A little something for Miss Lauren Clarke...

My friend Lauren celebrated her birthday at the end of January and to mark the occasion, I made her a sock monkey (who she has named Luis), and a little case for her Blackberry.

House of Illustration Competition...

The current competition with the House of Illustration is to illustrate 3 stories and the book jacket for the book, The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter for the Folio Society. Here are my entries...

The Bloody Chamber

The Company of Wolves

Puss in Boots

Book Binding idea

Little Rubber Ducky...

My friend Bryony loves rubber ducks so for her 22nd birthday I made her a little felt duck badge...quack!

Pitt's Birthday Card...

Another year older...

This month sees the birthday of Miss Natasha Louise Pitt a dear friend from back home. She is the grand old age of 22 and I made her a sock dog as a present, finished off with a little warm red scarf! Love you lots Pitt, many happy returns.

Guinness World Records...

Phew it's finally Friday! It has been a very hectic week and there have been A LOT of late nights to try and get stuff done but, I can finally take a mini breath! I've just handed in a short brief which was to produce 4 illustrations for Guinness World Records. They have 4 categories in which their records fall under; size, extraordinary, dedication and speed. Our project was to create illustrations to represent each of the categories. Here are my solutions...

Christmas is just around the corner...well kind of...

It seems that many of you have finally seen the Christmas Coca Cola advert which means that Christmas is just around the corner (even though yes I know it is only mid November!) But I was thinking about tree decorations the other day and fancied a go at making one out of my good old friend, felt. I made a little robin, complete with wool scarf and sparkly red breast.

The Little Brown Bear...

The felt's been out again!

Happy Birthday Elly...

My housemate Elly turned the grand old age of 20 this June and as she loves animals I made this cheeky little zebra postcard for her.

Dracula is no more...

Well I have just finished and handed in my Book Illustrations Project. I used my photographs and tried out a number of book spreads with different scales and sizes of picture. Here are the final beauties!

Dracula ah ah ah...

Ok so the current brief I'm working on is to produce 5 illustrations based on my favourite novel. Well, for starters I love reading so it was quite hard to choose which book to do. I decided to pick Dracula by Bram Stoker, a classic and something that I knew would be challenging to illustrate! I borrowed my housemates copy and whizzed through all 421 pages of it in two days phew! I wanted to do something completely different to my normal style so started playing around with silhouettes. Having them stuck down made the scenes too flat and lifeless. I decided to take a different approach and went into our little pokey cupboard for photographing and set about hanging the pieces I had cut out up.

I suspended the silhouettes from a pole with invisible thread (brilliant stuff) and then shone an OHP onto them. Straight away the illustrations were brought to life and I was able to play around with the arrangements and more excitingly, the shadows ooooo spooky! I spent 3 whole days setting up and taking photographs and am so so proud of the outcomes. Here are some of my favourite images so far. Enjoy! But watch your neck!

Logotastic...

I've just finished a project, creating four logos for four different companies. I'm pretty pleased with my final designs above and had a lot of fun designing them. I'm especially proud of my chicken...cheeky chappy!

Fellside Farmshop - A local shop selling as you can imagine farm produce like meat and veg.

The Open House Project - A children's charity who provide shelter and support for abused children between the ages of 0-16 yrs.

Carlisle Allotment Society - What it says on the tin!

Sealeys - A tools company who produce tools at tradesman quality (I hand cut my final design out of shiny card hence why the image above looks a bit strange!)

Guardian Illustrations - The Degrees of Separation...

I have literally just finished and handed in our second brief of this year. Phew! On the scale of stressful I was on the verge of tearing my hair out but it's all good! I've got some soothing music on and am updating this beast.

The idea behind the project was the concept of "The Degrees of Separation." This is best described by the game in which a person tries to link themselves to a chosen person/object via no more than x moves. Links can sometimes seem strange and tedious between two seemingly unrelated subjects. Our task for this brief was to take a list of 10 items and to produce two illustrations that attempted to portray this idea by using the specified objects. They were to appear in an imaginary Guardian article so we were given image dimensions and print instructions that perhaps would appear in a real life brief. I never thought Admiral Lord Nelson and a Porcupine would ever end up together...oh how wrong I was!

This is of a prickley nature...

We are designing some illustrations at the moment for an imaginary editorial spread. There is a list of items that we have to include in the pieces and one of them is a porcupine! This is my little chappy so far!!!

"Walking in a winter wonderland..."

I came out this morning to find these on my drive! They were so cute I had to take a photograph. That's one thing I love about snow is seeing which visitors have been in your garden especially the little foot prints that birds leave behind.