Week 7 - Sam Usher

Hello! It's Week 7 and talented Sam Usher has just completed his week with the book. His mountains of roughs and colour tests are below and they all look fantastic. You'll notice he has a soft spot for toucans and birds, which he draws and paints to perfection. More of these can be found hiding on his twitter updates and on his website.

Sam spent most of his childhood reading, drawing and forgetting to do school work. He enjoys attending Literary festivals and school visits, especially when there's the chance to make a mess and annoy parents! His debut picture book Can You See Sassoon? was published in 2011, longlisted for the Greenaway Medal and shortlisted for the 'Read it Again!' award.

Sam currently lives in London and his spare time is spent cycling to museums and trespassing (but its all for the love of illustration!).

So the end of another week. Check out Sam's website and follow his trespassing antics on twitter. Now over to Christine Pym...

Week 6 - Alex T Smith

It's week 6 and the book has been in Coventry and staying with the ace Alex T Smith for a week. Alex has been tweeting and posting up pics of his progress and they look amazing. He's also the first to try a slightly different format to the previous illustrators which was very interesting to see (see pics below).

So a little info on the artist... Alex was born in 1985 and has drawn and written stories since he could hold a pencil. He graduated with a 1st Class Hons degree in Illustration in 2006 and having won second place in the Macmillan Prize for Children's Picture Book Illustration in his final year, Alex begin working on his first commission as he put his degree show up!

Since then Alex has gone on to work for a wide variety of clients not just in the publishing industry. As well as writing and illustrating his own picture books, many of which have won prizes and have been read on TV during the Bedtime Hour on the CBeebies channel.

Alex is also the creator of the CLAUDE fiction series for early readers. The first title, CLAUDE in the City was selected for the Richard and Judy Children's Book Club 2011 and was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Prize in 2012. The first three books in the series are now published in fourteen languages across the world and a further three books will be hitting the shelves from October 2012.

You can follow Alex on twitter, keep up to date with his work on his blog and see his portfolio here.

Week 7 see's Sam Usher receive the book back down in London again. Stay tuned for what he does next week.

Movember madness

Five of the Bear With Me gang decided to grow the extra mile and take part in Movember this year. We adopted the team name Team Doodletache, and with some careful face growing techniques we all managed to pull off the hairy caterpillar look. The team raised a jaw dropping £1325 when Movember came to its hairy end. A huge thanks to all the support and donations - but it doesn't end there, there's still time to donate so please visit the team page here for more info!

Team Doodletache and the Booksniffer