from South Africa and wow, is she organised! To let you know the extent of her organisation, when I finished my first talk, I was taken to the library where there was a big tray of fresh tea and coffee and a plate with a perfect range of biscuits, no two the same: ginger nut, rich tea, hobnob, chocolate digestive, chocolate rich tea. I ate two of the biscuits, and when I came back from my second event, the plate had been perfectly restocked with the same range of biscuits, the two I'd eaten exactly replaced. And I never even saw Nelia leave, she must have tea tray elves.




Here's one of Nelia's elves, a fab American from Boston named Christine. The two of them helped me sign books, and more books and more books, and then another team of elves arrived and I signed more books, for about three hours. Wow, I don't think I've ever signed so many books in my life, it was amazing. I also really loved seeing the library guest book, signed by other writers and illutrators who have visited. Here you can see a sample of the pages, signed by Jan Fearnley, Carll Cneut, Eleanor Updale and Chris Wormell.

Quick update on my picture book with Anne Cottringer, When Titus Took the Train: Anne and I just found out that the warehouse is completely sold out of the first hardback print run! So anything that's left in shops or online is all that's left, and there won't be any more printed before Christmas. Ack! We saw that there are still a few copies left on Amazon here if you're quick. The second print run (with the paperback) won't come out til February.



You can still print out the free Titus board game here. (I had so much fun designing that!) It might be fun to tuck in the board game with the book if you're giving it to someone for Christmas. Or just play the board game by itself, Stuart and I got quite competitive over it. (He beat me, two games out of three.)

I have so much to blog today that I'm going to have to save most of it for later... But it would be very strange not to mention that the fab writer Anne Cottriger, Oxford University Press and I launched a book today! And we're so proud of it!



I hope you like it! Illustrating this book turned out to be a bit of a departure for me; I tried out a bunch of new ways of working, including using inks instead of watercolours, which gives the book very vivid, jewel-like tones. And it has this great interplay between the real and the imaginary, so I experimented with alternating warm and cool coloured palettes to reflect that. And there are loads of little foreshadowing clues... I hope you find the book a great romp. I think Titus is my favourite human character I've drawn so far, the little guy totally rocks. He's based slightly on my friend Woodrow Phoenix, who told me how he used to wear a cowboy hat all the time when he was little. He and my first two studio mates - Gary Northfield and Viviane Schwarz - were hugely supportive in getting this book off the ground, so that's why I've dedicated it to the three of them.

One other very cool thing! I've had a huge admiration for The Greenwich Phantom for ages, and he/she just featured me on the blog! Thank you so much, Phantom! Read it here. It was the tree drawings that made the Phantom take note this time, and it's Philip Reeve who set me off on those. Everything's linked. (Read Philip's review of Vern and Lettuce.)

My first copy of When Titus Took the Train arrived!

Isn't it pretty? :D I've been carrying around the proofs for ages, but it's so amazing to see it as an actual book. I've posted a bunch of free download activity stuff over on on Titus's website.


And more! I gave a copy of my Dear Diary mini comic to the amazing illustrator Chris Riddell at the Carnegie Greenaway awards, and he was so chuffed with it that he promised to send me a copy of his own mini, Hairstyles of American Civil War Generals:





He wrote, This mini comic thing is addictive! Yay! He's going to call his next one The Book of Colours in Black and White.

And the post made miracles again! Here's a packet from the fabulous David Lasky, who makes comics in Seattle. He's been working on a graphic novel about the Carter Family. David included some of his early mini comics (Dear Ella features an awkward relationship with an attractive life model and My Flying Dream is, as the title suggests, about a dream he once had. I love that he wrote on Salmon Bay Cafe paper. My sister took me for brunch there on a visit several years ago and it made me a tiny bit homesick.



Here's a closeup of his comic strip:


Thanks so much, guys! And thanks, Bridget, for the diary you sent! :D Gonna be doing a lot more diary writing this year.

And fresh in, Alex T. Smith just sent this photo via Twitter of our books nestled together in the shop tent at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Vern and Lettuce a whole month early! (See you in Edinburgh tomorrow, Alex!)

I had so much fun putting this together! Then Stuart and I tried it out and got REALLY into playing it. We had to settle for best game of three when Stuart's canoe kept sinking in the first round.


My web designer, Dan, just put it up on my mini website for my new picture book, When Titus Took the Train, launching Oct 7. You can download a printable version here! The boardgame gives lots of tasters of Titus' upcoming big railway adventure.



You can use regular markers and a die, but in case you don't have them or want to make your own, I've included some cut-and-paste templates along with the rule sheet. I hope you like it! Let me know if you played it (and maybe coloured it!), I'd love to hear how it went!



Edit: Thanks to a good friend for catching a spelling mistake in this version! I'll hopefully have the fixed version up by tomorrow!