I Love London

It's been a while since my last blog post, and that's because I've been busy working on a series of images for a book project I'm working on with a group of people from my illustration course. The idea was for each of us to choose a different area of London and then produce a short narrative across two spreads. The images should feature animal characters.

For my submission, I decided to focus on the West End of London, specifically Charing Cross train station, Trafalgar Square, Covent Garden market and Big Ben. My story follows the adventures of a small penguin visiting the city for the day...

-------------------------------------

I came to London on the train, when I arrived it began to rain...


I hurried towards Trafalgar Square, the lion statue gave me a scare!


To Covent Garden next, I popped. Fortunately, the rain had stopped.


Before I left, I saw Big Ben. I cannot wait to come to London again!!


Finally, here is a spot illustration I created for the index page...


I've really enjoyed drawing the buildings in these images, and coming up with different animal characters to populate the scenes. It's also been fun adding little details like the animal-based advertisements on the buses...

Sneak Preview

I don't often do this, but I'm currently working on a project, and while it is not yet finished, I'm really happy with how things are progressing, so wanted to share it with the world (well, anyone who bothers to read this blog...)!



I still have some details to add to the drawing before applying colour to the image, but the general composition is pretty much complete. I'm enjoying the challenge of incorporating my cartoon figures within a real world setting, and am also rediscovering a fascination with drawing cityscapes and architectural detailing.

It really is nice to be pleasantly surprised by my own work...

Happy Birthday Paul. From Paul.

Here's a card I did for a fellow Paul, from my Illustration course (...and the fact that there were two of us with the same first name caused no end of confusion for our tutor!). I wanted to try to create my own version of his street art inspired work, and added some textures and filters in Photoshop to give it a slightly edgier feel...

Happy Birthday Dad!

It's my Dad's 65th Birthday this weekend so, of course, I made him a card.

He recently thought it would be a good idea to buy a chainsaw to "trim" the hedges in the garden, which struck me as perhaps a tad excessive. Anyway, I began to think of what other household activities he could carry out using a chainsaw... like cutting his birthday cake for example...



Oh, and although it's not his birthday until Saturday, I have no worries about posting this before then, as I can almost guarantee he will not be looking at my blog. In fact, I'm sure he thinks a blog is a type of wooden shoe worn in Holland... Happy Birthday, Dad!

Illustration Friday: Frozen

So, this week's Illustration Friday topic is Frozen. I had a few ideas for this one, but kept coming back to the saying "When Hell freezes over", used to suggest that something is unlikely ever to happen. But what if Hell did freeze over? Could this be the ultimate impact of Climate Change...

Late Night Blogging: Where The Wild Things Are

Okay, so it's 3am and I really need to go to sleep, but I've spent the evening working on an illustration for a competition run by Little White Lies magazine, to design a cover based around the forthcoming Where The Wild Things Are film, which is adapted from the classic Maurice Sendak children's story. The selected designs will be printed in the magazine and featured on the website, plus there's a top secret prize for the best entry!

The only specifications are that you have to include the white title circle which is part of the magazine's layout, and you must also include the words "The Where The Wild Things Are issue" on the cover, but in any way you like.

As I often read the original book when I was a kid, and am really looking forward to seeing the film, I decided to put pen to paper and channel my inner Wild Thing. I decided upon the idea fairly quickly, and am pleased with the final result...

Illustration Friday: Germs

This week's Illustration Friday topic is Germs.

Initially, I wasn't really struck by the topic, but after a little while spent scribbling ideas down on a sheet of paper, I came up with this comic about two germ viruses.

I'm not really sure why I went with the vertical layout, it just seemed to work better in this instance than a traditional horizontal layout, or a square block...