Sounds All Around
An educational book of international noises.
In 2013 I began looking into the sounds animals are said to make in different languages. What began as a few scrappy drawings on my blog eventually became a series of self-published zines and eventually a published book called Sounds All Around.
It won the Silver Award for Children’s Non-Fiction at the 2022 Nautilus Book Awards.
These are a few sample spreads from Sounds All Around, which is available from all good book retailers
The idea of onomatopoeic words changing around the world really interested me as they're all interpretations of the same sound and differences are shaped by the culture and language of each place. This is the project that really got me fired up about becoming an illustrator, and I started researching and drawing as many examples as I could find. The work was posted on tumblr.
These illustrations became quite popular so in October 2014 I self-published the first book "Soundimals: An Illustrated Guide to Animal Sounds in Other Languages". This was followed by a successful kickstarter campaign for the second book “How to Sneeze in Japanese” in 2015
In the final book Sounds All Around, all the research was compiled into a single collection with all the illustration work redone to look a bit more professional.
It was published by Andrews McMeel in 2020.
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