Undercover at Crystal Palace Children's Book Festival

I took four accomplished cartoonists from my neighbourhood to the Crystal Palace Children's Book Festival organised by Alex 'Mousehunter' Milway - ostensibly to accompany them to the comics workshops.

But when I got there I couldn't resist joining the workshop.

First we attended the Zombie and Monster Art workshop hosted by Tom Percival - he who designed the Skulduggery Pleasant books.

Tom showed us how to draw exposed brains, missing limbs, uneven eyeballs, shadows.

I did this zombie picture starring my daughter Mia and her friend, Hugo.

Then we went to see the exhibition at Smash Bang Wallop, a funky gift shop in its normal incarnation.

It was only a short walk to the Bookseller Crow where I spent a lot of money and walked off with a book by my friend Sue Eves by mistake (Sue kindly returned it for me). I took a photo of Sue with her famous dog puppet Woofy but unfortunately it vanished from my camera, no doubt deleted by a zombie.

After lunch at the deli next door to the Crow, we headed back to the Upper Norwood Joint Library ("Wot a posh library!" one of the kids said) to attend the comics workshop run by the DFC comics guys.

There was a workshop on designing characters ... here's a 'Ninja Pie' designed by my pal Hugo:

We learned how to measure how many heads tall a character was:

- followed by a Comics Jam - which is kind of like taking turns drawing a comic strip with hilarious results! Here are some examples:

I think if you click on the image, you can see it in bigger mode.

... if the above one looks suspiciously as if it was drawn entirely by cartoonists it probably was. There were a lot of professional artists in the room - even apart from the DFC (Mine was the first frame).

Some were hilariously strange.I had to do this frame (number 3) for a strip that started off with an animal in a cage and an odd looking character in a long nightgown. In the second frame a mysterious little elephant joins them?!!! It was hard to think what to draw.

We had a great time (and nobody threw me out of the workshop for being old).

Alex Milway, interviewed by the Bookseller, said:

It’s very easy for us writers to sit back and expect the world to come to us. I wanted to see what might happen if we got did something like this for ourselves. Why wait to be asked to take part in a festival or event, when you can set one up for yourself?

A fantastic idea. Well done guys!

Brighton Children's Book Festival: the Bookseller's-eye-view

Providing Brighton festival goers with books to buy were the kind people from Bags of Books, the Lewes based children's bookstore (one of a decreasing number of specialist booksellers in the country, I might add). Their stall was located in the corner of a room exhibiting some rather startling photographs.

This was the view from behind the book counter:

The Brighton Children's Book Festival

It was my birthday last Saturday and to celebrate I took a group of little girls to the Brighton Children's Book Festival. I was on a panel (about promoting yourself online) the following day.

Snowy Globe, their school's cuddly toy mascot, came along. Our task was to bring back photographs Snowy Globe enjoying Brighton and the festival. Here is Snowy Globe and my festival companions getting ready to board the train to Brighton:

Snowy Globe was suitably impressed by the sights at Brighton:


Brighton was relentlessly cool.



At Brighton University we slavered over the book display.



The theme of this year's festival is 'Leaping from the Page' - books finding other incarnations in comics, film, stage, you get the idea.

The kids went straight into a musical performance workshop using material from Feather Boy by Nicky Singer. The workshop was run by Nicholas Beeby and Kate Bray. While they were in the workshop, I attended a comics workshop run by Marcia Williams:



The kids then performed a scene from Feather Boy - incredibly well given that they only had two hours to learn the songs and workshop the scene! It was mind-boggling. I won't be surprised if Grace (the girl in the foreground) who sang the lead ends up on the West End someday!







After the performance, Laura Atkins who organised the festival, very charmingly interviewed Dakota Blue Richards, the young star of the film of The Golden Compass and a Brighton local. My girls were gripped by this personable (not to mention exceedingly beautiful) and well-spoken young person.





Of course, Snowy Globe paid close attention to all that was said.



And Dakota Blue kindly had her picture taken with girls and dog.



As did David Almond when it came time for him to speak about the turning of his books into films.



David A gave an inspirational talk about writing and adapting work for other media. Then the BBC adaptation of Clay was screened (the girls were a bit scared).



We then rushed off to Zizzi in the Lanes for a birthday supper and then to the beach and the Brighton Pier to milk the most out of the rest of the evening before we left. Unfortunately the funfair was already closed. But that did not stop my intrepid gang.



Sadly, because I was speaking the next day (and because the events were geared for an older audience), I didn't take the kids with me. As a result, I took no pictures. Sorry.