Character Design Challenge: Alice In Wonderland

The Character Design Challenge Facebook page is a monthly creative competition to design a character illustraton based around a theme. This month's theme was Alice In Wonderland, and I drew my design for the Cheshire Cat. Smile!

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.'

So long Steve!

Pretty much ever since I started going there regularly since it moved to it's current location on Berwick Street in Soho, Steve Walsh has been working behind the counter at Gosh! Comics. And now he's left and moved to Ireland. It feels like the end of an era.

As well as working at the shop and having an encyclopedic knowledge for comics, Steve also played a large part in building a community around the shop, and in recent years ran the Capers superhero discussion group and, along with Oliver O'Keefe, the monthly comic book reading group Reads. When it became clear that Steve was leaving, Ollie had the idea of commissioning me to draw an illustration that we could give to Steve as a present featuring the various members of the group. I thought it would be a good idea to do it as a homage to a classic comic book cover. Ollie wanted to reference Crisis on Infinite Earths #1, but I suggested Uncanny X-men #138 instead.

Here's the finished piece:



And here's a photo of Steve after we gave it to him:



Good luck in Ireland Steve. And to quote the classic X-men cover-line: "Hope you survive the experience"!

Draw The Line

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected as President of the United States of America, I joined a group on Facebook called Draw The Line, set up with the aim of making comics and illustrations that provide positive actions that anyone can take when faced with a prevailing political landscape they do not like. These will be published on a website in early 2017, and in a print volume thereafter. A book about how to take action against inequality, unfairness, poverty, hate, and discrimination, no matter where or how it arises.

After the initial housekeeping and administration was complete, a list of universal, non-partisan actions was drawn up, – ranging from small and easy actions to those that take more effort, or require a little or a lot of money – distributed among the artists taking part and a deadline established to create a time frame for the project.

My action was:

If your car is only good for scrap or your phone is due for an upgrade, there are services which will take them off your hands and donate any proceeds to the charity of your choice.

After giving it a bit of thought, I decided to produce an illustration for my action, which hopefully gets across the message in a humorous way:



I'll try to update this post with more news about the project as it happens, so watch this space!

Sketchbook Project 2015: Winter

I've signed up to take part in the 2015 Sketchbook Project. I've taken part in previous years and it's a fun project to be part of. You sign up, pay $25, and get sent a 32 page 105 x 148mm sketchbook which you then have until 31 March 2015 to fill and send back. Once they receive your sketchbook it then goes into a permanent collection at the Brooklyn Art Library where it is viewable by the public, as well as taking part in a touring collection.

There are various themes you can choose from as a starting point for your sketchbook, and this year I decided on the theme "Winter".

And I've just achieved the first major obstacle with any sketchbook: completing my first page! And I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out. I found a quote by William Blake about Winter and drew an image to illustrate it: "In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy."



I used a Sky Blue Pentel colour brush pen to sketch out the image lightly, before inking it with a Zebra fude Brush pen, and then using the Pentel brush pen to colour the sky.

Look What THEY Drawed

It was my birthday last week and I got a some great illustrated cards featuring pictures of me!

Jo Blakely drew this fab picture of me, drawing my own birthday card...


Yuki Nishimura drew this awesome illustration of me, at work in the National Gallery...


And Katy Ellis drew this ace sketch of me, Chibi-style...


And an awesome pic from Anna Dowsland...

Happy Valentine's Day

Love is a smoke rais'd with the fume of sighs;
Being purg'd, a fire sparkling in lover's eyes;

Being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with loving tears.

What is it else? A madness most discreet,
A choking gall, and a preserving sweet.
Romeo And Juliet (1.1.188-92)

That's all well and good, but I think old Billy Shakespeare forgot the one Universal Truth about Love...

This drawing also featured on Illustration Rally's Valentine's day rally, which you can view here.

Two Fold Magazine (issue 2)

My Star Wars inspired illustration is featured in the second issue of TWOFOLD Magazine, an independent magazine "showcasing some of the world's best talent" (they're words, not mine!) in illustration and typography.

I also have a profile page up on their website. You can purchase a copy of issue 2 here.

Illustration course part 5

Day 3, and we were set a brief to create an illustration based on the short story The Snow Child, by Angela Carter. The story is about a Count and Countess who are travelling on horseback through the snow, when they discover a beautiful girl with skin as white as snow, hair as black as a crow's feathers, and lips as red as blood. The Count is instantly taken with the girl which makes the Countess very angry. She keeps trying to get rid of the girl, but the Count keeps stopping her. Finally, the girl goes to pick a rose for the Countess and pricks her finger and melts away to nothing.

Reading through the story, I was taken with the repeated references to red, black and white in the text, so wanted to use those three colours in my final piece. The dark undercurrent running through the story, combined with the very visual imagery, made me think of a lot of Japanese and Korean films. With these ideas in my head, I began looking through a whole host of magazines that our teacher had bought in for us to collect ideas from. I found this method of creating ideas very useful and something I will definitely incorporate in my future work.

Having collected a variety of images, I played around with some ideas and collages to create the basis for my finished piece. After talking with our teacher, she suggested I try to use the drawing style I'd developed the previous day to create the various elements I'd suggested. Below is a quick thumbnail sketch of the image I wanted to create, based on images I had collected. The idea was that the Countess would be large on the page, her hair sort of extending into the scenery to create sort of wintry, cloud-like shapes, while the Snow Child would be quite small in contrast, sitting naked among a large expanse of pure white snow. I wanted to have the horizon quite high on the page, and use red in the sky to symbolise the sinister elements within the story.

After a few unsuccessful attempts to draw from the photographs and images I had collected, the next day I decided to go back to drawing from life, using some of my classmates as the basis for my characters and then developing the images slightly to fit with my picture. This next drawing is based on a pose that I found in a magazine. I liked the rhythm of the lines in this picture...

I was then stuck with depicting the Countess, and eventually worked on making some reference sketches from observing another of my classmates, adding in my own flourishes, so that it wasn't a completely literal drawing of that person. I felt the sketch on the right in the image below fitted better with my drawing for the Snow Girl...

Taking these elements and pasting them up on my page, I made some copies so I could play around with the image a bit more without worrying about spoiling the final thing. For the Countess's hair, I wanted to retain some of the freedom and spontaneity of my initial thumbnail sketch, so I took my eyes off the page while drawing the circular patterns (this is where it helped to have a few copies to play around with).

For the red sky, I initially blocked in the colour using a marker pen, but something about it didn't feel right. Using a technique I had seen one of my classmates using, I decided to make up the colour from scraps cut from magazines, to add another texture to the page.

I was pleased with the final piece and feel it manages to capture the essence of some of my drawings from earlier in the week, as well as illustrating some of the themes and relationships from the story...