Ten-Minute Blog Break - 16th April

It's an all-illustrator special on the Ten-Minute Blog Break today, which will hopefully also prevent it from becoming a twenty-five-minute blog break like last week!




First up is Paul Morton, who's been cropping up all over the place on Words & Pictures this last week. Although Paul's main Hot Frog Blog mixes product design work with his children's illustration, Paul also has a couple of nifty blogs that he's designed purely to support his children's apps. Wiz-bods with Beeble and Blink is a primary-coloured riot, with colouring pictures, spot the difference and other games, designed to engage children and get them to make that all-important download. The Crazy Monster Mixer site is even more bonkers, and includes some neat "spoilers" for hidden app features that also serve as an illustration of what the app is all about. It's an interesting approach to user engagement, and I'm looking forward to wearing my Grumblesnout mask to a SCBWI event in the near future.

Big Little Tales is a group blog set up by SCBWI illustrators (deep breath) Katriona Chapman, Heather Kilgour, Shana Nieberg-Suschitzky, Anne-Marie Perks, Trish Phillips and Loretta Schauer. It's one of our first SCBWI-BI Tumblr blogs, but it features very few animated GIFs and quite a lot of combined wisdom. I was rather taken by Loretta's recent post on Striking a Balance, which very honestly explores the tensions and benefits of balancing a rewarding day job with an illustration career.

Finally, Jane Heinrichs is inviting us to look at her paint palette! It's all in a good cause, as she waxes lyrical about how she loves London in the rain. Speaking as someone who finds the combination rather less than magical, I can only marvel at her ability to see the positive and poetic side of precipitation.

Nick.

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Nick Cross is a children's writer, blogger and all-round digital guru. In 2010 he was a winner of Undiscovered Voices with his zombie comedy Back from the Dead.
Read Nick's latest blog post The Book That's Just Like Mine, about something unpleasant he found in the local book shop.