Mythical Creatures Postcard Book

As well as trying to juggle drawing, printing, exhibiting and a bit of teaching during summer I also spent alot of time putting together Mythical Creatures, the new Girls Who Draw postcard book. In theory it should be easier, quicker and cheaper to get a whole book done by collaborating with other people instead of creating it alone. Unfortunately things don't seem to work that way when there are 12 different illustrators involved, who have different levels of experience and who live in different parts of the UK. I lost count of the number of emails which I wrote and sent out, the number of emails which I recieved, read and replied to as well as phonecalls, text messages and smoke signals. Then there were the late nights spent downloading other people's artwork, followed by downloading last minute amended versions of other people's artwork, swearing, getting work re-sent because it was RGB instead of CMYK, getting files re-sent because they were corrupt, accidentally re-sizing artwork into metres instead of centimetres and swearing a whole lot more. And don't get me started on renaming other people's files because that's the one of the worst jobs. Exactly what am I supposed to do with 24 files all named Mythical Creatures?

Was it worth the effort? Yes, or at least I think so mainly because I got to work with a few of my favorite illustrators. One of them is definitely Kristyna Baczynski and she designed the beautiful cover for Mythical Creatures as well as contributing two amazing postcard designs. Then there's Esther McManus and Mina Braun who are also both screen printers. I've started adding information about them and the others involved in the postcard book to mythicalcreaturesbook.blogspot.com

Just to prove I can actually draw something other than Folk Trees here is one of my postcard designs, Pair of Sirins, which was inspired by Russian folk prints. This is the finished version which unfortunately didn't actually end up in the postcard book because in the chaos of trying to get everything to print on time I didn't notice the wrong design had been used until it was too late. Oh well, "C'est la vie" as they say, or better still "merde alors", that's more like it.