Whale

 I’m getting on with the illustrations for my latest book “Blue Penguin”. It’s going well, although a bit slowly.

I still have three pictures to do. I try to keep the pictures fresh by printing, scratching and using thick paint. Sometimes it looks as if it’s easy, but painting the backgrounds can take ages and not all of the attempts are successful.

I already painted a cover for the book, but talking to my editor we realised, that almost every published book about a penguin has a similar cover. That means the head of a penguin looking at you. I wouldn’t mind though, but we may change it anyway. I will see after the cover meeting.

The next task for me in the book is a whale. I need to paint a white whale. I already had a picture of a whale in one of my books.

It was a whale in “Puffin Peter”.

I wanted to have a look at some of the older sketches and got stuck looking through my sketchbooks.

Looking through a sketchbook is like finding an old family photo album. These are some fish I found.

A very old sketch.

Pickled fish. A drawing inspired quite probably by the pickled shark by Damien Hirst.

A similar picture named “Water tank with a Killer Whale and five paying viewers”.

This is another killer whale.

A sketch for the whale from the book “Puffin Peter”. I wanted to paint the body of the whale as if it’s wet and shiny.

My latest drawing from my sketch book. The White Whale.

And this is a sketch for the picture I have to do next week.