John Shelley's Blog, page 26

Year of the Tiger

Wishing everyone a happy and roaringly successful year ahead!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Children's Illustrators.com

Unfortunately the popular portfolio website Childrensillustrators.com, which I subscribe to, is currently offline. The company is working on the situation, fingers crossed things will be sorted out in the near future.


In the meantime you can see a broad collection of my children's illustrations on my Flickr page.

Illustration Friday - entangled

This is from the 4-volume collection of lesser-known tales by Hans Christian Andersen, "Unknown Andersen" published by Hyoronsha during the bi-centenary celebrations of his birth in 2005. It accompanied The Story of a Mother , a dark tale of a mother's quest to find her child after it has been stolen by Death. During her journey she faces a series of painful ordeals, including embracing a thorn bush.

Winchester Conference

Last weekend I was invited to run a workshop at the British Isles SCBWI Conference at the University of Winchester. This was the second year for the event but only the first time I'd been able to attend. It was also the first time to see the British Isles membership together, though I recognised several faces from other events such as Bologna or the Society of Authors CWIG Conference last year.

As I write, the web promo is still viewable on the SCBWI British Isles Website. Other guests includ...

Disney Collaboration Limited Edition print

My latest work is perhaps a surprising collaboration involving Disney. Popular art licensing and print company Art Print Japan, which has retail outlets across Japan, has tied up with Disney and approached 15 artists to offer their versions of Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh. These have just been released in Japan as limited edition giclée art prints.

For various reasons I prefered to avoid depicting the characters directly, and
chose instead to conceal the motif of their faces inside landcape...

"Imaginary Journeys" exhibition in Bucharest

As a repeat of a successful exhibition last year, SCBWI in Romania organised a second illustration show Imaginary Journeys combining work by name international illustrators with Romanian artists in Cărtureşti Bookshop, Bucharest, and once more kindly invited me to participate. The show was widely covered by the media and opened on 4th October. there was a big reception on 8th October, and the show was eventually extended 2 days beyond the planned closing date to the 17th. The Romanian Cultura...

Illustration Friday - Frozen

Anyone who knows my work well may have seen this before, it's from the picture book 12 no Tsuki-tachi (The 12 Months), a traditional Slovakian fairy tale, from the version by Marshak and published by Miki House in Japan with a translation by Sho Suzuki. One of my older works, but often reprinted, a new edition is about to be released.

London Transport

The blog has been pretty quiet of late as I've been moving out of Staffordshire and settling into London. It's a big change from pretty, quiet Lichfield, but considering I've lived in cities most of my life, especially the bustle of Tokyo for so many years I feel a lot more comfortable in the big city. Location is very important for me, not only for artistic inspiration (see previous posts) but also for the convenience of living.


My biggest handicap in Lichfield was not being able to drive. M...

Highlights High Five Award

Very busy time lately, hence my silence on the blog. I've just returned from a long home-hunting expedition in London, with happy results, so major changes are in the pipeline.

I was amazed to find in the post a beautiful pewter plate from Highlights High Five magazine in the US. The inscription tells me I've been awarded the "Thinking Feature Illustration of the Year 2008".

I'm admittedly a bit of a fatalist, so this has to be a good omen I tell myself. Here's the plate...


















...and the illustration.