Primrose is a princess who just wants to have fun but the King tells her off for climbing trees and the Queen shrieks when she catches her jumping on the bed with Percy the pug. She isn’t allowed to dig in the garden or cook cakes in the kitchen, her life is boring, boring, boring! That is until Grandmama shows up by Royal Decree to find Primrose splashing in muddy puddles. We discover that at the heart of every good Grannie is someone who knows how to have fun too.

Alex wrote the story Primrose quite easily – at first she was called Polly and she started life as a short story but when she was adapted to be turned into a picture book, what should she look like? Should she be hand drawn and watercolour, or painted with no lines? Should she have curly blond hair or straight ginger hair? Perhaps she’s better with a drawn line and digital colour but she has to be just right, to carry her through her whole book.

Primrose Character Designs

What about Grandmama, how should she look? Maybe not a black dress, that would be too much like Queen Victoria, and she shouldn’t be too stearn looking, she needs to look lively and fun like a real Grandma.

Grandmama character designs

After the characters were just right Alex spent the next few months completing the artwork for this charming tale, adding to his cast of characters the rest of the royal household, and a little subplot of Percy the pug falling for Grannie’s cat. It’s pink and feisty and a lot of fun, so to all of the great Grandmas out there, this is a must have book for your little Princesses, available in hardback and paperback published by Scholastic Children’s Books and also publishing as an ebook at the same time narrated by Lucy Porter through Me Books. You can buy the book from Amazon, or from all good local bookshops.