Foam-board cutouts of characters from What's Up, MuMu? have arrived. They are light, bright and in two window-friendly sizes: grande and regular. Their names are printed on the back too.
If you have a bookshop and would like to borrow them for your front window, let me know. The book is published August this year.
Characters in window are closer than they appear.
This Saturday there's a book festival in Barnes. There's a lot of good people talking about books, writing and illustrating, amongst other things. I'll be reading LUCKY and talking about making a book, and drawing, and planes, and there will be a lucky dip at the end. So please go to Gate SW13 as boarding will commence shortly.
The top half of the London Book Fair.
More spring.
There is a lot of spring near my house.
This morning's solar eclipse came and went behind thick grey cloud. In my street it was quite dark and odd for an hour or so from 8.30, and birds were tweeting. There wasn't a pinhole in sight though.
Eclipse on both sides of the cloud
Some new illustrations for Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (Alma Books 2015). They are minor chapter header illustrations, but of some vast subjects, like Dartmoor. On a recent trip there I saw these ponies but no sign of a giant hound with phosphorescent jaws.
Four of my World Book Day Classic Paperbacks covers. I'll post the full series as soon as I've finished them. They're printing on a white plastic in three colours. The illustrations and lettering are hand cut from origami paper and newsprint.
Design and illustrations © David Mackintosh
I had some postcards printed the same day the post office raised their stamp prices. I really want to post them, but I don't like paying the postage. I should have thought of this before. MuMu looks quite good in small format, printed digitally. I am devoted to litho printing, but this looks good to me too. My favourite postcard has a picture of a Mexican couple relaxing by a well. It looks like it was printed in the nineteen fifties. There's nothing quite like finding an authentic old postcard still on sale in a shop as a postcard, and not as an antique. I once bought two old postcards from Shoreditch Market for £5 each. Maybe sixty pence to post one of my postcards isn't so bad after all.
Only some of the first class pineapple-based correspondence I've received this week.
