Irish illustrator and artist Chris Judge has thrown his hand to the world of children’s books, and as it turns out it’s quite the dab hand. His debut picture book has been nominated for Irish Children’s Book of the Year in the Irish Book Awards. (You can vote for Chris here.)
The Lonely Beast isn’t a stand alone feature, Chris has launched a website where you can ‘Meet the Beast’, download desktop artwork, print games and activities and the kids can even submit their own drawings of the beast which are all displayed on the site. It’s a beautiful story for kids and the activities on the website get the thumbs up for extra effort. MEG likes this.
We asked Chris to tell us a little bit more about his creation; “The Beast is a character that I’ve been drawing in one form or another since I was a young lad. I guess he is a distilled version of all my favourite characters growing up like Chewbacca, Bigfoot, Werewolves and of course the Yeti in Tintin in Tibet which is probably my favourite childrens’s book. I am constantly trying to come up with new characters in sketchbooks and projects and when I decided I wanted to make a picture book about one of them I found I was constantly drawn back to him. I think it was because he always seemed so tragic that there was definitely a story worth exploring”.
Here’s the trailer for the book:
Keep an eye out for Chris’s second picture book ‘The Great Explorer’ out in February 2012.
