O is for Oystercatcher #atoz2025 #booksky

Regular readers will know I often talk birds, and this time it’s an oystercatcher. It’s the A to Z Challenge, and I’m continuing the illustration theme. I’ve also got one of my sketches from my art group for you.

My ten Princelings books and the two for younger readers, Messenger Misadventures and Cavies of Flexford Common all have illustrations. Most are chapter headings. Cavies is designed for younger readers (c 7 yrs old, Key Stage 1 in UK educational parlance). That has illustrations throughout.

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The A to Z is a blog hop, so do go to other people who are doing it. You can find the links here.

Willoughby imitates an Oystercatcher

Willoughby makes his living as a narrator, or travelling story-teller. He first turns up in book 5, The Talent Seekers, but then I started wondering about him, until he got his own book as number seven in the series. The oystercatcher features in the story he narrates, very garbled, in his first ever Narrathon, but he later gives it properly, demonstrating his talent in the highest places.

Willoughby’s tale is called ‘Diamond Souls’, a legend featuring some supposedly well-known folk characters who end up dying and their souls go to heaven to make two new stars. The oystercatcher comes peeping its mournful cry across the land and tells the people to ‘look up’ and see them. Well, roughly, in a nutshell. Book 7 is a fairly good book to dive into if you’ve not read any, since Willoughby is as lost as the reader at the start. He’s a fun character who became a fixture in the last two books.

I’ve always loved oystercatchers. Apart from being extremely handsome birds with distinctive calls, they have very clever ways of levering up shellfish off rocks at the seaside. Where I used to live they were harbingers of spring as they ‘peeped’ their way up the river valley where I lived, to get to their spring nesting grounds.

Come to think of it, I should draw some more.

More Illustrations

I did find few other possibilities for the letter O.

There’s an Owl in Cavies of Flexford Common that flies out of a barn at Roscoe and Neville and their friends, making them think it’s a monster.

In Chronicles of Marsh Fred gets an Orrery for a present. I’ve always loved the idea of an orrery, which is a mechanical representation of the solar system, but with moving parts like a clock, so that the planets go round the sun at the right rate relative to each other. I couldn’t quite get the mechanics right in my head, though. So I drew it in its box…

The last one is my response to the prompt ‘Old’ as part of my art group’s February challenge. This is my mother’s tea set when she was first a nurse, in quarters at the Middlesex Hospital in London in the 1930s. She was not allowed visitors in her room unless she had a proper tea set to serve them with! It is ‘Paragon’ Fine bone china, number 218 or 9 (it’s a squiggle), with a pattern of violets on the sides. There are two plates and saucers, but only one cup, plus the milk jug, sugar bowl and teapot in the sketch.

She was still at the Middlesex at the start of the war, and if you saw the film ‘Atonement’, she would have been coping with the aftermath of Dunkirk just as they did in that. It gave me quite a shock when I saw the film the first time. I wish she’d told us more of her anecdotes. Father got to tell all his stories, while Mum just smiled indulgently.

I start by using pencil (Derwent Cassell HB or 2B) on paper. Then I use an inkpen over to create the line drawing (I have a set of three Pilot Drawing pens, nos 01, 03, and 05). After that, I usually erase the pencil. By book 9 I was doing all my illustrations on the iPad, and I could take a JPEG copy of a hand-drawn castle, and amend it, or change it about a bit, rather than start again. At present I’m using the iPad from scratch, using the Tayasui Sketches app with my iPen.

I’m Jemima Pett, author, blogger, illustrator and guinea pig wrangler. My interests are in fantasy, environment, science (inc. fiction) and thrillers, to name a few things. This is my nth AtoZ Challenge. Mostly I talk about books. This time I’m talking about something I do without much thinking about… my illustrations.