The Scariest Dinosaur - My First Illustrated Children's Book is out now!

It’s finally happened! After many hours of sketching, painting, throwing away and re-sketching and re-painting and learning how to rhyme I have finally combined my love of art with story telling and published my first children’s book, The Scariest Dinosaur. The book is available on Amazon here.

The idea for this book started off with my wanting to write a short story for my granddaughter, Emelia. At just two and half year’s old she already loves dinosaurs and has some paintings from me as gifts. This time I wanted to combine the two and she could have a book full of paintings of dinosaurs and, hopefully, an entertaining short story to go with them. It has taken a long time to put it together but finally I have finished it.

The primary aim was only ever to create a book for my granddaughter, Emelia and I am already well into the next book project for my three year old granddaughter, Lily, which will feature a witch, a house made of carrots and unicorn in a purple coat! Well why not? I don’t know if either book will be successful in terms of others enjoying them but as long as my grandchildren enjoy them then I will think I’ve succeeded. That said, I have test-driven my first book on several young critics and it appeared to be very well received.

A great deal of effort, as you can imagine, went in to creating the sketches and paintings for the book and this has resulted in me having a collection of original ink and watercolour paintings in my studio. All of these will be available to buy as prints or originals from my website.

Below are a few of my illustrations and the opening poem that gets the book started. Do scroll down and leave a comment and let me know what you think.

The front and back cover design - all in water colour and ink.

Not strictly dinosaurs but prehistoric none the less! Stampeding mammoths can be quite scary!