un-cute anagram baby card

Edit: Here’s a business proposition! If anyone wants a personalised anagram painted card like this one, I’ll hand paint it for you for UK£100. You can choose the hair/skin colour, gender, eyeglasses or no, and pick up to ten of your favourite anagrams of the name. Makes a nice baby gift or a gift for yourself.
Buy soon, while the offer lasts! 🙂

I think I’m getting a bit too carried away with this anagram website. My friends just had a new baby and I’d been bored at the idea of doing a card with a fluffy teddy on the front or something, and then I got into the anagram thing. Fortunately my friends are not the kind of people whom I think will mind their baby’s name being rearranged into ‘barren jubilee wino’ or ‘injure a Bible owner’. I thought ‘a wee junior nibbler’ was kind of cute and fitting, though.

I just wrote a review for Write Away of The Book Book by Sophie Benini Pietromarchi. It’s a lovely little guide to making artist books and scrapbooks. I’ve only recently heard of the publisher, Tara Publishing, who are based in India and putting out some interesting stuff. I reviewed another book they published, That’s How I See Things, which I didn’t entirely love, but got me excited thinking about the possibility of more illustrators coming out of this part of the world. About four years ago, I illustrated a book set in the lowlands of Nepal, and I didn’t have much reference material for the landscape. But I did find some amazing artwork online by local artists at the Janakpur Women’s Development Center, which I was able to tie into the book, and which continues to fascinate me. I wrote to the center once, asking if they did workshops or allowed visitors to stay and study with the painters for awhile, but I never heard back from them. It seemed like a cool focus to a trip to Nepal. I ran into their work again at a festival this summer, a vendor selling hand painted mirrors from the centre, but the work wasn’t half as good as the stuff I’d seen earlier. I wish I could see more of their paintings.