Flimsy the Kitten

The uber-talented Rachael Smith recently reached 1000 posts on her excellent Flimsy the Kitten blog and to celebrate she's featuring a series of guest-posts by other illustrators and fans. And starting the whole thing off is ME!

I decided to go with a movie-theme. Can you name these films? I'm posting my images below, but you should definitely head over to Rachael's blog to check out more of her Flimsy comics. They're ace!

Attack The Blog: Life imitating art...?

Way back in January, I posted on this blog about all the layout changes being implemented on Facebook, and included a self-portrait inspired by Shephard Fairey's "Hope" poster featuring Barack Obama.

I liked this image and, after changing the text at the bottom, I used it on the cover of a 12-page booklet I designed to send out to publishers and magazines in order to promote my illustration work...



Yesterday I was attending a wedding and was wearing a suit with a red tie, and it suddenly seemed as though my real life was imitating my drawing...

Attack The Blog: Congratulations Joe & Yu-Hsuan

Yesterday my friends Joe and Yu-Hsuan got married in Blackheath. I made them a card, but unfortunately the weather didn't turn out to be as nice as in my picture... Still it was a good day!

Attack The Blog: Happy Birthday Katie!

Last week it was my friend Katie's birthday. She plays a mean game of Scrabble, so I made this drawing for her...

Attack The Blog: Bridge Over The River Thames

My friend Loraine commissioned me to draw a picture as a engagement present for her sister and her husband-to-be. She already had an idea in mind, which featured them fishing for cupcakes off of the Albert Bridge. As you do.

I wasn't familiar with the Albert Bridge, but one quick google-search later, I found out it was a combination cable-stayed / suspension / beam bridge connecting Chelsea and Battersea. Isn't technology marvelous! It's also quite a tricky bridge to draw with all those cables and beams, but after a day spent scribbling, I think I managed to capture it quite well.

Attack The Blog: Happy Birth Day William!

Yikes! It's been a while since I last updated my blog, but I've finally managed to find some time to sit down and post some new work. The next couple of posts will feature some of the things that I've been working on in my absence, and a couple of other drawings that I couldn't upload before. There are still one or two things that I can't talk about just yet, but hopefully I'll be able to post about them very soon...

So off we go then!

Towards the end of March, my friend Laura gave birth to a baby boy called William – which is her dad's name, not anything to do with the Royal Wedding in case you were wondering!

I made her a card to celebrate featuring William going for a ride on the back of Laura's dog Pippa (partly because I sometimes think it would be quite fun to be able to ride around on a dog, like a horse...).



Last week I went over to visit Laura, which was my first time to see the baby. And I realised that he had blue eyes, not brown eyes as I had drawn them on the card. So for this post I've corrected that in Photoshop! Isn't technology marvelous...?!?

Faster than a speeding lawsuit...

Website Updated!

I've been busy with a few different projects lately, so haven't posted on here for the past week. Normal service will be resumed shorltly, but in the meantime, I've just finished updating my website over at paulshinndraws.com. Please take a few minutes to have a look...

Thanks!

Happy Birthday Roger Hargreaves!

Roger Hargreaves is best known as the creator of the Mr. Men. He sadly passed away in September 1988, but today would have been his 76th birthday, and to celebrate his work, the search engine Google today featured 16 different Mr. Men-themed illustrations on their home page.

I loved the Mr. Men books as a child – my personal favourites were Mr. Tickle and Mr. Bump – and there's still something very endearing about the characters that Hargreaves created, and I wanted to draw something myself to mark the occasion.

So here's my own Mr. Men drawing, a homage to Jack Kirby's cover to Fantastic Four #1...

Happy Star Wars Day!

May the Fourth be with you!