Blue Boy

In a small sleepy town, right next to the sea
A very peculiar boy grew.
He was not yellow bellied, he never saw red;
Never green with envy, altogether well-bred.
But instead he was often quite blue.

Blue Boy is a story in the form of a poem about a small boy with an incredible sensitivity and proneness to being moved by things that leave other people indifferent. He feels rather lonely in his quirkiness and embarrassed by his frequent melancholic moods, but he doesn’t know that there is someone out there for whom his tears are by no means a symbol of weakness…

Inspired by the Norfolk landscape and Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense, Blue Boy is a 937-word story in a 32-page A4 size picture book with 16 illustrations on two page spreads. I wrote the text, created the artwork, and designed the cover and layout of the book.

A small bespoke first-run edition (unpublished) of the first version of the book was presented as part of The Makers exhibition at the William Morris Gallery in London in 2013 and was for sale at the gallery shop.