Sarah McIntyre

Mouse Birthday Longship

jabberworks — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 15:59:55 GMT

Most things I've been posting have been work-related, but here's a painting I made just for fun (well, for a birthday card, but I'd been wanting to draw it for awhile). The photo doesn't perfectly capture the gold paint, and scanning it would fare even worse, but the gilding sparkles nicely on it, in real life.

And here's the original inspiration, a thousand-year-old manuscript illumination. It's always fun to give ancient drawings a reboot!

Bovey Book Fest 2026

jabberworks — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 13:29:51 GMT

I drew a logo! I don't normally draw logos, but this bookshop - First Draft Books - is twenty seconds down the road from my studio in Bovey Tracey, Devon, so I couldn't resist. The festival will feature my fab comics friend Neill Cameron, amazing artist-writer Mikey Please, writers Serena Patel and Zohra Nabi, and yours truly, Reeve & McIntyre.

Visit the jam-packed First Draft events page to find out more!

Adventuremice: Of Mice and Mummies

jabberworks — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 12:57:23 GMT

The eighth Adventuremice book is poised and ready to launch! Adventuremice: Of Mice and Mummies will start hitting bookshops any day now, officially launching on February 26th. My co-author Philip Reeve and I have been coming up with activities and a video, and I hope to make another drawing video soon. But I wanted to make sure I wrote a blog specially about this book because the setting is very near and dear to my heart. When I was between, say, 11 and 15, I really, really wanted to be, not a writer-illustrator, but an archaeologist. I kind of knew an archeologist wasn't really a tomb raider like Indiana Jones (in fact, tomb raiding is bad!), but I was still wrapped up in the glamour and excitement of those films.

I went along to some archaeology classes and realised, if I did it for a living, I probably wouldn't be discovering amazing Egyptian tombs, I'd probably be digging up a petrified piece of a wood in a cold, muddy bog somewhere. And that made me realise that what I was most excited about wasn't the digging and cataloguing, it was simply getting to look at extraordinary tomb paintings, and even painting something similar myself. I love the flat aesthetic of ancient Egyptian art, the elegance, the way the pictures are made of lines, coloured in, much like a Tintin comic book. I've wanted to do this Egyptian-style book from the beginning of the series, I knew it was coming, but Philip and I waited until we had just the right story for it.

If you go onto the Draw & Make page of Adventuremice.com, scroll down to find the Maze sheet, and another Mouse Hieroglyphics sheet so you can write in code (or simply use them to decorate your drawings)!

This book pushed my watercolour paintings skills, and I was particularly proud of this double-page illustration, with the lighting on the ruins:

I like to keep one of the paintings from the book for myself, for a sort of home gallery, and I haven't yet decided if I'm going to keep that one or this other title-page illustration of Pedro and Fledermaus having a lark:

As with earlier book, the original ink & watercolour illustrations from the book will go on sale in the Adventuremice.com shop from 9pm on launch day, 26 Feb, UK time. (Set a reminder if you're keen, to get in quick so you get the best pictures or lowest prices! Usually there are pieces from as low as £5 up to £350.)

This book's dedicated to Stuart, a hardworking member of the Adventuremice team; without his help with the business side of things, doing this job would be nearly impossible for me. Thank you, Stuart!!

Emirates Festival of Literature 2026: Hartland International School!

jabberworks — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 21:05:02 GMT

I've recently returned from a trip to Dubai, my fourth visit there for the Emirates Festival of Literature, and I was going to write one blog post about the whole visit. Except I quickly realised that a particular Adventuremice school visit was going to need the space of its own post to do it justice! This was a visit to Hartland International School by Philip Reeve and me, accompanied by Maleeha Saad from the festival's Reading for Pleasure team.

Philip and I have both visited many schools, and occasionally we encounter a school with a dynamic school librarian or a teacher who absolutely understands how to communicate a love of reading to their children. They prepare the children for months in advance of a visit by an author, and by the time the author arrives, the children have read the author's books and are excited to meet them. Hartland is one of the best-ever examples we've encountered; when we arrived at the school, the children, staff and parents made us feel like rock stars!

Let's start with this incredible big mural of the Adventuremice Mousebase that we saw when we first arrived. Look, there's Fledermaus's seaplane! And staff dressed as our characters! School Librarian Mary-Rose Grieve is dressed as Juniper, Assistant Librarian Gemma McCormac is Millie, and Library Assistant Barry McAlpine is Skipper!

Not only that, but the mural has opening doors, as modelled here by Gemma and Mary-Rose:

Hang on, let's zoom in a little closer, so you can see the incredible details here. The mural was painted by an amazing team of parents, and children found the mousetails hidden around school, joined them back up with their mice, which then inhabited their Mousebase.

Check this out, it has a working lift!! And a water wheel that goes around, and twinkling lights!!

Philip and I were completely gobsmacked by this, and got to meet the team of parents who had put it together. Here they are! THANK YOU, incredible Hartland parents!!

But it wasn't only a Mousebase, there was ALSO an incredible Adventuremice photo booth, complete with details from our latest book, Adventuremice: Mousehole to the Centre of the Earth. Spot Ptiny the Pterodactyl! And the Hamstersaurus Rex! Fantastic.

When we went back into the library, there was a whole lovely display of Adventuremice-inspired work the children had made. I actually got a bit teary, it was so wonderful seeing a whole school really getting stuck in to a world Philip and I had made.

We left our own mark on the school, too, just next to the 'Evacuation Procedures' notice. (We thought Fledermaus would appreciate that, he's always getting into a panic.)

Here's Maleeha Saad from the festival, who came with us, and our visit was set up by Aliya Khan and Aira Jane Anupol from the festival team. (Thanks so much, all three of you!)

And, of course, a massive thank you to Mary-Rose, Gemma and Barry from the library for making this the most tremendous visit! And to all the teachers and parents who coordinated with them!! This was truly a special visit and Philip and I will never forget it.

Thank you, Mary-Rose!

Prairie Rascals drawing

jabberworks — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 16:53:41 GMT

I didn't reveal this picture in the last blog post because I was saving it as a Christmas gift for the Reeves, but here it is! Just like in the Gwenevere poster-drawing, I tried to include as many elements of the film as I could into one picture. This looks much better blown up to A3 or even A2, so if you can zoom in and browse around that way, you'll get more out of looking at it.

And here's a link to the Bonehill Films channel on YouTube, if you'd like to watch Prairie Rascals first!

It stars Rosanna Lambert, Laura Frances Martin, Amanda Lindseth, Mylo Skye, Nick De Jasay, Louis John Brzozka, Arran Hawkins, Xanthe Baylis, and Nick Riddle.

You won't find this video anywhere else: I pulled together some of the behind-the-scenes videos I shot on set, and added them to an interview Philip Reeve did about it on Radio Devon.

And here's a nice review of the film by Cowboys, Capes and Claws.

Bringing 2025 to a close

jabberworks — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 12:58:16 GMT

Merry Christmas, everyone! And if you read this blog, thanks for sticking with me. I joined way back in 2006, so next year it'll be 20 years of LiveJournal! It's odd, looking back that far, how much I've changed, my countries have changed, and even children's book publishing is driven differently. (But I'm still coming up with Christmas card pictures, that hasn't changed.)

This has been a busy year with Adventuremice. After the Kevin books, I went back to working less digitally, with real ink and paint on paper, and I'm enjoying that process very much. The only problem is that, since the books have so many full-colour pictures, I'm spending a LOT of time working at my desk, and I need to stand up and stretch more often or I'm going to be an old lady before my time! My husband, Stuart, has been helping me with the shop and some of the business side of things, and I'm very grateful to him.

My co-author Philip Reeve and I are currently working on the ninth and tenth books, and numbers six and seven launched this year, Adventuremice: Mice, Camera, Action! and Adventuremice: Mousehole to the Centre of the Earth. You can find free related activities on the website, Adventuremice.com!

Next year is full of events, which you can find out about on my website Events page here!

I've come up with one more teatowel design, which is selling in a couple local shops (Grace & Favour Home and MAKE Southwest). It features the 'Huggable Rock', which may not appear on maps, but definitely gets a hug every time I pass it, and works as a useful landmark ("turn left at the Huggable Rock").

I thought it reflected the way that Dartmoor has lots of well-known landmarks, such as Hound Tor, Jay's Grave and Bowerman's Nose, but how families also create their own landmarks, that they talk about, miss when they're away, and revisit.

Other news: earlier this year I helped out on the film set of Prairie Rascals, a Western romp, filmed on Dartmoor but set in Arkansas in 1871. Philip and Sarah Reeve have been making films, just for fun, and I love the way they bring together a community for a week or so while they're shooting. This latest film is 50 minutes long and would make for great holiday viewing, if you're looking for something to watch! (It's not strictly family-friendly because there are shootings and some swears, but I think older kids will enjoy it.)

They've only just made it go live on YouTube, and you can see the 'makings of' documentary and Gwenevere on their Bonehill Films channel. (I don't do any acting in either film, but I do make an ignomious appearance in Prairie Rascals at the 48:40 mark...)

To everyone who's been reading Adventurmice, supporting me with online shop orders, taking part in the StudioTeaBreak drawing challenges, and generally being encouraging, thank you so much! Here's wishing for light and peace in 2026.

Bovey Tracey tea towels

jabberworks — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 12:44:09 GMT

On a side note, while I've been busy working on the next Adventuremice book, I've ALSO been coming up with a tea towel design for the town where I live and have my studio. It's very locally produced: not only did I create the artwork for it here at Bovey Paradiso (spot me in the window on the towel!) but a chap named Fletcher Naisbett-Jones did the two-colour screenprinting just down the road at Print Stream Studio. (If you look him up on Instagram, you can see him printing five at a time on a rotating flatbed wheel thingie.) Here it is!

Not only was it printed here in Bovey, but our house guests were asking if they could help in the kitchen, and I put them to work doing something MUCH more helpful. (I didn't quite calculate how much ironing and folding there would be to do.)

If you're local, you can pop over to Grace & Favour Home to buy it (and check in with Leslie in the same shop space at First Draft Books, who stock Adventuremice). And they're also selling it at the Bovey Tourist Information centre and at MAKE Southwest craft centre. And if you're further afield and still want one (yes, I know, it's quite niche!), you can buy it online from Grace & Favour Home here on their website.

London & Dublin Tour, May 2025

jabberworks — Sat, 24 May 2025 09:35:07 GMT

This week, the Adventuremice went on tour! (Well, their creators did.) Here's a picture I drew in my sketchbook of Philip waiting for our plane to Dublin.

But before that, we took a train to London! And then to Twickenham in southwest London, for the Barnes Children's Literature Festival, where we were doing an Adventuremice stage events in front of 550 schoolchildren. Our otter, Mortlake, got rather excited on one leg of the journey and insisted on photos.

And what a venue it was, right there in the famous rugby stadium! Huge thanks to Director Amanda Brettargh, Production Manager Celia Allbut, and the whole team who looked after us and made our event run so smoothly. We even got to say a quick hello to the next author on stage, Patrice Lawrence!

The audience were terrific, and we all drew pictures of Bosun twirling his lasso, as featured in our latest book, Adventuremice: Mice, Camera, Action!

While we were in town, we met up with our Independent Alliance sales rep, Lucy Cornwell, who organised our visit to The Kew Bookshop, The Paper Cat in Herne Hill, and South Kensington Books, where we signed lots of Adventuremice books.

After that, we caught a train down to Bright Agency in Clapham, who were hosting a meeting of judges for this year's Alligator's Mouth Award for Early Illustrated Fiction. Philip and I won the award last year for Adventuremice: Otter Chaos, and we were honoured to be on the panel to pick the new winner.

The Alligator's Mouth is a terrific bookshop in Richmond, and the very next day, owners Margaret Wallace-Jones and Tony West were celebrating ten years since its opening. Congratulations, Alligator's Mouth! (Click through to their website and you can see the painting I made of the shop!)

Then it was straight on from the meeting to Ireland for the International Literature Festival Dublin! I didn't manage to get any photos from the event itself, but here's the fabulous woman in charge of the festival, Janet Smyth, and the terrific tech team who ran the GIANT screen behind us! It was amazing, our pictures were so big that we were literally stepping into our book, the size of Adventuremice. SO cool.

After our event, we caught the DART south along the coastline to Greystones, to see author Sarah Webb, which is an essential thing one must do when one goes to Ireland. (I was hoping the big hat dent in my forehead would fade before I got there, but no luck.)

Here's Sarah in front of the terrific bookshop she works at and champions, Halfway up the Stairs.

We had a nice little event with families in the shop and signed lots more books. It was great to hear that the Adventuremice were going down well with their readers! Big thanks to Sarah and the owner Trish Hennessey for hosting us!

On our last morning, we had breakfast with fellow author Nadia L. Hohn, who had come all the way from Toronto. We'd met Nadia once before, at the Emirates Lit Fest in Dubai in 2017, so it was great to see her again and catch up.

Then we were off on a whirlwind bookshop tour! Sales rep Jacq Murphy took us all around the street of Dublin, starting with Ireland's oldest bookshop, founded in 1768, Hodges Figgis. Children's bookseller Mary-Brigid Turner was so supportive of Adventuremice and we were thrilled to be there!

The next stop was Dubray Books on Mary Street, who were the bookseller for the festival where we'd just performed. Aisling the bookseller showed us their Book Nook where lots of authors have taken photos, and we tried our best to squash in...

Oh, wait, this is how it's supposed to be done!

Next stop: The Gutter Bookshop, who have often hosted booksales at events I've done in Ireland! It was great to see Marta, Sarah and the team there.

And then on to Chapters Bookshop, with its great big windows and lovely high ceilings!

And finally to Eason's bookshop, the big one on O'Connell Street, where we signed the last big batch of books. Thanks so much for looking after us, Jacq - it was great to see you!

And then back, through Dublin's technicolour airport. (This vivid stretch was so exciting that we actually took a wrong turn and almost ended up back in Security, but all was well.)

Huge thanks to everyone who looked after us, and to Fraser Hutchinson and Ruth Sanderson at David Fickling Books for putting together our complicated itinerary!

If you came along to one of our events and want to discover more about the Adventuremice - and find fun, free activities! - visit our website, Adventuremice.com.

Seventh Adventuremice book: cover reveal!

jabberworks — Fri, 16 May 2025 12:33:22 GMT

My co-author Philip Reeve and I are thrilled that David Fickling want us to keep making Adventuremice books! And they seem to be going down well, from the feedback we get from young readers, parents and bookshops. Yay!

Here's our new cover, of the seventh book, launching Oct 9th in the UK & Ireland with David Fickling Books: Adventuremice: Mousehole to the Centre of the Earth!

I loved the Jules Verne story when I was little, and even (unsuccessfully) tried to dig to China and start my own tour company, so this story was loads of fun to create. Who knows what lost worlds - even miniature ones - exist below the earth's crust???

Here's the back cover, with a new machine, driven by... oh look, is this a reappearance of Professor Quatermouse? What could possibly go wrong?

Some of the covers come together as if by magic, but this one was quite hard work! We started with this sketch by Philip (left), and I reinterpreted it with this painting (right).

I tweaked that cover quite intensively in Photoshop, starting with a scan of this watercolour painting, below. I was thinking we might have other books that are lush and green, so I was trying to capture a sense of underground earthiness and soil. But it just looked too... brown, and our designer Katie Taylor and the marketing team weren't going for it. That was okay, I wasn't that sure about it either.

So I went back to the drawing board and tried to create a mysterious-looking cavern. I was rather pleased with how that came out! It looked a little different to anything I'd painted before, and reminded me of some vintage Tolkien illustrations, like I might meet Gollum lurking by a pool just around the corner.

I liked Fledermaus and Pedro with the pterodactyl in the first version, they just seemed to be pointing the wrong direction, away from where you open the book. And I have to be careful about flipping it in Photoshop, because Pedro only has a brown spot on one of his eyes and that can't swap over. In the end, I just repainted the whole thing on a separate piece of paper, like this, so I could position and resize it later.

And I had a lot of fun designing the Boring Machine (which is not at all boring)! I might post more about that in a future blog, Adventuremice tech is always fun. When Ivy builds machines, they're very reliable, but when Professor Quatermouse (Uncle Bernie) assembles them... not so much.

If you love the Adventuremice books and plan to get this one, it would be a huge help to us and to booksellers if you could pre-order it! That way the booksellers know how many to stock, and in the industry, there's a big deal made of 'first-week sales', which helps us to keep making more books. So please pre-order if you can, before the book launches in October! (And hopefully our US publisher, Kane Miller Books, will publish it not too long after!)

And, as always, you can find out more about the Adventuremice and discover lots of fun, free activities on the website, Adventuremice.com!

AI & Copyright: why does it matter?

jabberworks — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 21:55:49 GMT

As featured in Books For Keeps magazine, Issue 271, March 2025, commissioned by Andrea Reece, and available on their website. Cover illustration by Ben Mantle.

Artificial Intelligence offers big gifts. Do you need a free poster? A book cover? Pictures for the children's book you wrote? You no longer need to hire an illustrator or be able to draw. All you need to do is enter some written prompts and - hurrah! - you have it!

How does AI come up with these images? Large tech companies 'scrape' the Internet for existing artwork, including artists' web portfolios and artwork they've shared on social media. The company then processes the artists' work and reissues it. Often a new image look very much like the original artwork the company nabbed. But because the artwork has been processed, it's no longer under that artist's copyright. Something similar happens with words; you can enter prompts and AI will sift through authors' texts it has scraped and give you a mash-up version that's yours to use as you like.

This comes at a price. The AI user gets an illustration for free, or by paying a subscription fee that goes to the tech company, but the artists whose work has been used to train the AI get nothing. Margins are already very tight for almost all writers and illustrators, and if they are competing against their own work, repackaged by AI, they can't make a living at all.

Do we really want books for children that are chugged out by a machine? The way AI works is to suppress anomalies and outliers and come up with a convincing-sounding average blend. But that uniform result gets things wrong, and sounds boring. Behavioural science expert Rory Sutherland argued that if, using AI, 'you could produce someone who is the average of all your friends, you probably wouldn't like them very much and they'd be extremely dull'.

Frankly, I think many risk-averse people in the children's book industry are satisfied with stories that are average and bland. And many illustrators, instead of going out to develop their own visual take on what they encounter, are satisfied to copy other illustrator's work they find online. In a sense, these people are acting like AI, and perhaps it doesn't matter if they're replaced.

But what does matter is losing those books of brilliance, created by a person with a heart, who has an eye for detail and can add quirky, brilliant and unexpected elements to the words and pictures of a story. These books take our minds to new places, and give us entirely new pictures in our heads. They don't only comfort us with what we already know, but stretch us, and perhaps throw in absurdities that make us laugh.

Children right now are devouring stories by the likes of Jamie Smart and Dav Pilkey, and the humour of these writer-artists is built on unexpected and startling juxtopositions. Having pored over these books, many children are then inspired to write and draw their own stories, and they can imagine they, too, might be able to be writers or illustrators like Jamie and Dav.

We ought to be proud of our children's book tradition, not give it away free. The government is currently considering AI policy measures that would make illustrators, as copyright holders 'opt out' if we don't want tech companies using our work to train their systems. I can't imagine tracking down the thousands of images I've made public, images which, until now, were protected by copyright law. Here's my colleague Steve Antony's description:

It's like allowing someone to break into my house and steal my belongings so that they can research, recycle and resell them, unless I stick a label on each and everyone of my belongings that says 'Do not steal', even though the objects are clearly not theirs and clearly within someone else's house.

We'll see what our government really values when they make their decision about copyright. Will they favour small business and freelance creatives or the big tech industry? Will I still be making Adventuremice books in a few years time? I very much hope so, I've been training hard for the last 20 years and I think it's the best work I've ever made. But will I be undercut by an editor somewhere entering mouse-themed prompts? If that's really what people want, I need to be looking for work elsewhere.

Sarah McIntyre co-writes and illustrates the Adventuremice books, her new series for early readers with Philip Reeve. Together with James Mayhew in 2015, she started the Pictures Mean Business campaign, showing how everyone wins when artists are properly credited for their work. Discover fun, free creative resources on her websites, Jabberworks.co.uk and Adventuremice.com.

Sound and Silence, and things that are lost

jabberworks — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 11:28:03 GMT

Last week, my friend Jen Bell got in touch to urge me, as a local bell ringer, to contact our local art centre, MAKE Southwest. She said they were planning an exhibition about bells, and maybe I could get some of our local ringers involved. So I dropped them a line, only to realise the next day that the exhibition was opening the following week, not enough time to plan anything. Last night, as I was sitting in The Bell Inn after practice with my fellow ringers, I remembered the show was opening and decided to pop along to it in the morning, Sound and Silence: an exhibition of contemporary bells.

At the entrance to the gallery, there was a collection of small beater sticks, with a sign encouraging me to take one, and use it to strike certain bells marked out. Interactivity, that's nice, I thought, and took a stick.

At first, I quite liked it; anyone who can cast big shapes in bronze is pretty cool. I dinged the marked bells, and avoided the unmarked bell shapes made of breakable materials.

But within a few minutes, a feeling of sadness came over me, and got greater and greater until I left with a very heavy heart. The exhibition felt so... lost. It felt like a window into a society that no longer understands itself, or understands what things are for. Like archaeologists who pick up a piece of carved bone, don't know what it is, and so say, Ah, it must be a ritual object.

For me, learning how to ring bells has been one of the most valuable ways I've been able to become a part of this community here in Bovey. I've always loved the sound of church bells, but it was only when I moved to Devon that I really understood that they're rung by a whole band of real people, not some machine. And that they're wrapped in a countrywide network of friendships, shared purpose and companionship. Ringers take great care to train up other people to ring, and nurture them through what is a quite difficult process of learning to handle a bell so they don't get hurt. After that, the novice goes along to practices where they learn to ring the basics of what's needed for Sunday morning, weddings and funerals, where one person calls out each change. And then the experienced ringers introduce them to an even more difficult level of learning the patterns, where no one calls the changes, everyone just knows what to ring. If you look at the patterns (or 'methods'), they look like knitting patterns, and each has a name, starting with the simplest, Plain hunt, moving on to Grandsire and Plain bob. And then things get even more complicated, reaching to extraordinarily difficult methods, such as the ones shown here in our Bovey tower captain Mike Wigney's handbook, Bristol Surprise Maximus and Orion Surprise Maximus.

I doubt I'll ever be able to ring the more complicated methods, but it makes me glad that there's always more to learn, and that there are people out there who really can do these highly-skilled things. They don't look down on novice ringers like me, they'll ring simple things with me, too, and they know we're all in it together; if they don't train up new ringers, the art form will die out. Ringing appeals to people who love company, a group of friends to go to the pub with, but it also appeals to people who struggle in company, people who are shy, or neurodivergent. It's a skilled activity we can do together without having to make small talk, and no one will judge you harshly if you simply do your best to ring your bell. It's a blessed haven for all sort of wonderful oddballs, geniuses and eccentrics, which is something I love about it. We even have a method composer who lives in Bovey Tracey, Robert Brown, who has his own tiny ring of bells in his garage. (Yes, Bob, if you're reading this - you're a lovely eccentric.)

But back to the exhibition, the description at the front reads:

When did you last hear a bell ring?
Perhaps it was Big Ben announcing the 6 O'Clock news, or maybe church bells on a Sunday morning inviting people in?

Bells have been made and rung since 1600 BCE, and continue to be used across every culture to signify immportant events and to mark time. Bells are traditionally metal, but as this exhibition shows, they can be made from almost any material. The sound of a bell is created when it vibrates, usually as a result of being struck.

Bellfounding is recognised as a critically endangered craft in the UK today. This exhibition showcases 4 different UK-based contemporary bellmakers who work on different scales and in different materials, using a wide variety of approaches, from traditional to experimental, often encompassing digital technology.

And then it lists the four contributers: Marcus Vergette, Cooper Sounds, David Snoo Wilson and Emma-Kate Matthews.

As I wandered around the exhibition, it felt very much like the 'contemporary bells' in the title were meant to say, we've moved on now. Bells used to be for churches, but now we have deconstructed and modernised them; look, how wonderful. But instead of being a celebration, it felt like the heart had been taken out of the bells, the whole reason for their being. Many of the bells didn't even ring, and some of the ones we were invited to pick up and ring had no clappers inside, they were hollow.

People could go around and ding the bells with their little sticks and think they were ringing, but that erased all the elements of what really go into ringing and made it seem easy and facile. Random 'bongs' sounded around the gallery from mechanical striking devices which moved in listless fashion.

These felt like a nod toward AI, as in, we no longer need bell ringers, we have devices that can do it. Just like our country no longer needs artists, because our work has been scraped and mechanised. Which misses the whole point of both, the purpose, the joy of creation and the warmth of doing something together with other people. I wrote about this in an article for The Author magazine, how, in the face of AI, I see my way forward by embracing the local aspect of making art.

Which was another thing, the exhibition felt strangely non-site-specific. The gallery sits in the Devon heartland of bells and bellringing, and didn't have any real nods toward that ongoing tradition. I suspected they would have found art made by bell ringers - and even tower ringing itself - too low-brow, and again, I think that's the point of bell ringing. Ringing's not highbrow, anyone can do it, and it's always mixed manual labourers with more upper-class people.

And then I felt that sense of lost purpose, not only in creating community, but in calling people to church. Not all bellringers are Christian, tower bands tend to be a healthy mix of believers, non-believers, people who only come along to ring and people who stick around for the service. But by regularly going along to these beautiful old churches, even non-believers develop a respect for the care and craftsmenship that have gone into making these buildings and these bells, and many have a gentle care for them as historic places of worship.

But in the exhibition, it felt like they didn't want their bells to be tainted with any signs of that historic Devon Christianity, that we have moved on. But that's not to say it didn't feel religious. Instead, there was a sort of made-up folkloric look, both to the image on the poster and a mannequin with bells slung around it: Here's what we have, as a substitute. It felt rather... silly, or facile, in this context, just like the dinging bells which weren't really being rung.

I should add that I went back a second time with a friend and, knowing what to expect, enjoyed the show a bit better that time, banging on the bells and having more of a laugh. (The engraving exhibition in the other gallery has lovely work in it.)

The exhibition called bellfounding a 'critically endangered craft in the UK today'. But I don't think making bell shapes is going to bring it back in any real way, by reviving the famous Whitechapel Bell Foundry, for example, which has recently descended into dereliction. It felt more like a 'thoughts and prayers' sentiment, with nothing behind it. To bring back bellfounding, bells would need a purpose, and ringers, and people who would be willing to put a lot of time and money into making and looking after them. (They still exist, but yes, they're endangered.)

Overall, the whole exhibition felt hollow, like those bells without clappers. It reminded me of a Bible verse that most older ringers would recognise: If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. That was it, the exhibition felt lacking in love. The kind of love you get when people come together and help each other struggle to learn something difficult. The kind of love you get when your tower captain is paralysed from the chest down and you all work together to make sure he can still get up the tower to ring his beloved bells. The love you find when you visit a different part of the country and join in almost any ringers' practice and find a readymade group of friends who take you along to the pub after.

I'm not bashing the artists, who have put lots of work into making the pieces for the exhibition. Their difficult, skilled processes involved aspects of community, but that wasn't what was highlighted in the exhibition. Rather, it was a spare, clean gallery setting, focusing on the material itself, and our simplistic interactions with the bells and bell-like objects.

But I'm not disparaging MAKE Southwest either, I wouldn't necessarily say it's a poor exhibition. In the sense of it being very of-the-moment, and contemporary, I think it's spot-on. It reflects the way our culture has lost its appreciation for and understanding of itself. And the way people want something 'religious', but only things that look and feel cool and folklore-ethnic, with no real grounding in our own faith traditions. So I'm not saying it's bad, what I'm saying is that it made me feel profoundly sad, and I don't think that was the exhibition's intention.

I used to think I'd become a member of MAKE Southwest when I moved here, but I realise I'm too lowbrow. I think I might want to embrace that, if lowbrow means love, purpose and local community. I don't want to deconstruct things, I want to construct, and explore why people do the things they do, and why they may have done them for hundreds of years. It's odd that this would make me feel like an outsider artist.

I go to church. I ring bells. I haven't moved on.

My artwork for the cover of The Ringing World, a weekly print magazine that our tower captain subscribes to.

Some more local bell ringing

Sidmouth beach pebbles

jabberworks — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 16:36:32 GMT

Been travelling around the area a bit with our visiting friend, Alaskan artist Valisa Higman. Here's a drawing from our trip with Stuart, Philip and Sarah Reeve to Sidmouth beach, on the Devon-Dorset coastline.

The Clock Tower cafe is a great place to sketch - plus, they supply coloured pencils!

Valisa knows way more about beachcoming than I do, and how to find Jurassic fossils.

Whereas I'm rubbish at it, so I made up my own ammonite.

Photo by Philip Reeve

Portrait Challenge: Dorette, by Gerald Leslie Brockhurst

jabberworks — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 17:30:41 GMT

Ink drawing of this week's Gerald Leslie Brockhurst #PortraitChallenge for StudioTeaBreak over on X/Twitter. I love this portrait, Dorette has such an enigmatic gaze and her hair makes a terrific shape. If you have an X account, check out lots of other people's studies of the same portrait, that hangs in the Watt Institution in Greenock, Scotland. (The Watt were very generous in sharing lots of the drawings to their own account!)

Adventuremice Book 6 cover reveal!

jabberworks — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 12:04:06 GMT

So here are the five Adventuremice books that you can already find in bookshops:

And here's the book that's coming out mid-March next year, Adventuremice: Mice, Camera, Action! .

(This one will come with a special dedication to Sam Reeve.)

Have we become AI?

jabberworks — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 09:14:14 GMT

Some reflections on Artificial Intelligence, its impact on illustrators
...and trying to answer the question: What do we do now?

Summer 2024, Cover artist: Yuji Takahashi

By Sarah McIntyre, first published in The Author magazine,
issued by The Society of Authors, commissioned by editor James McConnachie
Reprinted with permission

Let’s talk about Artificial Intelligence. How do you know AI didn't write this article? An AI text generator could do a pretty good job of amalgamating words of enthusiasm and outrage about itself that it’s scraped off the Internet. You’d get a fairly convincing mash-up of what people are saying about AI right now.

But the outrage is real: translators, scriptwriters, poets, audiobook narrators, illustrators and writers fear AI will replace us. And from what I've heard from illustrators, what angers them most is that it's our own work competing against us, that these AI generators operate by 'scraping' the work we've posted online to train and develop its products, without crediting or paying us. Do read the latest SoA Resolution on Artificial Intelligence approved by 97% of voters at the last Extraordinary General Meeting. In it, the SoA statement refused permission of copyright-protected works to developers without specifically agreed licensing arrangements. It called for developers to provide full transparency on works used in development, to be specific about what they're requesting, to ask permission from the relevant rightsholder, to pay and credit authors, and to remove any works that developers have already fed into their systems.

The SoA's survey in January noted of its members that 26% of illustrators had already lost work due to generative AI, and 37% of illustrators said it had caused the value of their work to sink. The survey also revealed that 12% of illustrators have used generative AI in their work, 31% of illustrators have used it for brainstorming ideas, and 5% have used it 'because their publisher or commissioning organisation asked them to'.

While the SoA battles for credit and pay, illustrators are left thinking, what do we do now?

When I set up the Pictures Mean Business campaign* in 2015, I'd been listening to veteran illustrators saying that no one ever really listened to their complaints about lack of credit for their work. Decades of objection hadn't helped at all. So I thought, we have to stop banging our heads against a wall, we need to approach this differently to get results.

To start with, which objections to AI won't work? The argument that AI takes away our jobs may be about as effective as it was for dock workers in the 1960s. As illustrators, we've even benefitted from the internet forming databases out of other people's copyright-protected work without permission: who hasn't used Google Image Search for reference material? As Darrell Maclaine pointed out on X, "You've all been using that without comment for 25 years. I don't see the fervent calls to 'hire real photo librarians!'"

A second argument also doesn't fly: imploring the publishing industry and the general public to fight illustrators' corner out of love and respect for us. When hard decisions are made that involve money, business just doesn't work that way. Even on a small scale, a cash-strapped book festival or an overworked illustration agency may rely on AI images when they can't see any other way of making ends meet.

But, at least for this small scale of UK publishing, book festivals, schools and libraries, I think we can flip the argument. If we stop making ourselves the focus, and make it about other people, we have more chance of convincing them. With Pictures Mean Business, I tried to show people how everyone benefits when they credit illustrators properly for their work. People love to hear how they can get an advantage in publishing, how they can make their books more searchable, how they can tap into larger illustrator fan bases to get publicity for their books or festivals, how they can better inspire children to read.

How could this work in relation to AI?

Art by recognised illustrators make powerful branding, people are drawn to it.

I recall crossing a street in Edinburgh to look more closely at a poster featuring Judith Kerr's cat; it instantly brought up recollections of my favourite childhood Mog book and I even tweeted this photo of it. Now imagine you're a book festival organiser. You have the choice of coming up with a poster that is nice in a sort of generic way, or you can feature Chris Haughton's dog from Oh no, George! or Nadia Shireen's Billy and the Beast, or Melissa Castrillon's wonderful organic patterns. The first choice - the AI image - expresses disdain for illustrators (which they will note), and the second, besides tapping into a brand, lets you show off your connection with an amazing creator and highlight how your team support artists. If that's the mission of your festival, this absolutely makes sense: it makes you look good, draws extra attention to your festival, and taps into the artist's own fan base.

For writers, associating with real artists boosts your reputation. Illustrators scrutinise authors before they agree to take on their books. If you have credited artwork on your website (instead of uncredited, or AI), a top artist may be much more inclined to work with you, and to big up your project afterward.

But AI issue poses deeper questions about what it means to be a creative person. What can we make that a computer can't?

Over the past decade, I've seen social media turning so many of us into something that might as well be generated by AI. Illustrators copy online illustrators who have copied other online illustrators.

Our artwork isn't only about creating a certain style, it reflects ideas, and communicates how we see the world. And I'm not sure how much we really ARE seeing the world, and how much we're looking at it through the lens of other people, because that's what's acceptable in our bubble or peer group. It's easier to accept what people whom we admire say about an issue than to dig deep, seek uncomfortable truths and details, and draw something that freshly interprets what we've discovered. Social media works like ChatGPT; it aggregates us in a way that suppresses anomalies and outliers, and comes up with a convincing-sounding average blend. But that uniform result, just like ChatGPT, gets things wrong, and sounds boring. Behavioural science expert Rory Sutherland argued that if, using AI, 'you could produce someone who is the average of all your friends, you probably wouldn't like them very much and they'd be extremely dull'.

'But we just need to make a living', you could reasonably argue. 'If publishers are playing it safe, and I'm turning out the bland content they want, at least it pays the bills.' But this is unsustainable, what distinguishes us from AI? And why should anyone care if we disappear?

I don't think there's one solution to this problem, and perhaps therein lies its beauty. You need to find your own way, discover what makes you and your work unique.

Perhaps this involves stepping back from the computer for decent lengths of time, building off-line relationships with people, and learning how to make images that have nothing to do with anything going on in your online peer group. Try your hand at something that has nothing to do with a suggestion from an internet influencer, and don't worry about how it will look on social media. Explore it and revel in its unique quirks and eccentricities. For me, I've recently enjoyed drawing scenes of local community life; people I've been getting to know - they love seeing themselves in pictures, and I can draw them in very specific locations, with an awareness of their personalities and loveable quirks that a computer hasn't yet cracked.

Writer and illustrator Sarah McIntyre is currently creating the Adventuremice series with her co-author Philip Reeve and is trying to spend less time on the internet. And yet, there she is: jabberworks.co.uk

*Pictures Mean Business website generously created and funded by freelance artist Soni Speight. #PicturesMeanBusiness hashtag created during a discussion on Twitter with artist James Mayhew.

Adventuremice at Bath Kids Lit Fest 2024

jabberworks — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 13:59:30 GMT

When you go to Bath, you expect to see a lot of Regency grandeur. Have a look at our event venue in the Assembly Rooms, you could easily imagine Jane Austen's characters gathered there for a ball. Did Elizabeth Bennett draw pictures of Pedro the mouse on her dance card? Perhaps?

Photo by Grace Lev for Bath Kids Lit Fest

But then you go up and up some small stairs for a quiet curry and realise, once again, you're in a Regency ball room and yes, Jane Austen definitely ate a curry here.

But what did Jane Austen read when she was kid? I can 100% guarantee that it was not Adventuremice: The Ghostly Galleon by Reeve & McIntyre, and that she did not needlepoint any firescreens inspired by it, depicting the Ghost of Captain Cheesebeard. Well, we would have needlepointed firescreens if we had a bit more time, but pencil drawings did suffice. Here are two fine examples from Bath Children's Literature Festival!

If you missed the event, you can learn how to draw the Ghost of Captain Cheesebeard in a video here.) In fact, the chap on the right showed me a bunch of his Adventuremice drawings he'd made when he had a bit more time and they were ace! Here's his drawing of Bramble Isle:

It's taken from this illustration in the book which, to be fair, was quite a challenge me, too! Making sense of that blackberry tangle while still keeping it autumnally wild.

And the detail in this one boggles my mind. Way to go!

In total we did three Adventuremice school events: the two scheduled ones, and an extra one for a school that got the time wrong and we fortunately happened to be signing in a bookshop just down the road. They were amazing, because of the team running them but also because Gill and John McLay who run the festival had decided that they would make sure every child went home with an Adventuremice book. It was a real leap of faith for sponsorship on their part, with their Share the Story scheme, but makes so much sense in closing the reading loop: children come to an event, get inspired to read a book, and then get to read that book. Thank you, SO MUCH, John and Gill, for making that happen!! (Please donate if you can, to help them connect more children with books!)

Besides Adventuremice events, John McLay and Philip did a Mortal Engines event at Waterstones Bath, featuring Philip's brand-new Thunder City.

The room was packed out - his publicist Rachael Phillips and I were perched on stairs at the back.

Quite a lot of the people there, of greatly varying ages, were SUPER FANS, with in-depth questions that showed they knew the world of the traction cities incredibly well. They also asked questions about Philip's Railhead and Utterly Dark trilogies, and similiarities and differences between the books; I loved hearing those great stories resurfacing in conversation.

Some lovely faces in the author lounge: Ken Wilson-Max, our fabulous David Fickling Books publicist Fraser Hutchinson who came all the way to Bath to support us (thank you, Fraser!!), Onjali Raúf, and Megan Whalen Turner, who was over from America and I got to meet for the first time.

And here's AF Steadman and Sarah Currie Dyer with the wonderful team that made everything possible. A HUGE thanks to Gill McLay, John McLay and everyone who made this wonderful festival happen!

Since we were in town for the festival, we paid visits to two other fine bookshops: Toppings & Co, where Caroline the bookseller set us up to do some signing...

And Mr B's Emporium, where Nic and Lottie let us share the author signing corner with Rick Astley (who's slightly wooden in manner but obviously a big fan).

(LOL, you've just been rick-rolled.)

Adventuremice at Marlborough Lit Fest 2024

jabberworks — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 19:54:58 GMT

I was excited when I found out my co-author Philip Reeve and I would get to do our Adventuremice event for Marlborough Lit Fest in their fancy main room at the Town Hall! Here's an ace photo by official festival photographer Ben Phillips:

I wanted to look my best and Disaster Struck, oh no!

But when I plodded into the author lounge in my dress, hat and bog-standard trainers, I was greatly cheered to find top actor Simon Russell Beale, whom it turns out is a Patron of the festival! I babbled on about how much I love The Death of Stalin (it realy IS a brilliant film, and he's smashing as Beria) and how Stuart and I went to see him in Tom Stoppard's Jumpers, etc, and he was very nice about it and still took a photo with me.

Then Philip and I got down to work. One of the great things about doing events with a co-author who is also an illustrator is that is SUCH a great help when we need to draw something quickly.

I thought Philip's five-minute drawing of Marlborough Town Hall with a flipchart marker and a blue highlighter came out smashingly.

Huge thanks to everyone who came along and drew pictures with us of Pedro and Captain Cheesebeard! They're characters from the new book in our series, Adventuremice: The Ghostly Galleon. (Feel free to visits our website Adventuremice.com for more drawing activities!)

We popped into beautiful White Horse Bookshop to say hello to Angus and Debbie and have a nose around. Thank you for coordinating our book sales, White Horse team!

And huge thanks to the tech team, sponsors (including St Francis School in Pewsey, who sponsored our event!) and organisers who made everything run so smoothly and elegantly, including Elaine James who fielded many emails (including back and forth in remote Alaska, when she thought I might be asking her to pay my way over from Alaska) and (pictured magnificently here) Kate Fry. Well done, Team Marlborough!

And thanks to our team at David Fickling Books - Fraser Hutchinson and Sadie Nathan - who did a lot of liasing for us!

PS About the shoe disaster, I saw photos later and realised they sympathetically cut off my feet anyway, so let's just pretend that never happened.

First Draft Book launches Adventuremice: The Ghostly Galleon

jabberworks — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 19:37:50 GMT

Since I last blogged, Philip Reeve and I had a new book come out! Presenting the fifth in our highly-illustrated series, Adventuremice: The Ghostly Galleon. And you can find out more about it here on our website, complete with activities and videos!

Here's one more video, a recap of our launch party hosted by First Draft Books in Bovey Tracey, Devon (which is in southwest England if you're not familiar with these parts)! Amazing Leslie Leggett opened this independent bookshop in my town less than a year ago with her husband Malcolm, and she's already going strong with events, helped out by lovely Steve and Rachael from Grace & Favour Home, who run the larger shop in which she runs a section. So we were thrilled she also wanted to host our party, and the good people of Bovey took part!

Special thanks to Cristina Guraliuc - @sparkleupyourcontent on Instagram - who gave us extra photos and video footage, some of which we've used here!

Making things in Seldovia, Alaska

jabberworks — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 21:40:46 GMT

I've been meaning to write a proper long blog post about my trip to Alaska, but for now, I'll post this video of some things I made while I was there.

My auntie had collected lots of second-hand bowls for me to draw on, and my dad and Stuart sanded them down for me. My auntie drew on one, too!

Adventuremice on Budleigh Salterton Lit Fest schools tour

jabberworks — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 20:59:22 GMT

For the last two days, my co-author Philip Reeve and I have been visiting four different schools, in the Budleigh Salterton and Exmouth areas, as a schools outreach programme for Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival. The days were action-packed! The first day was UK Election Day, so Philip and I were at the polling stations as soon as they opened, then we whizzed off to Marpool Primary School for the first visit.

Here we are with the enthusiastic Assistant Head, Jemma Poulsom, and our Budleigh Lit Fest companion, David Marston, who made sure the whole visit went smoothly.

Sometimes you just know straight away, when you arrive at a school, that it's going to be a terrific visit, and this was one of those schools; it turned out two of the years had been studying Oliver and the Seawigs and had even created their own books of poetry inspired by its Rambling Isles!

The children were thrilled to meet the authors whose books they'd been reading, and we were equally chuffed to see their characterful drawings and read some of their poems!

Some of the islands had terrific details:

After coffee overlooking Exmouth Beach, our next stop was the Deaf Academy, where Joanna Fison took us on a tour and explained to us some of the ways the school is leading the way in the UK for being a welcoming and inspiring place for children and teens, including those with more complex needs. Here we are with David, Joanna, and the academy's principal, Sylvan Dewing:

They have a wider vision of turning Exmouth into a place that's particularly known for being deaf-friendly for people of all ages, a place to gather, go on holiday, etc, and Joanna explained how it's already happening, with the local shopkeepers, for example, who are knowledgable and on-board. She talked about how it can mean so much to people who don't have anyone to communicate with, isolated but then suddenly finding themselves in a sign-language haven where they can understand all the conversations going on around them.

We talked about our books, but for the children, the DRAWING was such a key element, they really loved that. And it pleased Philip and me to see how drawing together can break down so many barriers to communication. This boy Blair really loves to draw, and it was great to see how the activity really lit a fire under him; after we drew space mice, he was off designing a whole second project by the end of the lesson. Big thanks to our two sign language interpreters, who valiently took on our very interactive and multi-focus events!

After the two visits, we were able to walk along Budleigh beach in the late afternoon and see the lovely rows of beach huts, beautiful smooth stones, and go on a walk around the wetlands in the newly-developed Lower Otter Restoration Project.

The new day we went to Littleham Church of England Primary School by Exmouth, where Joanne Poslett hosted our visit.

We had a lot of fun plotting a space-themed story in gameboard format, and the kids came up with lots of great ideas!

Our final stop on the tour was St Peter's CofE Primary School in Budleigh Salterton, where Deputy Head (and Acting Head for the day) Lisa Broad moved mountains to accommodate three different schools in their assembly hall - Otterton and Drake's primaries. It was a stonking good visit, getting to meet so many excited children and, to be honest, we were so busy with signing books that we didn't get around to taking a single photo! But it was a terrific way to end our visits, and we hope to visit our tour bookseller Winstone's in Sidmouth soon to sign some more books for the children who wanted multiple books.
Edit: Photos! Big thanks to St Peter's for posting these on X for us to see!

Big thanks to organiser Annie Ashworth, and David who was good fun and looked after us so well for the two days. And to Winstone's and everyone at all four schools who made us feel so welcome! If you're local to the area, do check out the schedule for Budleigh Salterton Lit Fest, 18-22 September, which is certain to have a brilliant selection of book events. (Tickets go on sale on July 22nd.) And, of course, if you enjoyed the school visits and want more Adventuremice-themed free activities, check out Adventuremice.com!

Adventuremice at The Grove School, Totnes

jabberworks — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 20:34:22 GMT

Big thanks to The Grove primary school in Totnes for hosting our Reeve & McIntyre Adventuremice visit today! Here's teacher Mrs John (Shanaz John) who looked after us (thanks, Shanaz!), and drew this rather splendid picture of Pedro along with us.

My co-author Philip Reeve took this picture of me warming up my drawing skills with a picture of Fledermaus on the flipchart before we started the all-school assembly. If any of the children (or staff, or parents) would like to learn how to draw more characters, check out our Adventuremice.com website, or my Jabberworks website!

Philip and I presented award certificates to children who had been shortlisted for the BBC 500 Words writing competition, and to children who had won a school-wide writing competition. Huge congratulations to all the winners, and to everyone who took part!

I was a bit rubbish at taking photos this time, this is the only picture I got this morning, of a staff lounge biscuit jar. ...But look at it, what a classic.

Thanks to everyone who drew along with us, and to Nigel and Claire at Totnes's local East Gate Bookshop for supplying so many books for us to sign. We hope the children enjoy them!

We popped by the shop after lunch to sign more books, so if anyone missed out this morning, they can stop in and pick some up.

Adventuremice Spring Tour 2024!

jabberworks — Sat, 17 Feb 2024 19:00:33 GMT

There's always a strange transition time between when we're hard at work making our books - I've been painting long hours at my desk in the studio to meet a print deadline for Adventuremice Book 5 - and when we take the SHOW ON THE ROAD and meet the people who actually read our books!

So all but the back cover and final edits of that book are finished, but Book 4 - Adventuremice: Mice on the Moon - has arrived back from the printer all shiny and lovely for our March 7th launch date! But we're already on the road; this morning we presented Adventuremice to a wonderful audience at Exeter's 'WHAT IF...?' Festival, set up by Theatre Alibi and Exetreme Imagination Festival. Be sure to check the list to see if we're appearing anywhere near you, and you can find details and booking links on my Events page!

Big thanks to Hattie, Rachael, Jules, Tim, Jeanne, Elspeth and everyone on the Theatre Alibi and festival teams! And to everyone who came along with all your terrific ideas, drawings and story suggestions!

In other news, today Philip announced his new Mortal Engines sequel, Thunder City, with magnificent cover artwork once again by Ian McQue! You can read about it on Philip's blog here.

And if you're looking to catch up with the backlist, you'll have no shortage of reading! Also, check out Philip's most recent Utterly Dark trilogy, it's terrific.

Dartmoor sketchbook: Christmas Day 2023

jabberworks — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 22:21:29 GMT

Big thanks to the Reeve family for hosting Stuart and me again this Christmas! We don't stay as long as we used to, since we live just down the road now, but we love seeing them, and watching Frodo the poodle go nuts, ripping up all the discarded giftwrap.

Let's see, for New Year's Resolutions, aside from my regular work, I'm hoping to:

* Use my new Pooki Press for the first time with some linocut prints
* Sand down and paint some of the wooden pieces I've been hoarding this year
* Draw some more Devon community scenes
* Possibly come up with some more booklets/zines in the same vein as the Bovey Bestiary
* Do some more outdoor tree drawings on Dartmoor, starting with a particular line of beeches near Castle Drogo

...And outside of artwork goals:
* Learn how to ring Plain Hunt and possibly one other method on tower bells
* Be able at least to keep up with all the over 65's in my new Pilates class

Bonehill Films presents: GWENEVERE

jabberworks — Sun, 24 Dec 2023 00:00:34 GMT

I'm so excited to say that this film made by Philip Reeve and Sarah Reeve - GWENEVERE - is now available to watch online!! Here's the poster I made for it:

Gwenevere had screenings at Chagford Film Fest, The Bookery in Crediton and at Torquay Museum, and now you can watch it here on YouTube:

I was joking with Philip about doing a commentary edition, Gwenevere: the Caterer's Cut, or even Gwenevere: the Annoying Version, where you'd get me piping up every few seconds to say, 'Hey, those are my shields!', 'I made that little woodland figure thingy!', 'There's Alan Lee!', etc.

Making the film was so much fun, it really brought together a community of people for a short time, and everyone put so much into it. Here's a drawing I made where you can even see my parents helping Stuart and me feed the whole crew for four days, sometimes as many as fifteen people. Plus we made extra sandwiches and cake for the thatchers working on the house next-door to the medieval barn where Philip and Sarah were filming most of the indoor scenes.

I also made this woodland shrine figure out of Sculpey clay, and Philip added all the colour, texture, moss and little amulet charms.

But my favourite thing to make were the shields. Philip cut and shaped them, and then handed the over to me to add colour and heraldry, and I swear, it's some of the most fun I've ever had, painting those. This was Philip's original concept sketch:

And I'll go through some of the shields! Eventually they had to say, 'Sarah! You can stop making shields now!' as I would've happily continued doing so forevermore. I think this owl shield is everyone's favourite. It's hanging right now up in my studio at Bovey Paradiso:

This shield's also hanging up in my studio, it's one of the first ones I made. One of the most fun things was roughing them up to make them look like they'd been used and then spent time weathering on a tree. With this one, the sandpaper took a big line right through the middle of the rabbit's eye, which scared me a bit at first (had I ruined it?), and then I decided it's what made it really work.

After the mer-rabbit, I distressed this dragon shield even more roughly:

There are quite a few funny snails in illuminated manuscripts, so I tried one out:

And some of them got quite ornate:

With this horse shield, I started to worry it was all going a bit too Greek-looking, but I still really liked how it came out. (And hey, there could've been some medieval shield painter who was very inspired by Greek art, you never know...) To get the texture, I think I might have thrashed this one with a chain, as well as sandpaper.

This shield was intended to be the young knight Sir Ruan's, but the cartoonish lion was a bit distracting, and in the end, he carried a shield with a more abstract pattern. (I was pleased to see this shield showing up again in the local panto!)

Here I am painting the shield that Sir Ruan ended up carrying:

I think this shield might have been at least partly inspired by The Bookery in Crediton; I helped with their rebranding and shopfront logo, which features three rooks. Another one that showed up in the local panto.

Philip decided he didn't want me to rough up this shield, and it ended up, not on the tree, but over the fireplace in the barn.

The farmer who owns the barn - Cat Frampton - liked it so much that she ended up keeping it.

I hope you like watching the film! Do share it, if you enjoy it! I love a scene on the moor, right near the beginning, with a pinky sky and Sarah Reeve and her friends Jane and Marilyn singing a beautiful period-appropriate song composed by Brian Mitchell. Oh, and another scene where Isabel and her mum Rachel just happened to be singing a song they knew while they were putting on their costumes, and it was so beautiful that Sarah and Philip recorded it. They layered it with some beautiful scenes from the barn; Tessa looks just like an old-masters painting. And Laura's daughter putting on a too-big-for-her helmet, Alan herding sheep... Okay, I'll save the rest of my EXTENSIVE COMMENTARY for later on the special Annoying Cut, just go watch it!

Dartmoor sketchbook: Bovey Tracey Baptism

jabberworks — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 13:50:39 GMT

I drew this a week or so ago and just remembered to post it! Here's an addition to my sketchbook pictures of Devon community gatherings. The vicar noted that he liked the way my drawings included lots of different elements that couldn't be captured in a single photo.