Some fine teacher notes for My Dog, Hen have been prepared by Penny Kemp and can be downloaded here.
Hen has found a good home…
I have recently acquired a number of cardboard boxes of the first edition UK hardback of My Dog, Hen which are being sold through my website.
If you contact me directly I’ll happily put a drawing on it or initial it for you, wrap it up, then walk up the street, cross the road to my post office, go inside, and post it to you via Royal Mail. Some booksellers struggle to offer this type of personalised service.
Of course, if you want the book pristine, untouched and from-the-factory then that’s OK too. Let me know when you order.
Click to roll the video tape…
Book reading, fried eggs and Twinkle at The Ned Hotel, London…
Thank you to the Ned Hotel, London, and the families who came to the book reading yesterday. We drew pictures, and read My Dog, Hen , and the children ate the best looking pastries I’ve ever seen. The reading was inside what was previously a water tank that serviced the building, but is now an excellent cabana-style bar area. The building is the old Midlands Bank, designed by Edwin Lutyens, but the children weren’t particularly interested in the structure so much as the jam donuts. I tried to steer the conversation back around to the construction process and the physics of the rooftop water reservoir, but they wanted to talk about things like a bulldog eating fried eggs and a cat named Twinkle. A good time was had by all.
Thanks to Matthew and his team at the hotel, and to Phil Perry who knows what she’s doing.
Not being able to photograph the room and attendees, like a courtroom artist I have to draw the event from memory.
The City of London early on a Sunday is always shockingly peaceful.
World Book Day and encyclopaedic memories…
Growing up, it was unusual not to find a full set of encyclopaedia in a friend’s house I was visiting.
Years later I learned that if they did have the full set, then that family were probably on a subscription. People went door to door selling subscriptions. A subscription meant when the encyclopaedia company felt like they needed to update the information, they would send the customer a new complete set of the latest edition – A to Z. This meant that customers were left with a full set of superceded, outdated, hardback encyclopaedias burning a hole in their spare room or garage.
On world book day, I want to remember the many sets of encyclopeadia and the stalled subscriptions, and the school fetes unable to sell old sets on. But it’s not all bad memories because I had two volumes (D and K, 1965) which I salvaged parts from for collages.
Volume K, circa 1965.
Heavy petal…
“It's cold today, but in a spring way, and I love you.” – Vladimir Nabokov. Letters to Vera.
Thanks Nico…
Thank you to Nico in Poland for his nice card and drawing. I like your confident use of black, and how you aren’t governed by the dictates of lines to colour between. Keep it up.
Spring has sprung.
Spring/Primavera/Printemps/Tavaszi/Forar/Lente/Fruhling/Hayfever…
Being outside.
Scale matters…
Finally, the Apollo lunar module I made eleven years ago has a purpose. This 1/72 scale model of the LEM really gives the viewer a good feel for the size of the book Hello Space.
Objects may be closer than they appear.
Hello Space: A new picture book for the Natural History Museum…
Today, my picture book Hello Space: Is Anybody Out There? is published.
The book is published to coincide with the opening of the Natural History Museum’s exhibition SPACE.
But this time, the subject isn’t something big, prehistoric and lumbering that once lived here on earth and then died from an asteroid to its cranium. It deals with the idea of how life exists beyond our planet Earth and how we know about it.
The book features Waterhouse, the mouse that lives in the Museum and has investigated the sauropods Diplodocus and Titanosaur in my previous books. Asteroids play a big part in what we know about life beyond our planet, and this time the mouse ventures beyond the Museum to see for itself. The Natural History Museum has examples of meteorites, which are an asteroid’s way of getting closer to us.
This book is a little presentational (there’s a lot of big ideas that need to be explained on a grain of rice), and a little philosophical, too. I don’t think the Museum experts – who have to authorise the text – will ever be completely satisfied with my glossing over subjects that they’ve spent a career investigating in-depth. But then… they probably can’t even draw. That’s what I reckon.
The pictures in my book are made with ink, oil pencil, kraft paper and watercolour. There’s a lot of drawing going on, and this book is printed in two colours: black and a nice Mars red.
These books don’t just appear out of the sky in a streak of bright light. You can get one at the exhibition, or through the NHM online shop.
Hello Space is out now.
Hello Space: picture book promo trailer © David Mackintosh, 2025
Early stages. Some ideas made it into the book.
Hello Space Re-entry book trailer © david mackintosh. 2025.
The End of October is Nigh…
"Birds are not aggressive creatures, Miss. They bring beauty to the world."
Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963)
Bats are flying mammals of the order Chiroptera – The Internet.