I'm happy to announce that my latest book with Fremantle Press, Crunch! Kaboom! Mighty Mining Machines, launched on July 29!

Outside the town, in the heat and the dust, where the sky is bright blue and the earth is like rust,
is an iron ore mine that’s bigger than big with mighty machines that blast, drill and dig. 

With bright colours, enormous engines and lots of fun sounds,
Crunch! Kaboom! is perfect for kids who love to play with toy trucks and dozers.   

Crunch! Kaboom! was written by brother and sister duo Conor Mills and Clodagh Starr, with lots of fun rhyming text and sound effects for each machine. Conor used to work in mining and technology, and was keen that the book be fun but also an accurate non-fiction portrayal of the process.

Illustrating this book was quite a learning curve for me, with lots of machines and a different illustration style; but with such a fun onomatopaeic story I very much enjoyed turning each sound effect into a typographical part of each illustration itself. I have a love of typography stemming from my days studying graphic design, and although I made use of existing fonts for this project, it was great fun choosing, adapting and placing the text so that it became part of the overall illustration but still a recognisable part of the text itself. Rebecca Mills at Fremantle Press did a great job finalising the page design! 

Crunch! Kaboom! was officially launched at Melville Library, and is I hope already joining the libraries of all the little boys and girls obsessed with BIG machines and BIG landscapes! It's a great book to read aloud with BIG sounds, too!