Last night I had fun playing around in my sketchbook, imagining if artists from northern India saw a Mortal Engines traction city for the first time, and how they might describe it.



Influenced heavily by Mithila art and Madhubani paintings, an alternative film poster, featuring London, or possibly Juggernathpur:

I'm really looking forward to seeing Korean musician and actor Jihae play Anna Fang in the upcoming Mortal Engines film! She's incredibly striking, I had to draw her:



Universal Pictures are posting a bunch of really interesting looking featurettes on YouTube. Here are some clips of Anna Fang, with screenplay co-writer, producer and second unit director Peter Jackson talking about Philip Reeve's character:



And I love these peeks at the craftspeople behind the film; I'm quite envious, it would be fascinating to work on teams like these ones. Here's a featurette on the work of Principle Design Coordinator Naomi Campbell, Lead Pattern Drafter and Cutter Anna Deacon, and Costume Machinist Melissa Mundi:



Propmakers Terence Turner, Robert Nairn and Dave Irons:



Model maker Alex Falkner:



The painters: Textile Artist Assistant Hannah Webster:
"I really like to draw trees, so this is perfect."



Concept artist Nick Keller:



Key Breakdown Artist Hamish Brown and Costume Breakdown Artist Sonia Murray:



Just a reminder, if you want to catch up with the books, here they are:
* the four Mortal Engines books
* the Anna Fang book (Night Flights, three short stories illustrated by Ian McQue)
* the three Fever Crumb prequels
* The Illustrated World of Mortal Engines, brand-new and co-written by Philip Reeve and Jeremy Levett, illustrated by David Wyatt, Ian McQue, Philip Varbanov, Rob Turpin, Maxim Plasse, Adel Fakhrie and Amir Zand

If you're on Twitter, maybe you'll be aware of the regular @StudioTeaBreak drawing challenges, including #ShapeChallenge, where Alison Diamond and I post shapes which people then turn into pictures. The producers of the BBC's Blue Peter loved that idea, and while my Legend of Kevin co-author Philip Reeve and I were in Media City for Newsround, the Blue Peter gang got us to do some drawing for them!



The video shows how Kevin is constructed out of a simple half circle, and then quickly moves on to the team daring Philip and me to make pictures from other shapes.



And then we turned the objects and characters we'd made out of the shapes into a story!



It's a bit madcap, but the Blue Peter team have written up a basic synopsis of it:



The website comments are open if anyone else wants to take part. You can make it a game for yourself or to play with a friend, making up drawings from shapes. Then use those shapes in a story!

Here we are with Blue Peter editor Helen Varley and her camera crew. Oh, and you can learn how to draw Kevin step-by-step on my website!

These two weeks, Liverpool readers have been abuzz with the Liverpool Readathon!! I'm a patron of Read For Good, a charity that runs sponsored Readathons in schools to get books and storytellers to kids in hospital. The whole idea of kids helping kids really motivates kids to read, which is great! And it's reading for pleasure, so they can read whatever they like, which is the best way to create readers for life.



Here's our team outside gorgeous Liverpool Central Library: me, Annie Smith from Read For Good, and Jenny Holder from Liverpool Learning Partnership, whose partnership made the whole thing possible! And it's not over! This FRIDAY at 2pm, people across Liverpool are going to Drop Everything And Read!



Liverpool pride themselves on being a City of Readers, and there's nothing more powerful for kids to see than grownups reading, too.



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