Alex Latimer's Blog, page 2

During the process of making a picture book, a lot of images come and go as the characters evolve. I found this early cover for Pig and Small today - I still like it very much.

The publication date of Pig and Small crept up on me, and then it crept silently past. So it's been available (in the UK at least) for the last couple of weeks. I'm usually very tired of a book by the time I'm done making it, which was the case with Pig and Small too. I moved onto the next project and forgot about the characters, the story, the sleepless nights spent trying to get the ending right. But now I get to go back and read it, and I'm back to the feeling I had at the very beginning - when the title came to me and I couldn't wait to see how it all turned out.
reviews here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

Sometimes you've drawn enough walruses for the week. Sometimes you just need to draw something else. The result is Captain Koala Rescues a Sock. This is water-coloured, which is unusual for me since I lack the patience for real world painting. That said, Captain Koala Rescues a Sock is certainly no A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

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I was invited to be part of this year's Artist's Almanac - an awesome project run by the good people at Essie Letterpress. I illustrated March - which here in South Africa is the start of Autumn. 
So I drew a range of local animals in a bit of standoff. I think that if you're on the ground, you're more vulnerable to attack from above, so a rock is a safe place. Everyone is rooted to their rock despite the arrival of Autumn and colder weather, which you can see is depicted by the floaty-down leaves. What happens in the end? Perhaps they're all frozen in place by the time winter rolls around.
You can buy the Almanac calendar and prints here:http://essieletterpress.co.za/188059/...

Ok, so it's not exactly cheap as a Kindle book - but it's there. (http://ow.ly/oPJ4K)

I've wanted to write a novel for much longer than I've wanted to make picture books - which makes the release (in September) of my first novel quite special for me. It's not a kids novel either - so it's a step in a strange new direction. Staying on the topic of strange... the book deals with the aftermath of the launch of a nuclear powered space ship that was built in secret by the apartheid government. The novel lands itself in the Speculative Fiction/Thriller genre - which is a complicated way of saying that it is an easy read about weird stuff. I was even lucky enough to be able to design and illustrate the cover - which depicts two bat-eared foxes gazing up at the sky-bound rocket.

South African science and non-standard fiction novels are beginning to blossom all around the place - and my publisher here, Umuzi, publishes the bulk of them. If you're local, then keep an eye out for their books - and if you're based somewhere else in the world, I'd suggest you order a couple online. There's a bizarre non-conforming originality to these novels, that you'd be hard pressed to find elsewhere. 

http://www.randomstruik.co.za/books/the-space-race/5154

For some months last year I worked on this wonderful new book that Penguin approached me to illustrate. It's not often I get to collaborate with a literary genius, or someone who is dead, or someone so well moustached - and Rudyard is all three. It was such fun re-visiting and re-imagining these stories that I was so familiar with as a child. The end result landed on my desk this morning, and I'm thrilled with it.

 Come and listen to me read my new book and draw pictures. All are welcome, except people who ask me to draw difficult animals.