Word On The Street #2

Word On The Street is a weekly column in Time Out where readers Tweet the most ridiculous things they've overheard in London during the week (#wordonthestreet @timeoutlondon) and the best ones get printed in the magazine.

For a long time now, I've been meaning to pick one quote each week to illustrate as a semi-regular personal project, and like a lot of the ideas in my head, I haven't got around to putting pen to paper...until now!

This week's Word On The Street:

'This beer has gone straight to my eyebrows.'

Word On The Street #1

Word On The Street is a weekly column in Time Out where readers Tweet the most ridiculous things they've overheard in London during the week (#wordonthestreet @timeoutlondon) and the best ones get printed in the magazine.

For a long time now, I've been meaning to pick one quote each week to illustrate as a semi-regular personal project, and putting together some illustration samples that I could submit to Time Out in the hope of getting some work from them. And like a lot of the ideas in my head, I haven't got around to putting pen to paper...until now!

This week's Word On The Street:

'I've eaten peacock. It's just a chicken that wears Dolce & Gabana.'

Comics In The Kitchen exhibition

Way back in June, I took part in the "Comics In The Kitchen" exhibiton at Orbital Comics, London, alongside a bunch of other food-loving cartoonists and illustrators creating illustrated recipes.

I decided to revisit two characters from a recipe comic that I created last year, featured in the Comics Cookbook, published by Centrala, but come up with a new recipe to illustrate. After giving it some thought, I decided to do a cake recipe, because I enjoy baking cakes. I looked up some recipes online and decided to go with a chocolate and beetroot cake, which I did try baking before deciding if it was the right recipe to use for my comic.

The exhibition was great and there was a really strong mixture of different styles and recipes. Obviously, it's long since been taken down, but here's my piece from the show [click to enlarge]...

Blogs of Future Past (Part 2: Comics)

So continuing my catch-up of 2015 in the early days of 2016, here's a couple of comics projects I was part of last year which I hadn't got around to mentioning properly...

(Click on the images below to enlarge)

I contributed a page to A Bit Of Undigested Potato, Keara Stewart's anthology about bad dreams and nightmares, which is available to purchase from her online store.


I was also asked to contribute to Richy K. Chandler's second Tempo Lush anthology: Tempo Lush Tales of the Tanoox, the follow-up to Tempo Lush Tales which was released in 2014 and which I provided artwork to a 12-page story that Richy wrote. This time I was contributing to a collaborative comic with a dozen artists all illustrating a page of a comic based around the lyrics to a song Richy wrote called Bugleberry Tree.

Richy sent me the lyrics for the whole song and told me which verse he wanted me to illustrate, but that was it really in terms of direction. Everything else was up to me in terms of how I chose to interpret those lyrics and even how the main character should look. I didn't see any of my fellow creators' work until the book was all put together and it was fun to read through it all together. Tempo Lush Tales of the Tanoox also features a number of other stories and is available to buy from Richy's online store.

And I drew a one page comic for Frame By Frame, a free Film and Television zine put together by Steve Walsh and Shaun Richens from Gosh! Comics. I don't think there are any copies still available, but I drew a comic about Spoilers!


I'm hoping to have a lot more comics projects happening in 2016, so watch this space!

Life Drawing

I've started going (fairly regularly) to a Life Drawing class above the Royal Inn In The Park pub on Victoria Park. I've been meaning to get back into Life Drawing for a while, so it's good to finally be doing it on a regular basis.

5 minute poses...


15 minute pose...


30 minute pose...


30 minute pose...

The House Of Illustration's Christmas Illustrators' Fair

Earlier this year, I took part in the House Of Illustration's inaugural Illustrators' Fair. And they are currently running a Christmas Illustrators' Fair shop alongside the House of Illustration's shop selling a range of prints, cards and other festive gifts produced by a wide range of contemporary illustrators.



They're currently stocking copies of both my "March Of The Penguins" comic and my latest comic, "Look What I Drawed...", alongside my new xmas card design...



The Illustrators' Fair will be open during the House Of Illustration's usual opening hours: 10am–6pm Tuesday–Sunday (Please note, they're closed on Mondays!). They also currently have two exhibitions on: "Paula Rego/Honoré Daumier: Scandal, Gossip and Other Stories" and "Paddington: Illustrated and Animated". The House Of Illustration is next to Central Saint Martins' building close to Kings Cross station: 2 Granary Square, King's Cross London N1C 4BH

London Sketchbook Scavenger Hunt #BigDraw

Last night I joined a group of people taking part in the London Sketchbook Scavenger Hunt, a Big Draw event organised by Jenny and June from the StoryHands Illustration collective.

The theme for this year's Big Draw is "It's Our World" and Jenny and June interpreted this theme as a call to notice and appreciate what we see around us in the city, and in particular the city of London. Once everyone had arrived and been issued with their unique hand-made and responsibly sourced sketchbook (made from donated materials at the Children's Scrap Project charity) we set off...



The walk took in various locations around the city, some of which were familiar and others that I hadn't been to before. At each location we were given a list of things to draw, both from observation and imagination and a set amount of time in which to draw as many of the items as we could (usually between 10–15 minutes).


Image courtesy of StoryHands Collective

Jenny and June were great hosts and provided a bit of background information about the area at each stop before assigning us our drawing challenges. In keeping with the unknown nature of the evening, I'm not going to specifically mention where we went, and have removed the names from my photos below...











The evening was a lot of fun, and I found it good to only have a limited time to draw at each location, as it made me more instinctive with my drawing, working quickly to capture the essence of what I was seeing. And that quick drawing was taken to the extreme at the end of the night, after everyone had added up their scores for the evening, there was a Draw Off where we had to draw as many identifiable London Landmarks as we could in 60 Seconds...



I even ended up with a prize at the end!



Jenny and June will be running the event again on the 1 November and there's a Facebook Event page here: http://www.facebook.com/events/1487342084846994/. I'd definitely recommend it!

Come back soon Ayano and Ikuno!

My friends Ayano and Ikuno are both moving back to Japan at the end of this week, and I drew them each a card...




And because they have been in London together and are leaving at the same time, I also made it so the cards join together to make a single image...



Hope I'll see you both again soon, either in Japan or London! :)

Congratulations Celine and Henry

My friends Celine and Henry got married recently in Macau and I wanted to send them something special, so I drew a picture for them. In November they travelled over to London for a few days to take some pre-wedding photos. Although the final photos looked really nice, the weather at that time wasn't perhaps the best...

The Sketchbook Project – London

I've previously posted about my The Sketchbook Project 2012 sketchbook, which I completed in January of this year and sent off to the Brooklyn Art Library to be part of their permanent collection. Since then, the sketchbooks have been on tour around the US and are now making a one week stop-off in the UK, and will be available to view at Canada Water Library in London from 12–19 October. The opening times to view the sketchbooks are as follows:

Friday: 4pm-8pm Saturday: 11am-5pm Sunday: CLOSED Monday-Friday: 4pm-8pm

I'm hoping to make it along tomorrow to have a look.

For those of you that missed my previous posts about my sketchbook, I selected the theme Heroes & Villains, and my book – entitled SUPERhuman – depicts various fantastical comic book heroes and villains carrying out mundane everyday tasks. It's an idea that I have plans to continue working on, and as part of that, and to celebrate the start of the London stopover, I've drawn a new image featuring Mr Fantastic from The Fantastic Four putting his mental abilities to the test with a jumbo puzzle book...



If you're Facebook enclined, you can view the event page for The Sketchbook Project - London here: http://www.facebook.com/events/275205519265968/

Happy Birthday Diana!

My friend Diana was visiting London for a few days last week, and it was also her birthday the day before. Here's the birthday card I made for her. Thankfully it didn't actually rain while she was here, and it was nice and sunny for most of the time. London weather is SOOOO unpredictable!

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...

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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...