Hurray! Baby Can Bounce!, my new baby book and the sequel to Baby Goes Baaaaa! is now out.
The bold baby animal illustrations are designed specifically to catch the eye of babies from 1- 3 yrs, but I've worked hard to try and make sure that both books are also a funny read for the poor parents (some baby books can be a little basic in content, so gruelling on the 50th repetition...). I wanted mine to be fun to read aloud and easy to share with baby again and again.
I got the idea for Baby Goes Baaaaa! from noticing that many of my friend's baby's loved making animal noises. I knew that phonics was very important for early language development and learning, so created a book to help readers practise the all the different sounds that all babies enjoy: educational and fun!
My publisher was so keen on the concept, they immediately asked me to create a sister book. I wanted it to be just as useful for baby's development as book 1, so I did a little more research and discovered that it is also very important for small babies to practise mimicking faces and actions: Baby Can Bounce was born!
I used the same cast of characters (different animals on every page) but also introduced a tiny harvest spider, who pops up to share each action, helping me to keep the same level of humour, but also creating a link to hold all the illustrations together.
The idea of course, is that you and baby make the noises / do the actions together, as you share the book.
They are being stocked in Mothercare, Sainsbury's and Morrisons, as well as all the usual bookshops, which is great, as they will find a larger audience. So, please, pretty-please: rush out and buy them RIGHT NOW. Go on... you know you want to...
You can follow the progress of Baby Can Bounce, to see how a picture book is created from scratch. I put all the sketches, roughs and artwork-in-progress here on the blog, as I went along. Just click the link and scroll down.
I have also made a short video about drawing cats, which ends with me showing you, step-by-step, how to create your own drawing of the singing cat in Baby Goes Baaaaa! (the same cat as is licking the ice-cream above):
If you enjoy it, there are more films on my YouTube channel and also on the film page of my website.
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