I always like to challenge myself and I'm having some downtime right now. Therefore when I saw that author Neil Gaiman had a contest to illustrate 12 short stories he'd written; "A Calender of Tales" I thought I'd give it a crack, so here's my contest entry for his April Tale.

I thought I'd post it here so you could see it

The story the balloon is based on can be found here //http://keepmoving.blackberry.com/desktop/en/us/ambassador/neil-gaiman.html#Apr

Hi all,

Some of you may know me already from other places around the web, but I thought it was about time I reared my ugly head on this wonderful forum.

My stage name is Phileas Flash (real name Rupert Appleyard) and I'm a British Balloon twister/modeller who now lives in Edmonton, Canaad. I specialise in making people and large scale sculptures out of balloons, but also do the line work as well. One of my goals is to infuse my work with humor as I normally accompany it to gigs and I love to see people laughing. Someone recently called me a "balloon savant" and I guess that's true as I seem to have an intuitive understanding of how to make stuff and am largely self taught. People are constantly asking me to tell them how I make the faces, but each one is different and quite frankly they kind of make themselves!

I have recently created a new Steampunk character "Phileas Flash - Time Twister" so if anyone has any questions about the future feel free to ask (I'll probably get the answer wrong as I'm a clown but you can still ask)

If you want to see more of my work feel free to check out my website; //http://www.flashballoons.com

Anywho, thanks for having me.

Flashy