Federation Square Book Market with Ann James Saturday April 18

Upcoming Books Illustrated Events

Federation Square Book Market with Ann James Saturday April 18 Ann will join us between 12pm to 5pm to demonstrate her chocolate flavoured illustration and to sign books!  Share some of this hungry dinosaur’s delicious chocolate cake … with hundreds and thousands.  I’m a Hungry Dinosaur  written by Janeen Brian, illustrated by Ann James and published by Penguin Books will be released on April 22. This is the eagerly awaited sequel to the very popular and award winning I’m a Dirty Dinosaur. Exciting news, I'm a Dirty Dinosaur! was the third most borrowed picture book in a recent survey of South Australian libraries! Original artwork, limited edition prints and signed books available on our website.

Mud & Magic

The opening of Ann James' exhibition Mud & Magic was on Friday 1 August, 1.30pm at Central Goldfields Old Fire Station Art Gallery in Maryborough central Victoria. The exhibition will run from 2 August - 7 September celebrating Ann James' 32 year career illustrating picture books for Australian children. Featuring 'I'm A Dirty Dinosaur' written by Janeen Brian and published by Penguin Books. 

Beginning with A Pet for Mrs Arbuckle, Ann's first book in 1981, the exhibition presents Illustrations and background process from many books including the Penny Pollard series, Lucy Goosey, Sadie and Ratz, The Butterfly, Shutting the Chooks In, The Way I Love You, It’s a Miroocool! and Bird & Bear, which demonstrates Ann's playful approach to making pictures with a variety of mediums and techniques.

Ann has painted a giant Dirty Dinosaur mural on the back wall of the gallery painted with mud from her dam in Central Victoria!. Over 700 school children will visit the exhibition through August adding their own magic to the swamp mural with creatures they have created. Ann will run a workshop at the gallery on Saturday August 30 for 8 to 12 year olds. Visit  Ann's page on Books Illustrated.

Kid's magic pencils and mud painting inspired by Ann's book

Audrey of the Outback in Paju Book City, Korea

Christine Harris and Ann James' delightful character Audrey of the Outback was ready to greet Books Illustrated when they arrived in Paju Book City...

Illustration from 'It's a Miroocool!' 

Books Illustrated at Paju Book City

September Exhibition - Books Illustrated in Korea  

• Paju Book City Booksori Festival

Books Illustrated has been invited to present an exhibition of Australian Children’s Book Illustration at the inaugural Booksori Festival which will run from Sept 16 to 23.  The festival is the largest Book Festival in Asia and is being developed as a mecca for the international publishing Industry.

 

The heart of the exhibition is a series of promotional prints curated for the Bologna Book Fair this year. It will be augmented with other sections promoting Australian Literature including Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing DVD and a promotion of the inaugural Australian Children’s Laureate position held jointly by Alison Lester and Boori Monty Prior. As well as events with publishers we will be running illustration workshops with visiting children.

Paju Book City is an amazing concept in itself –‘A place where people, books and culture are in harmony’. It is a specially designed city focussing on books. To celebrate producing books, in 2011 the city started creating bookstores with libraries, exhibition spaces and book cafes in publishing houses under the name of Check Bang Geo Ri (Street of Bookstores). As a result, 42 bookstores have been opened and the city has become a member of the IOB (International Organization of Booktowns). We are excited that representatives from Australia's own booktown, Clunes, will also be at the festival. 

We look forward to being part of this festival and sharing it with you soon!

Ann James at last year's opening ceremony.

A Scritchy Scratchback Success!

We had a lovely day yesterday with two groups of kids at Gasworks Arts Park doing scratchback workshops - what a talented bunch!

Here's one way to create scratchback artworks if you would like to try these at home. *And please feel free to comment on this post if you have other tried and tested recipes!

Materials: A4 or A3 paper, oil pastels, black acrylic paint, a scratching instrument like scissors

How to:

- Practice the design (in ours they used reference material about animals to practice drawing characters/creatures)
- Make sketches for the design using your drawings as inspiration
- Cover all of a new sheet of white (cartridge) paper with a good coating of oil pastel (pretty dense)
- Either:
- Paint whole surface with black acrylic paint
- or
- Only paint your creature as a silhouette onto the surface
- Then... leave it to dry
- Using a sharp instrument, scratch through the black paint to create patterns or lines that bring through the colours of the oil pastels below!

Enjoy! And remember it takes a bit of practice but once you've got the hang of it this style of artwork can be beautiful!

Scrathback in action!

An example where the silhouette of the creature was painted on in black and then scratchback was used to create texture and pattern. 

This is an example of where the entire page was covered in black paint and the shape of the creature was scratched out. 

Join us for the opening night of The Art of Australian Children's Books exhibition

The Art of Australian Children's Books
Metropolis Gallery 64 Ryrie St, Geelong
July 7 to July 21
Opening night July 7,  5 to 7pm
64 Ryriw Street, Geelong
Open 9 - 5.30pm weekdays, 10 - 4pm Saturdays.


For those who love children’s picture books, Metropolis Gallery will present The Art of Australian Children's Books, an exhibition of original book illustrations, character sketches, etchings and prints by some of Australia's top book illustrators: Terry Denton, Leigh Hobbs, Elizabeth Honey, Robert Ingpen, Ann James, David Miller, Anne Spudvilas, Shaun Tan, and Anna Walker.


This exhibition will coincide with Geelong City Library’s In Conversation with exhibiting artists Leigh Hobbs, David Miller and Ann James on Sunday 15 July, celebrating The National Year of Reading

School Holiday workshops with Ann James at Gasworks Arts Park

Kids Holiday Program with Ann James 

Workshop: Scritchy scratchback 
Dates: Wednesday 11 July
Times: 10am to 12noon (6 to 9 years)
Venue: Gasworks Arts Park
1pm to 3pm (8 to 14 years)
Cost: $30

Create scritchy, screwball characters in scratchback technique in this fun hands on art workshop with Ann James, award-winning illustrator of Lucy Goosey, Little Humpty and the Audrey of the Outback series. Participants need to wear an art shirt and bring a drink and snack. To book online visit Gasworks Arts Park or call on (03) 8606 4200.

One Word One Day in Melbourne (Fly)

We thought you'd enjoying seeing some of the lovely artworks created during the One Word One Day event in Melbourne, the chosen word was 'fly'. To find out about the materials used to create each artwork click on the caption below the images.

(Photographs c/o Micador Group website). 

Alison Lester, the inaugural Children's Laureate 

Ann James from Books Illustrated 

Bettina Guthridge 

Christine Bever

Craig Smith

Danni Grantford

David Miller

Elizabeth Botte

Judy Watson

Jacqui Grantford

Jason Chatfield 

 

Karen Erasmus

Judith Rossell

Kathryn Creamer

Lorette Broekstra

Mini Goss

Mitch Vane

Sebastion Fowler

ShaunTan 

Fly close up

One Word One Day

One Word One Day is a fun initiative of the Australian Society of Authors this year to celebrate and promote our illustrator community.  Collaborating with Micador (art materials) and the ABC we will raise funds for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation through a series of fabulous hand-on workshops in major cities around Australia.
Each workshop has a single word as its theme. The first one was "Fly".

Melbourne (Wed March 14) theme word, FLY

Perth (Wed 18 April) theme word, NIGHTLY

Brisbane (Fri 11 May) 

Hobart (Wed 23 May) 

Darwin (Wed 6 June) 

Sydney (Wed 20 June)

Listen to Ann James and Alison Lester being interviewed during the Melbourne One Word One Day.

To find out more or be involved, go to the ASA website.

To check out art created so far and read the artists' profiles go to Micador Group's website.

To support the initiative please LIKE us on the ASA One Word One Day Facebook page.

Artists' paintings will be auctioned on-line on July 11 - proceeds to go to the ILF

Books Illustrated at Clunes Booktown Festival

May 5-6

Do visit us at our stand at this wonderful event

• Ann James will be demonstrating at the Books Illustrated Stand and there will be lots of lovely prints and picture books for sale!
• The biggest collection of books on sale in the southern hemisphere with 60 booksellers
• Talks by Geoffrey Blainey, Tim Fisher, Alice Pung, Peter Goldsworthy, Nicholas Jose, Anna Goldsworthy, Gina Perry and more
• Workshops on book reviewing, publishing, poetry writing, book collecting, writing science
• Children's Booktown with visiting authors Hazel Edwards and John Nicholson
• Selections from the State Library of Victoria's rare and precious book collection on show
• Street entertainment, live music, food, wine…fantastic atmosphere

Admission to entire program by Booktown badge $5, $2 concession and children.

To find out more visit the Clunes Booktown Festival website. 

Or follow them on facebook.

Our exhibition at Clunes 2011

Sunrise, Sunset – watercolour workshops at Gasworks with Ann James

We had a lovely day at Gasworks Arts Park yesterday as part of the Kids' School Holiday Program. 

To celebrate the launch of  Ann James' and Christine Hariss's new picture book 'It's a Miroocool!' - the prequel to their Audrey in the Outback Junior fiction series - Gasworks hosted an exhibition of Ann's artwork for the book and she carried out a watercolour and charcoal workshop focussing particularly on her sunset illustration.

Ann worked with two groups of kids throughout the day. First she demonstrated how to create a watercolour wash. Her paper was pasted up on an easel and gravity encouraged the sunset colours to blend. 

Then while the washes dried, Ann and the kids all went outside into the sunshine and did some charcoal drawings of trees, birds, leaves, bushes, buildings looking at how to transform what they were seeing into shapes for silhouettes.

Then they used their charcoal drawings and imaginations to help create silhouette sunset landscapes.  Feel free to take a good look at some sunsets and sunrises and try your own sunset painting at home !