Is your art ever inspired by books? It's a great source of inspiration next time you get a bit of a creative block. I just love books and I believe this passion for the bound page has made me the artist that I am today...and even lead me to create my own book. It's been an exciting few months since my book Eerie Dearies: 26 Ways to Miss School was published in North America. I have been tracing it's steps as it turns up in favourite book shops in towns across the continent.  Recently it turned up on the blog for Brickbat Books, a super cool bookstore in Philadelphia : ) 

Seeing all these adorable book stores makes me super happy - because bookstores really are the coolest places on earth and have only become cooler as books have taken on a strange novelty factor: see the words in print, touch the texture of the paper, and to literally hold a story in your hands...I digress! Bookstores themselves have a great hushed quality to them. A cozy silence made up of closed books. I love picking up a book at a random page and diving in. I like to get this disembodied snapshot of a book's content and style. 

I have great memories of going to the local 2nd hand bookstore with my mom. She read so many books at that time. We treated that store almost like a library - selling them back their books a week or two later! I loved science fiction the most. I remember reading a great deal of John Wyndham books like this one about blind earthlings and plant monsters:

When I was a teenager I read fiction like a machine. I'd like to imagine that this changed the way I thought permanently, which in turn affects the way I create art. I was a highly impressionable teenager - at least in this way : ) I still think that this element of fiction inspires my work today. This piece is definately inspired by the sentiments of those old science fiction paperbacks: 

Image source [1]

Image source [2]