Now Wash Your Hands!

It’s a strange old time here at MCD towers. To be honest as I’ve been working from home for about 18 years life hasn’t really changed much! Except for having the entire family here all the time! Anyway before the lockdown began I did some free posters for schools to put up to promote hand washing for kids. (Based on the ridiculous gag that she obviously has more hands than anyone else!) They went pretty well with a few schools downloading them and printing them out. Then I got an email from Scholastic who asked me to take Doris the Doctorpus and see if I could make her into a book! Which I have just finished. It was a very quick turnaround as it is published 2nd July! I will be giving a donation to NHS charities and hopefully ongoing it will raise more funds from royalties.

RHINOCORN RON IS ON THE LOOSE!

Also last Thursday my new kids book RHINOCORN RULES! came out! I had my first reading at Book Nook Hove on Saturday wearing my awesome new RHINOCORN hoodie!

LOLLIES 2020

Spent most of January with Flu so it was lovely to go to Bloomsbury Ballroom last thursday for the LOLLIES 2020. They are an award for the funniest book of the year and SPYDER was shortlisted! obviously it didn’t win but I had a lovely night, sort of hanging out with picture book royalty like Julia Donaldson (and her husband Malcolm, who incidentally came off stage after playing a king to tend to a woman who had fainted just behind us! Bit of an allrounder is Malcolm) Liz Pichon and Michael Rosen.

Festive Knitwear!

Who would have thought, with my horrendous fashion sense that I would become a knitwear guru, but as you can see by my latest designs for London transport Museum and Imperial war Museum, that’s what i’ve become. You’ll certainly get noticed in these beauties!

New Silverstick stuff!

Just done a load of new designs for www.silverstick.co.uk

RHINOCORN RULES!

Kids book wise, It’s been a busy time of late and I’ve just finished artwork for my next book ‘Rhinocorn Rules!’ about a Rhinoceros who feels different to other Rhinos. It’s published by Egmont in Feb 2020! I’ve got 3 more books lined up too so watch this space!

SUPERBAT chosen as a BOOKBUZZ book

As part of Bookbuzz 2019/20, Matt Carr talks about his book Superbat. While two of our Bookbuzz students also tell us about why they love the book.

Superbat has been chosen by Booktrust as one of their BOOKBUZZ books. You can find out more about it here.

MOON T shirt

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing I designed this Warhol inspired t shirt.

All Aboard at the London Transport Museum

I’ve just done a range of kids clothes for London Transport Museum! I love busses and I love animals! You can buy em here!

LOLLIES!

Amazingly SPYDER has been shortlisted for the LOLLIES! which is the award for the funniest books of the year! As you can imagine i’m well chuffed. Hopefully it will prove to my kids that my jokes ARE funny and I’m not just that sad idiot who works out of the back of the kitchen! You can vote for SPYDER here

INVASION!

Just designed / illustrated this book about D-Day. It’s out now! Click here to get hold of it!

Rocketmole launches!

It’s been a few months since my last post because it’s been MEGA busy. But some nice news is that Rocketmole has launched at last! My mum likes it and she’s 87 so that is a good sign. Although she always say she likes everything I do (i think she’s just saying it) so it’s probably better to go into a book shop and make your own mind up. It’s not War and Peace so you can get through it in about 5 minutes.

Rocketmole!

Only a couple of months until my new kids book Rocketmole! is launched! You can pre-order it here! https://www.waterstones.com/book/rocketmole/matt-carr/matt-carr/9781407187860

Biographic goes from strength to strength

The Biographic series that I do has now got 20 titles and is translated into loads of languages. The latest two are Tesla and Einstein which were quite tricky as i have less understanding of science than my cat does.

British Legion

This job was one of the most laborious I’ve ever done. Luckily I could listen to about a million hours of radio including about 5 hours of the wonderful June Whitfield playing Miss Marple!

Oxfordshire Book Awards

Had a lovely day at the Oxfordshire Book Awards where SUPERBAT was highly commended in the picture book category. They even made a SUPERBAT cake!

SUPERBAT on MILKSHAKE!

In 2007 I designed the Milkshake! logo for Channel 5. (They only changed it this year.) So it was great when they said they were going to read SUPERBAT across their Social Media channels on Halloween. You can still watch it here!

Life & Cheltenham & Henley festivals

It’s been a while but i’ve been very busy plus having an extension done on our tiny house (13ft wide!) to make it slightly less tiny (same width bit longer) so i’ve been living and working in building site with no water ! just me and the cats. the rest of the family have sensibly moved out. I think the cats want to move out as well but i’m paying them to stay. It’s about 3 quarters finished and everyone has disappeared, which is great. Anyway as a way off getting out of whats left of my house i went to do festivals at Cheltenham (where i’m the kids festival illustrator this year) and then Henley. I had a blast! I decided to turn up the bonkers and introduce a sing a long theme tune and various wigs to my event thing. I also came on to a hollywood style trailer theme and ran about and did roly polys on the stage. I think i over did it, anyway I think it went ok - i think they thought i was an idiot. i had over 500 kids in on the friday schools event and the family event was sold out to. I may need to see a chiropractor as i landed heavily on my radio mic during one of my action stunt rolls! After Cheltenham i had to rush in the pouring rain to Henley for their festival. i got there only to discover i’d been sitting in a falafel which had fallen out of my sandwich! That’s show biz.

Greenwich Book Festival

Last weekend I went back to my old manor to the Greenwich Book Festival(well I hail from Woolwich, the rough side of town). I was a bit nervous because somehow I was billed as doing both Superbat and Spyder in one session! But it went really well and i had a great time! I even got on the official poster! Ok i was last and I think i only got on the because I've got a short name but hey!

Hey, I went to HAY!

As usual my blog is about two weeks out of date but last week i went to the high brow literature festival at Hay on Wye. I was the lowest brow thing there but it was really good fun!