Gluey Fingers turn into Green Fingers?...

This summer I have decided that I want to grow some fruit and veg. As a child I used to love planting seeds and seeing them grow into something amazing. I felt all nostalgic the other day when I thought back to when I was a child and I went to my grandparents every Saturday. My Grandad was a keen gardner and I used to love exploring the wonders of my Grandparents' back garden. Afternoons spent picking bowls and bowls of raspberries, gooseberries and blackberries and shaking the apples off all their trees. I was too little to cut up the rhubarb but I would follow my Grandad down to the very bottom of the garden and watch as he cut off long pieces ready to be made into a crumble or pie by my Granny. He can't garden as much now and the raspberry bushes are gone as they were too much for him to look after. But it is time to get my own green fingers out and sow some seeds once again.

Me and my mum took a trip to Homebase and came back well equipped. We bought and planted some strawberry plants into a special strawberry plant pot and I planted some courgette seeds in little pots to start them off. We are also going to plant some potatoes and hopefully some carrots too. Maybe I'll be the one making the pies this time round. We'll see!

The End of Year 2...

I can't believe it but I have pretty much finished my second year of my Illustration degree. Times flies when your having fun as they say! Our last project was to sum up what we had learnt over this semester. For me this term has been quite a poignant one as I have realised that the most important thing is not to label yourself. I became so frustrated with people trying to fit me into a box that I thought the lesson I have learnt is I am a designer and there are many strings to my bow. Here is how I chose to illustrate this...

I designed a mailer which, once opened reveals my contact details and a booklet that has two sections to it entitled, "I am a Graphic Designer who can illustrate," and "I am an illustrator who can design," highlighting both of my skills as a designer. I was really pleased with my design and especially the hands that hold in the booklet. I even created my own typography using collaged letters, which I used throughout the design. I hope you like it too!

Happy Mother's Day...

Hopefully everyone remembered to send their mums a little something at the weekend for Mother's Day! I wanted to make my mum a really nice card and decided to use my developing knife skills to cut out an intricate pattern. I was just doodling and drew out a rough design and then cut it out with my craft knife. I was really pleased with the result and my mum loved it too!

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/