S is for Standing Stones #atoz2025 #booksky

Standing stones, stepping stones, any stones will do. It’s the A to Z Challenge, and I’m continuing the illustration theme. I’ve also got at least 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.

Feel free to comment below!

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

The Standing Stones of the western downs

There are standing stones and stone circles in all sorts of places in the UK, but when I was doing the Talent Seekers, I realised that the ancient pathways and rolling hills of Salisbury Plain made an excellent, and very eerie, backdrop for Humphrey’s wanderings. Imagine it as a wilderness, with few scattered cottages. Most dwellings huddle around the bases of the castles of the area. And a horse pattern has been carved out of the hillside to reveal the chalk lines – we have plenty of white horses (and other drawings) on the hillsides of south central England!

Humphrey uses this line of standing stones to help him escape from something nameless and scary that is pursuing them. There’s a fair amount of paranormal in the Talent Seekers. I moved away from that in the series as time progressed — partly because the addition of garlic to George’s fuel made the vampires leave!

I had a lot of trouble with my illustrations involving night scenes in both Traveler in Black and White and Talent Seekers. I eventually decided that careful line shading was the best approach. I’m not normally the neatest of sketchers, but these were illustrations, so more care was needed. We have another example of this style tomorrow, for T.

More Illustrations

I did not find many other options for the letter S in my book illustrations. But we did have a couple of prompts that turned out well during my art group February Challenge. We’re now having a monthly Challenge, so maybe I’ll do something specifically geared to missing letters here!

The two prompts I liked for S were ‘sweet treats’– a simnel cake for Easter and ‘shadows’–from a photo of a racehorse called Issuing Authority. He’s retired now.

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 for all my sketching, 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.