Shine

Shine is a love song between a parent and a child, celebrating the beauty and joy of everyday family life, through mess and chaos and daily routines. This is a story that seeks to find the beauty in ordinary things: the wonder of a lazy afternoon, the joy of being together. It is an attempt to put words to that spark of connection that we have with each other.

Ruth de Vos’s illustration work has grown out of a career as an internationally recognised textile artist. Ruth combines traditional (pencil, gouache, collage, screen-printing) and digital techniques to create fun scenes and worlds. Ruth’s passion lies in illustrating children’s books. As a mother of six young children, she is an avid and critical consumer of children’s literature, and she also has a ready source of drawing inspiration right in her home. Danny Parker has been an actor, a nurse, an undertaker, and a drama teacher. The youngest of six children, Danny grew up with a family competing for airtime at the dinner table. His memories of the stories told and the laughter ringing out as one sibling or another held court surely influenced his own desire to create narrative. Danny writes about joy and challenge, about creativity and curiosity, and always—not very far from the surface—he writes about love.