A big old catch-up.

Oh dear, oh dear. I do seem to be incredibly slack lately. However, all the big deadlines are now out of the way and I can go back to experimenting.

Today I finally managed to get my new Eeries postcards out there into the ether. Hopefully they're winging their way through the postal system as we speak, off to earn me new contacts and new contracts. I addressed and stamped 62 of the little buggers, so I hope they reap some rewards. I've found them to be very useful so far, and I've only handed out about 10 of them. Seeing Rima talking to ADs at the London Book Fair two weeks ago made me take a deep breath and say "Right, if she's brave enough to actually show her portfolio, I can go up to someone and just hand them a card." I got a call from Fernleigh books the day after. Gemma, who used to work for SGA, now works for them, so it's very nice to have someone I'm quite friendly with already in a new publishers. Plus, it's brought in a lot of email enquiries and more traffic on my site. Speaking of which, the new and updated website is now online. I'm especially proud of it as I built it all myself in Freeway. No more relying on Lovely Jon to update it for me. I am my own (web)master! Mwah-ha-ha!

I spent the rest of my available time drawing chickens. I'm going back to experimenting with line and digital, and I thought chickens were as good a place as any to start. Here we go:



And a few attempts with colour:









I like the black line. It's very simply done with just ink and a brush. I'm going to have a go with stick-based line-making tomorrow, and even just sketching really small with a fineliner and them blowing it up to see what happens. I'm not so sure about the "sponge" effects on the second chick. Maybe it's too much. I'm off to have ANOTHER look at Linzie Hunter's site for inspiration.