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

Whatever Happened to C.T. Studd's?

During my work experience at WEC International, I was given a brief to illustrate a book cover for a new publication about the founder of the organisation, as they head towards their centenary year in existence. I am ecstatic to say the publisher liked my design and the book is in print as we speak...so watch this space!

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!

Don't judge a book by its cover, A Very Short Introduction...

So I'm back at Uni now and our first project after the holidays was to design a series of book jackets for the well known OXFORD series "A Very Short Introduction." We were given a list of subjects from which we had to select 3 to explore and produce designs for. I decided to choose Architecture, Butterflies and Moths and Clocks, Watches and Timepieces which by the end of the project was such a mouthful to say! Anywho, I played around quite a bit with stenciling this time which was pretty fun. I wanted my designs to be quite simplistic and a bit more abstract than my usual stuff. I didn't do quite so well on this project but hey you can't have 'em all can you?! At least I got my type right! Below are my final designs have a ponder....

My Stamp Collection

We have just finished a four week project entitled "Collections," where we had to design and create a book/catalogue about a collection that we owned. When I was little I collected stamps so this was ideal! I really got my teeth into this project and loved every minute. At times it seemed such a daunting task producing so much imagery and wanting it to be a true to what it was about. I made a little book using images from my stamps as well as letters I received over the years from my two penpals and stuck this inside an envelope packet that I designed and illustrated. I'm really proud of what I managed to produce, above are just a selection of photographed spreads, I hope you like them! (Full set of spreads to follow!)