January 2015 I replied to a Facebook call by Ann Sharman for an artist to make illustrations for a proposed children’s book about a small dragon. I knew it would be an interesting challenge that would involvne working on a much smaller scale using A4 paper and making more line drawings than I would otherwise use in my canvas art. Several thousand doodles boiled down to several hundred sketches. The sketches boiled down to some fifty potential paintings of which about thirty have been painted. I needed to get a sloping drawing board to make it a more comfortable process for my wrists & hands and a light box to combine the various elements involved in some of the more complex illustrations. Another pair of more powerful spectacles to see what I was doing…new items an endless list! A new stock of various H grade pencils , those that I last used in industrial draughtsmanship of my youth and softer erasers. I needed new smaller design T squares, shape templates, set squares and to dust down my fifty year old professional drawing compass kit. Then I had to figure out how to paint on paper using acrylic paints. This would be simple as I’d used Winsor & Newton’s Galeria Paper in the past I knew it would work for me as an artist. Only to discover that it was not the best surface for scanning into a printed image. For the next part of this commission the deadline was moved forward. I had to urgently source some beautiful A4 ‘Clairefontaine’ Acrylique Paper' which has an incredible smooth surface and does not readily cockle. This paper is made in France and no UK artists’ supplier had any of it. Frantic emails to France followed! The first trial painting run revealed another problem for me; acrylic paints that I have known and loved for half a century were too heavy and difficult to drag into place on this new to me small scale. My normal smallest short flat brush which is about 5 mm across was too big. I would need finely round pointed brushes similar to those I last used in senior school half a century ago. Fortunately Rosemary & Co™ makes the finest small sized round pointed brushes for acrylics with short handles and they were immediately available from stock. Short handles? For close-up work without poking my eyes out. in 2013 on a long-haul cruise I took a ‘learn how to paint with watercolours’ course with my dear friend Peter Woolley and I realised that I could make those illustrations in acrylic inks as I know just how they behave...if in doubt shake them up in passing! Except I only had black or white acrylic inks which I use in my canvas art for ultra fine detail. It needed an investment in further acrylic inks of all colours and hues and watercolorist palettes. This project was particularly hard on those ultra fine brushes too. The brief was for a minimum of thirty colourful A4 sized hand painted artwork that should real and not computer generated & look as if any child could have made them. The illustrations should tell a story in their own right. The designs and layout were for me to choose. The magic cabinet should be a simple design but be somehow transparent and variable in proportion yet look real. To encourage parents & children to have a go at making art. And the dragon must look like a friendly creature. http://terracotta2015.blogspot.co.uk will give more background. Grateful thanks have to go to: Nick Parry, the Clairefontaine UK agent, for the A4 Clairefontaine Acrylique paper. Rosemary & Co when my small [ 0/2 ] brush stock ran low. Jackson's for the Magic Color acrylic inks again another urgent restock when an open bottle dropped to the floor... Finally a big thank you to The Memsahib (aka, my wife) for her tolerance, patience & support during this twenty five week long project while I slogged it out in the studio on a near daily basis. Often for 30 - 40 hours per six day week. Some of these illustrations took days to get the scale, positions & angles correct. Some of these illustration represent five hours of painting time alone. Some were painted as back to back illustrations ( so that the colours matched ) & these took even longer!