(Credit: Sarah McIntyre. See how easy it is to add illustrator credit?)

The fantastic #PicturesMeanBusiness campaign moves into its second phase, taking on extra staff to ensure that the publishing industry (and other branches of the media) begin to understand just how important it is to ensure that illustrators, artists, designers and creative folk are properly credited for their work.

From the blogger perspective, time and again we find ourselves forced to do a lot of extra work trying to find information on particular artist credits.

When you write a blog in your spare time, you're effectively wasting a huge amount of that spare time hunting around for information that publishers and PR folk could quite easily provide for you in press information and releases. Yet time and again, and not just in PR stuff but in other aspects of producing information about books (such as ads and catalogues) ILLUSTRATORS AND ARTISTS ARE NOT PROPERLY CREDITED, OR IN SOME CASES NOT EVEN MENTIONED AT ALL!

So we're left digging through books often to find the easily missed single line where the cover or interior artist is briefly mentioned in tiny print somewhere inside the book or frantically googling around to see if the author or the publisher has mentioned the artist elsewhere (answer: usually no!)

Sarah McIntyre AKA @jabberworks has been tirelessly campaigning with her #PicturesMeanBusiness initiative for many years, and with phase two about to begin, I thought it'd be a good idea to wrap together ten common misconceptions about being an illustrator / artist both from my own (failed) attempt to become one back as a surly twenty-something, and from direct observation of the way creatives are treated during our 8 years of book blogging.

1) "You get paid to draw pictures all day? What a dossy job!"

Oh my god, if there's a statement designed to result in someone being stabbed in the eye with a Bic biro (no self-respecting artist would ever use any of their 'good' pens or brushes for such a task) it's this one.

Again through my own direct experience of folk completely failing to understand what illustration is, what artistic talent involves, and how UTTERLY AND COMPLETELY HARD IT IS to become a professional artist or illustrator, statements like this show that the ignorance goes deep. Most people seem to equate artists and illustrators with the "kid in class who was always doodling or drawing" and quite a few folk also seem to believe that doing this day in day out for a living is something of a dream job.

Far from it - most artists really do struggle to crack the market in any meaningful way, and rely heavily on a lot of foot slogging and promotion of their work - which again is where the whole #PicturesMeanBusiness campaign stems from - if publishers and people employing artists made a better fist of helping their creatives out, perhaps the public perception of the job of being a professional illustrator may change too.

It's not just that - it is supremely difficult to be disciplined enough to work day in day out creating something from nothing. Imagine what it's like as an office drone when you wake up on a monday morning and can't be bothered to turn in for work. Now imagine if you're tired, or ill, or have sore eyes, or worse yet - have a complete creative block, but rely on getting up and working on something creative despite all that - and often for very little reward. Easy is it?

2) "Wow, I bet you get paid a fortune!"

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Again, from the direct experience of quitting an IT job with decent pay, going away to art college for two years, emerging with a bunch of qualifications and a portfolio - and then taking on any illustration jobs I could find (when I could even get someone to pay me at all, often at a rate that was worse than performing manual labour or even shop work, the majority of artists do not earn anywhere near a fortune.

While at college I worked various jobs to fit in around classes and studio time just so I could live (and by 'live' I mean 'scrape by on less than minimum wage per week'). For a lot of professional creatives that's also their reality. Very few can earn a solid living purely from illustration, and either have to take on other jobs (often more than one), or extend their illustrative or creative work out into other forms (such as workshopping or experience stuff at schools etc). Authors will gladly tell you how little they earn from each book sale. Consider that in a lot of cases illustrators will also earn a pifflingly small amount and have to subsidise their incomes in other ways too.

3) "Can you draw this for me? We don't pay but can offer you great exposure!"

Again, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

I think we've gone over this one many, many times on the blog and on Twitter. We've seen a lot of illustrators and artists we follow on Twitter each with their own stories of folk who've approached them for work, with no intention of paying a cent - but offering some level of coverage that isn't really worth a bean to an artist who has bills to pay. If you're trying to employ an artist for any work, and your up-front discussion doesn't come with a fee offer, pack up, go home, go find another job because you're obviously terrible at the one you're doing. Or, at the very least, don't be surprised or get aggressive when that person calls you out on it, and makes you look like the penny pinching meanie you are.

(See also: "Competition to design our new logo! Win the chance to see your work on every billboard and sign away all your creative rights at point of entry")

4) "It's all about word of mouth".

Not exactly, though word of mouth can be very useful for an artist - and recommending their work to others can help an artist find even more work. But it goes deeper than that. If you cannot also show that you value the work that the person has done for you by properly listing and crediting them throughout a project (regardless of the type of creative project we're talking about here - not just book illustration but even something as simple as designing a logo for you) then you're only doing half a job.

Many professionals in all other aspects of children's book publishing do get to know talented artists through word of mouth and reputation, but if someone has to hunt around for information on a specific cover or interior artist for a book, they won't hunt for long in my experience - and may just take on someone else, thus losing the first person a job. That's so flipping wrong and just should not be happening in this information-led age.

5) "Artists are so difficult / demanding to work with though".

I remember hearing this a few times while hawking for gigs after graduating from college. Artists are often imbued with the unfair reputation of being fairly narrowly focused, not adaptable and quite difficult to deal with professionally. If you feel like that, you're obviously taking the wrong approach (probably the approach already detailed in the previous four points above).

Artists want to work, and they may want to work with you. But any creative process is a two-way street so if you instantly set up a confrontational and 'bossy' approach to dealing with a creative, don't be surprised if they dig their creative heels in and push back.

Again it stems from the way a lot of artists are treated by folk higher up the food chain in a particular company. I remember being in a planning meeting in one gig where I'd managed to secure illustration work in-house for a company, and being told to shut up because "I wasn't being paid for my opinion, I was being paid for my work" - purely because I assumed I was there as a professional whose opinions would be feeding into the creative process - not a pencil-pushing drone.

Back to the original line and most artists will tell you that the most difficult folk to work for are creative directors who have no concept of give & take.

6) "Rights? What rights? You're getting paid, aren't you?"

This is a tricky one, particularly if you're working in-house as you may end up having to sign a contract effectively waiving your rights over your own work.

Many artists have wildly differing experiences of this. Some retain absolutely no rights at all to their work and are not even allowed to use it in their own portfolios (again, I have direct experience of this but the industry may have (hopefully) changed in the last 20 years or so). Some are given more slack and allowed to use their work for their own promotional means. It's vitally important for an artist to be able to show and name clients, work and aspects of a project in order to get more work so please for goodness sake don't choke off that chance.

7) "So what if it's 2AM. I thought you liked drawing?"

Maybe a smidge of exaggeration, I don't think many artists have been woken up in the middle of the night to finish off a piece of work - but many artists and creative will indeed have worked an all-nighter to finish off a project, or put their own physical (and mental) health at risk when under pressure from tight timelines on a project.

This again is unreasonable treatment, and assumes that creatives don't have their own lives. Imagine the life of a freelancer illustrator who has to account for every minute of their working day, but also needs the benefits other employees get in all other forms of employment. Yes they need downtime, they need holidays, they need a pension, and dammit they need to be able to live and exist. So when your company announces its next quarter profits in the millions, yet the employees and creatives, freelance or otherwise are barely scraping by, how do you sleep through 2AM?

8) "We cut your bit so we don't need to credit / pay you"

Again, back when I was trying to make a living as an illustrator I took on a job providing a set of graphics for a web company. I spent about three weeks designing headers, logos, link indicators and all manner of other screen furniture for a look and feel for the site.

Though I was (miraculously and luckily) paid for the gig, the company eventually ditched my stuff in favour of an in-house creative who put together an alternative look and feel for their site.

Because I wasn't allowed to use the material in my own portfolio (see "rights aren't important" above) and because I had no credit anywhere in the site, I had no proof that I'd ever done the work - which again meant that I had nothing to take to my next job to secure work along similar lines.

This must be how it feels for artists who don't get their work credited on children's books. Imagine trying to convince someone that your illustrations and designs were used on a book if you were soaked up as part of a creative team who weren't credited individually - and were also denied the rights to your work for portfolio purposes?

9) "We really can't possibly list absolutely everyone who worked on this book!"

Bizarrely, some forms of publishing do go the extra mile - where nearly all aspects of the design of a publication are credited in some way either in the publication itself or in the listing for that item in catalogues or e-shops or websites.

Comics. Colourists, letterers, even layout artists often get credited by DC and Marvel and rightly so.

Would it not be feasible and appropriate for all children's books to also similarly credit everyone involved in a publication? I'd love to see that happen, particularly for a lot of non fiction titles.

If you think that it's appropriate to miss your cover artist out, imagine what your book would look like with a plain cover, and how many copies it would shift. Cover art (and not just in kidlit, in all forms of publishing) can often be the difference between an impulse sale at first sight, or someone passing your author's book by, so never underestimate the worth of an artist's work on covers.

10) "We don't need talented artists, we'll just hire anyone. It's just a kid's book after all!"

Again, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

I don't know if any of you remember that episode of "The Apprentice" where the vacuous folk involved in the programme were tasked with producing a children's book. But the assumption above is just so wrong on so many levels.

First, any author will tell you just how difficult it is to write for children. Any illustrator will also tell you how utterly brutal and withering kids are when it comes to critiquing your illustrative work. If you're an artist and you've got kids of your own (or nieces, nephews, younger sibs, cousins etc) you'll know just how precise they are in their requirements for what constitutes as 'good drawings'.

When we started blogging 8 years ago, I remember how difficult it was to woo my daughter away from visually impactive books that had dreadful stories - and conversely how difficult it was to get her to love a book that was beautifully written and had a gorgeous story, but had illustrations that sucked donkey biscuits.

The whole package has to be utterly faultless and professional for kids, from start to finish, from cover to end papers, through internal illustrations and back again (purely talking about the illustrations here but the same rules apply to the stories / text too).

The publishers that do well are the ones that fully understand this, and take no half measures with either. Don't ever assume that just because an illustrator is drawing or painting for kids, that they'll somehow be fine with cutting corners either because experience kidlit illos will absolutely KNOW that kids are super-picky and won't accept just any old tosh.

Bonus Point: "We didn't want to put the artist's name on the cover, because it would detract from this being the Author's book"

(Had to sneak this one in as a final extra point). Yes, I have actually heard this used as an excuse why a particular set of books featured no cover art / interior art credit. You see, the intended audience were supposed to magically believe that the author in question had magically acquired some seriously amazing art skills, in fact art skills that looked EXACTLY LIKE ONE OF OUR FAVOURITE ARTIST'S! Obviously after a bit of digging and surreptitious tweets to the suspected artist, we did eventually find out that it was her work - but she'd accepted the contract knowing her work wouldn't be flagged. So wrong on multiple levels as the artist in question's work was utterly fantastic and absolutely essential to how well received the books were.

Stuff like this is wrong, yet it seems to happen almost on a daily basis.

These are just a few points I wanted to draw our readers attention to under the umbrella of support for #PicturesMeanBusiness.

 I probably could've written another ten easily. Suffice to say that my own artistic experience is fairly limited when it comes to working on commercial stuff, yet the stories and anecdotes I hear again and again from artists and illustrators involved in kidlit have an air of sad familiarity about them, and are very similar to my own experiences. This seems to demonstrate that very little has changed in the last 20 years and that makes me sad because it means the very reasons I couldn't cut it and definitely couldn't make any kind of a comfortable living at illustration are still true to this day.

Perhaps it's a good thing that we have superheroes like Sarah McIntyre and #PicturesMeanBusiness fighting for the creative corner, to ensure that folk get a far better deal and are far more fairly treated by the children's publishing industry. Maybe one day there will actually be a way that creative folk can earn a crust from something they're passionate about after all.

It's been quite an "Arty" summer and my quest to get better at art, and the pursuit of the perfect digital set-up continues...

This time I wanted to answer a question I'd had since the new 2018 iPad range launched. These 'cheaper' iPads have a slightly lower spec than the iPad Pro, but are perfectly capable of running the latest version of iOS.

That's not the important bit though. At last, Apple has seen sense in supporting the fantastic (but ludicrously expensive) Apple Pencil on the lower-end models as well as the iPad Pro. Digital artists rejoice, now you've got a serious contender for a portable digital art workstation that won't completely break the bank compared to the likes of the Surface range, or the (crazily priced) Wacom tablets.

So here we are then, the 2018 Apple iPad 9.7" model (with a 10.5 and 12.5" model also available) could see you kitted out for well under £500 (a lot less if you're lucky enough to cash in on some educational discount, so students and University affiliates take note, you can get substantial discounts through Apple's educational discount programme or through UniDays).

The kit itself is small enough for me to substitute my existing paper-based sketchpad for. It's worth noting that the Apple smart-cover is a complete waste of time if you're after more than just screen protection but hunt around on Amazon or Ebay and you can find a huge array of protective cases (with the same 'wake on open' smarts that the official rubbish Apple covers have). I bought this one and it's great - and a quarter of the price of the official Apple covers:



https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07BVP2W7Y/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The Apple Pencil. A game-changer for lower-end iPad support and your new best digital friend when it comes to drawing and sketching

Then there's the Apple Pencil. Apple produce some of the most amazing designs on the planet (whether you love their kit or hate it, you've got to admit it really does look and feel great to use) but the Apple Pencil comes with a couple of really idiotic design decisions

1) The pen cap (that hides the Lightning Plug for Charging) is magnetically attached to the pen, and can easily fall off and get lost (it's tiny!)

2) Likewise, the lightning adapter for charging the Pencil is tiny and easily lost

3) The Pencil's default tips are quite hard. Don't go too over-enthusiastic with pressure on your screen, as tough as the 9.7's screen is, it can still be scratched by random grit picked up on the tip of your pencil (which again isn't capped!)

So again it's back to Amazon to source a few more bits. A pencil cap retention widget, a lightning adapter retention widget? Or just stop mucking around and get yourself a case to house your Pencil, cap and adapter and perhaps some spare tips too:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0744CZKGC/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The last piece of the puzzle for me was to grab a Brotect Screen Protector to avoid scratching my new bit of kit early on. I'd bought one of these for my XP-Pen and it works so well and is so easy to apply I did the same here:

Brotect Apple iPad Pro 9.7" Screen Protector Protection Film [2 Pack] HD-Clear

So still under the £500 budget by a good margin, our hardware requirements are sorted. What about art packages?


There can be only one, and it's the mighty ProCreate. For a shade under a tenner you get one of the most comprehensive and easy to use art packages available for the iPad. Though there is also a version of Clip Studio for iPads (and, sadly, it's far superior to ProCreate IMHO) it's ridiculously tied into a monthly subscription price rather than an all-out flat fee like Procreate, instantly removing it from the equation for me (Don't do what I did and depress yourself by trying out the Clip Studio demo, it really is fantastic and you'll only become as annoyed as I am that Clip Studio isn't available for a flat fee too - like the desktop counterpart is).


Though Procreate plays second fiddle to Clip Studio it's by no means worthless, in fact the results you can achieve with this package are nothing short of jaw-dropping - as you'll see when you load up the app for the first time, see the art that's been created with it on your Dashboard - and replay the process  videos that accompany all Procreate works of art (yep, even your own!)

So now you're ready to go on the road with your new iPad and Procreate. How does it compare to other desktop-based art setups? I'm going to compare it directly to my current desktop setup of a Mac Mini running Clip Studio and a screen tablet (the XP-Pen 15.6).

Sketching

This was the main purpose I bought this new digital set up for. Lugging around a traditional sketchpad and a brace of pens and pencils is part of my everyday bag, but having something that you can build finished digital work on is just the icing on the cake. All those bad little habits you've got into with digital artwork, like having multiple layers or even something as simple as an 'undo' button really do spoil you. But any digital set up has to be pinpoint accurate and capable of giving you a variation in stroke, darkness and perhaps even the ability to shade with a tilted pencil.

The iPad and Pencil does that, and in Procreate you've got a ridiculously cool brush engine that's every bit as customisable and tweakable as Clip Studio or Photoshop on a desktop set up.

The Apple Pencil has an unspecified pressure sensitivity level (compared to most tablets / stylus setups that range from 4096 levels of pressure and up). The important bit is latency, that 'lag' you get on your stylus when you go for quick sharp strokes or big sweeping marks.

On the Apple Pencil this latency is less that 20ms, combined with the display's 120mhz refresh rate meaning you get an extremely quick response (put it this way, for the way I draw there's little to no detectable lag at all).

Pressure wise, in Procreate you can tweak the levels to suit you, simulating soft or hard pencils with a quick tweak of the app's pressure settings. I set things soft, again mainly because I don't want to damage my screen by having to press harder with the tip.

With tilt support, you can actually tilt the tip of the pencil for broader strokes with most of Procreate's tools (or build your own brushes that support tilt too). This makes a HUGE difference to your art, suddenly just like a stick of graphite you can draw the edge of your pencil's tip across the screen and get a nice broad fuzzy stroke. It's incredible to see it in action (in fact one of the places I demoed the Ipad and Pencil at before I bought it didn't know about that feature, and were completely blown away by it! Hah!)

Calibration - what calibration? I think this is the chief difference between my two setups. On the desktop with the XP-Pen I'm constantly fighting a losing battle between getting the tablet to understand exactly where the tip of the stylus is in conjunction with the on-screen brush / cursor.

It's pinpoint accurate on the iPad and Pencil, behaving exactly like traditional sketching tools and that's all you really need to know. It's nice to be back in the ballpark of having exact replication of strokes right where you expect them to be.

Procreate's in-built pencil brushes are fantastic, ranging from HB, 2B and 6B right up to some pretty fancy variations. Same goes for pens and there's no mess no fuss in getting straight into some tight artwork on this thing even if your skills are like mine, mediocre at best.

"Werewolf Chihuahua" - A Procreate drawing showing off some of the inbuilt brush types

Digital Painting

Speed painting and digital painting are two things I royally suck at, but again Procreate has just about all the features you'd see in more expensive dedicated desktop digital art packages.

Layers are one of Procreate's strengths and I use them a lot. Being able to shuffle layers around, and even 'pinch' them together to merge them really makes dealing with layers in Procreate a pleasure.

Layers can be individually adjusted between different modes like colour overlay, multiply, lighten and darken - so you're bound to find a setup that works for you.

There are some truly fantastic tutorials out there on using Procreate for digital painting, but this is easily one of the best I've found so far:

https://www.creativebloq.com/how-to/procreate-tutorial-draw-a-dramatic-female-figure

I still haven't quite got to where I want to be with Procreate, ie not quite at the point where I've got a pin-sharp and accurate digital portable paint studio but a lot of that is because I still haven't quite mastered Procreate's bog-standard round brush set. Once I've managed to replicate Clip Studio's awesome watercolour brushes though, I think I'll be there.

Neat stuff

One of the best features of Procreate is the ability to instantly share something you've drawn or painted with your social media feeds. This makes the workflow of joining in with daily art challenges such as #Portraitchallenge, #Shapechallenge and #AnimalAlphabets on Twitter an absolute breeze.

Social media integration in Procreate is fantastic, even allowing you to painlessly share the other really great feature all Procreate art has. Every time you draw or paint in Procreate, the package surreptitiously records the session, so you get cool process videos.

Here's mine for the little Chihuahua fella above:

These videos are great for showing off, but they're also really good for seeing how your piece of art changes from moment to moment, so you get to see all your mistakes as well as the steps you take to undo them. Quite fascinating to have something like this to refer back to and a killer feature for the app for sure.

Procreate is capable of handling image imports too, so even if you've sketched something up traditionally, and you have scanned it (or just taken a decent picture of it with the iPad's camera) you can import that file into Procreate and start tuning it up with the standard paint and sketch tools.

Last but by no means least is Procreate's brush engine. It's massively powerful, and all the brushes in the package itself were created with it - with a multitude of options to choose from you can turn a squiggle or an image into a usable brush just like you can in Photoshop or Clip Studio, and it's far more easy than the latter.


Advantages and Disadvantages. 

Of course it's not all wine and roses when it comes to using an iPad for your primary digital workstation and I still find that there are things I can do on a desktop setup that I just can't replicate on the iPad and Procreate. I've already mentioned Clip Studio still being my number one go-to for digital art, and that still holds true.

That said, bear in mind that any desktop setup you put your money towards will cost you a substantial amount more than my basic setup here and you will really struggle to approach even a fairly usable Laptop-based solution that is as fuss-free and portable as this.

So here's a few pluses and minuses for both my setups.

iPad 9.7" and Procreate with Apple Pencil

Startup time: 

Seconds. I'm not kidding around. If the iPad is in sleep mode I can open the cover, unlock the iPad and be in Procreate drawing and sketching in under 20 seconds.

Accuracy: 

Pin-sharp accurate and ridiculously responsive to the point of showing up every little tic and quirk as I draw (hey, I'm getting old, my hands aren't as steady as they used to be what can I say!). Thankfully Procreate also does some cool line compensation stuff so you can get nice smooth sweeping ink or pencil strokes with the right brush settings. A definite bonus!

I've never had to calibrate the Apple Pencil once, and aside from some pressure setting tweaks when I first got it, I've never had to go into Procreate's settings menu to change anything else.

Colour reproduction: 

The standard iPad might not have the glorious retina displays of the higher end iPad Pro, but it's by no means a dull fish. Colours are rich and vibrant and Procreate's dropper tool makes getting just the right palette setup for your work an absolute breeze. You may need to do a fair amount of tweaking in external desk-based packages to perhaps prepare your work for print, but you'd be doing that with any other set-up anyway.

UI ease of use: 

The iPad has to be the most idiot-proof piece of kit on the planet. Press the home button, press the icon for the app you want and you're in. Likewise, Procreate's designers over at Savage Industries have really gone to great lengths to strip out a lot of the chaff from a traditional art package setup, relying instead on a fairly stripped out UI but a LOT of tweakable options and menus under the hood. There are tons of shortcut options for you to set up if you want to do things like quickly switch between draw and erase (gad, do I ever miss the day of using Wacom stuff and just turning the stylus around to rub things out) or selecting an eyedropper tool. There are some quirky things about Procreate I don't like (the fairly inaccurate way you fill large areas with colour drives me mad, as do the selection tools which always seem to fight with me for doing the sort of masking / selections I can do with ease in Clip Studio and its ilk) but I can't fault the standard tool sets or settings at all, and building / arranging your artwork is a doddle too.

Cost: 

Breaking the cost down of the particular setup I went for, without shopping around (Note that I only went for this in the first place because of substantial educational discounts only made possible because of where I work) here's what you can expect to pay (minus costs for screen protectors, cases etc):

iPad 9.7: £319
Apple Pencil: £89
Procreate: £9.99
Total: £417.99 (Inc VAT)

I sourced mine directly from Apple (with the educational discount) but various places sell the same kit, and Procreate is obtained directly from the app store.

Minuses:

In no particular order, these are the things that drive me slightly batty about Apple's entry-level portable digital art setup

• The Apple Pencil and its tiny, easily lost caps and converters. Stupid design decisions really, style over functionality

• The cost of Apple Pencil tips. Sure, they don't wear out quite as quickly as Wacom nibs but they're flipping expensive when you do need to replace them. 

• Battery life / recharge time. You don't have to recharge a sketch pad and pencil, you will need to recharge your new whizzy digital buddy quite often (I'm using mine a lot, and find the need to recharge the iPad twice a week which isn't too bad. You get around 24 hours of use out of it with constant use, maybe 10 hours if you're doing daft stuff with it like playing 3D games. 

• Pencil battery meter - There isn't one, but once you've paired it with your iPad and hunt around a bit, you can at least show a widget to show both the iPad's remaining battery and the Pencil's. Again though because there are no digital readouts or heck, even a status light on the pencil you have no visual clue on how much charge is left until you find that hidden menu. Also you've no idea how long it takes to fully charge (around an hour I found, from a standard USB3 charging source).

• Screen protection. The iPad 9.7 (and in fact all iPads and iPhones) use the same scratch resistant tempered glass screen. That said, I learned the hard way about not buying screen protection for my screen tablet (the XP-Pen) from day one so I'd advise you to think about this if you're going for the iPad. No glass is entirely scratch proof (think about how tough the windscreen on your car is, but how easily scratched it is by sand or grit if you're careless while cleaning it) and apply the same logic to your iPad. Pay particular attention to those Pencil tips too. Underneath the pencil tip is a copper conductor so if you wear the thing down to that and draw THAT across your screen, it'll be toast. 

• Security. Always, always with any expensive piece of kit consider some horrible little bumbag stealing it out of your bag. It may be worth considering single item insurance for it or at least getting it covered under your house insurance if that's possible too. Securing the device is pretty tough but lockable cases are available plus the device has pin, fingerprint and face recognition measures if you want to stop people getting into it once they've made off with it. 

Summary: 

After just over a week of putting this thing to the test, I'm already really impressed with it. Being able to work digitally just about anywhere with a device that feels so slick and easy to use is a real boon, and the improvements to workflow and ease of getting work completed really has made a huge difference to the way I like to draw and paint on the go.

There are still times when I prefer to work with traditional sketch stuff (pencils, pens and paper) but I'm really surprised how far things have come since I first started dabbling with digital art almost two decades ago.

I can see the advantage in something like this for students who want to have a low cost digital solution for work at University or College, using a package that has a massive worldwide user base and a hell of a lot of love and support from the professional art community as well as talented amateurs who are now swearing by Procreate.

As immensely satisfying and fun as this is to use, it comes at a cost that puts it firmly in the "fine if you've got the money" bracket (I had to save for this over the course of quite a few months btw, I just don't have that sort of money to chuck around but it was very much worth it).

I think the last piece of advice I'd give you is to nag, nag and nag again in stores until you can get a go on an iPad and Procreate. John Lewis stores over in the UK thoughtfully provide the demo version of Procreate on their iPads (but some stores need you to nag a salesperson before they'll let you have a go on the Pencil itself, far too easy to walk off with I guess!) If, like me, it just clicks with you straight away then all the better because you will get a heck of a lot of satisfaction out of using this setup, it's been nothing sort of revelatory for me.

Ahhh, now THIS is right up our street. If there's one thing both of us enjoy it's getting out the poster paints and creating great art...

This book's arrival couldn't be more timely, with our current obsession for drawing portraits...

Here's a neat and rather intriguing idea to enhance your days out with the aid of an innovative and fun activity pack...

It struck me as I was reading this to Charlotte that Louise Bourgeois is just one of those artists whose works surreptitiously work themselves into your subconscious, and whose influence you see in so many of the works of art you love.

We're doing a bit of a rain dance on the blog at the moment, hoping that 2016 will be the year of the activity book. We had a LOT of fun with activity and art books in 2015 and here's a fantastic one to kick off the new year in style.

Herve Tullet is the genius creator of hundreds of fantastic children's books and he's now come up with a genius way for kids to draw and design their own stories, even if they're not super-confident in their art skills.

"My Stencil Kit" comes with 6 huge die-cut boards containing 200 stencils, covering a wide range of subjects from alphabet characters to animals, from curls to geometric shapes and tons of other fantastic designs in between.

The stencil sheets come with a nice large format book (which would have been even better if it had been spiral bound but you can't have everything) full of interesting and intriguing 'scenery' to get your designs off to a roaring start.

We couldn't resist diving right in with our pencils and pens to put those interesting and intriguing stencil designs to good use. More artistic kids (and adults) will love adapting the designs to produce more fully fleshed-out works of art but even if you just love making patterns and nonsense drawings (who DOESN'T love drawing giraffes body-surfing on the roofs of cars) then you're going to find tons and tons to do in this interesting new art book.

Charlotte's favourite bit: Some cool background designs to really get your artwork off to a flying start.

Daddy's favourite bit: A great new activity book that enables kids of all abilities to design brilliant artwork and scenes to tell their own stories with. Absolutely absorbing and beautifully designed by a true genius of children's art.

(Kindly sent to us for review by Thames and Hudson)

"My Stencil Kit" 

Written and Illustrated by Herve Tullet

Published by Thames and Hudson

Publication Date: 29th February 2016

We love art activity books and we particularly love any book that can introduce us to new art styles or ways of drawing and colouring - and of course books that feature our favourite animals...!

Join us for another journey of artistic discovery with Laurence Anholt's brilliant "Anholt's Artists" series, this time with a master of colour - Henri Matisse...