Thursday 11 August 2011

I'm the Best

Can Dog's friends teach him to be less of a show-off? Find out in this brilliantly original picture book from Lucy Cousins, creator of Maisy.



Dog loves his friends. He thinks they’re brilliant. But he also thinks that he’s the best, and he just won’t stop telling them! So what happens when his friends decide to teach him a lesson, by showing him all the things they are best at?



Lucy on creating I’m The Best:



“I really enjoyed working on I’m the Best because it was with inks rather than paints, so it felt new. The line is a pencil drawn line rather than a brush stroke. So I'm starting to feel that I like experimenting to find something different and a little bit fresh. With I'm the Best, I wanted it to be very, very bold, almost like my sketchbooks. Often when I'm doing my sketches for ideas they have a real vitality to them, and when I've redone that page seven times and had a go at a few coloured paintings it's quite hard to keep that freshness."



Lucy is also the author of another Picture Book Picnic title, Yummy: My Favourite Nursery Stories. In Yummy Lucy retells her favourite nursery stories in spare bold language and brilliant vibrant pictures. She gives their famous characters new life and imbues their great adventures with her own very modern magic. These stories are treasures of the imagination. They were first told long ago and they will be told again and again, far into the future. They never fail to stir and excite. Retold in this book: Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, The Enormous Turnip, Henny Penny, Goldilocks and The Three Bears, The Little Red Hen, The Three Little Pigs and The Musicians of Bremen.



Maisy the mouse is perhaps Lucy’s best known character and we have a gorgeous video with Lucy talking about how she brings Maisy to life - there's a lot of drawing too, we hope you enjoy it.