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!

Biggest strawberries ever...

As the sun starts to come out it's slowly feeling more and more like summer. Yey! So last weekend I decided to treat myself to a punnet of strawberries from the local market. They were absolutely delicious! Not only that but two of them were HUGE! I had the photo up on my computer to put on my blog to show these beauties but when I came back, it had been defaced by a certain Stephen Arthur thank you very much! But I thought I'd put his version on here! The strawberry on the right is a normal sized strawberry and the the ones on the left were the two beasts! Nom nom nom! Summer is here!

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!

Introducing the talented Miss Caitlin Ashton...

Well I turned the grand old age of 21 last thursday. I had a lovely day and my best friend Jen threw me a surprise "jungle themed" party which was amazing! Coconuts, snake jelly and pin the tail on the baboon were involved in the proceedings! I also received lots of lovely cards from all my friends and family including a beautiful postcard (above) from my illustrator friend Miss Caitlin Ashton. She is currently studying at the University of Bath and is flipping amazing! Her work is so wonderful so check out her tumblr please!

http://agirlmadasbirdsno.blogspot.com/

http://agirlmadasbirdsno.tumblr.com/

Pin up...

Although most of my time seems to revolve around my university projects I love to make things if I do get a spare five minutes! As you know from previous posts I love felt and in the past I have been known to make little felt badges. Recently, I've started crafting these little beauties again and although I've not had time to make a lot, I've managed four! A teeny house, a camera, a flower and a little square face in homage to my felt cubes! I hope you like them. And hey, if you want anything making drop me a line!

I want to ride my bicycle...

So the second year illustrators came into uni last Monday morning and were met with a set up still life of bicycles! Hmmm I hear you say. Yes we thought the same! Monday and Tuesday were spent doing detailed drawings of the bikes with no idea as to what they would be used for. Then we received the brief.

The theme of this project was based on the idea that families rarely eat dinner together anymore and that other activities were taking over such as bike riding. Yes an unusual and tenuous link but hey you gotta do what you gotta do! We had to use our initial drawings to produce two illustrations that would appear in a Sunday supplement. The first was just using our drawings and the second could be anything. I really enjoyed this project, although vague it was nice doing something random. These are my illustrations so far, I may make a few alterations to them, I'm not sure as yet but for now I'm pretty happy with the results. Many thanks to fellow illustrator and super star Jenny Cox for introducing me to the wonders of textures and the lasso tool. Oh and her generous donation of chips on Friday night much appreciated lady!