i decided to treat my girlfriend to a ‘bouquet’ of flowers – the week before valentine’s day – how good am i?!
daffodils.
for a pound.
from the supermarket.
anyway, they provided the inspiration for a few drawings and then my valentine’s card effort. i’ve got a bit of a fixation on flowers again at the moment.
okay, so a blog about christmas in february is a little late - but it’s here now. i make my own christmas cards each year and once the design’s done i usually have my own little production line going – printing them off in volume, cutting each one out with a trusty craft knife and steel rule, gluing them onto mount board (nice and sturdy), carefully scoring each card just enough for a fold, signing each one on the back and even making my own envelopes. to save me all of that fuss i decided that for christmas 2011 i was going to get them printed professionally. sure, i avoided all of those tasks – but how many times did i have to go back and forth to the printers to get all of the colours right? too many, but it was worth it in the end. hope you like it.
happy new year, by the way 
whil
e it may not yet be quite an obsession, i did produce two octopus pieces in one week not so long ago. i already blogged about the first, now i’m blogging about the second. in august i answered capsule’s call out for illustrators to contribute to their upcoming zine to celebrate the supersonic festival in birmingham. the zine is being distributed around the city, but there’s also an online version you can view by clicking here. my work’s on page 17 – buried underneath a whole page of writing, much to my amusement. i was pleased to at least see that there’s a credit and link to my wesbite. just so you know what you’re looking for i’ve provided an unobscured version of the illustration for your viewing pleasure.
a few weeks ago i spent a couple of days doing some work to try and secure a commission from a study based at birmingham university. the study is into promoting healthy eating and active lifestyles for children aged around 6 and they wanted to develop their branding to make it more professional. altogether they were looking for designs for a new logo, some templates for information sheets and a newsletter, as well as some spot illustrations. although i have a lot of work you can view online, they still wanted to see some examples of what i would do for them. i spent more time than perhaps i should in preparing this for them but that was because i wanted to secure the commission by impressing them with some finished illustration rather than just rough sketches. this is what i submitted:
i was told that the deadline was tight and a decision on who would get the commission was imminent and to be made by the end of the week so i worked hard and late to get the work sent over in time. i heard nothing and waited ten days before i phoned them. i was then told through email that “we were extremely pleased with the work you presented and would have been extremely happy to go forward with what you presented.” however it turns out that the university will only allow certain ‘authorised’ suppliers to provide them with services. i thought “it really would have helped me if you’d known this information beforehand.” after a phonecall i got a bit of a better explanation that the university will only outsource work and services if it can’t provide them itself. the university’s design team had said they couldn’t do the work that the study required but when they found out that somebody else was actually going to do the work, they decided they could do it after all – and so the university wouldn’t authorise funds to be spent on an outside service (me).
great – two days of my holiday gone on a commission i could never get. partly it’s my own fault for spending too much time on it, but i don’t think big organisations get how much this kind of thing can affect us little freelancers. i’d like to have had the opportunity to complete the project and think i would have provided a unique branding image for them – i imagine that now, the newsletter, information sheets and communications for the study will be peppered with clip-art or stock image rubbish or just (duh-duh-duh-dum)…bad drawing. shame. oh well, i’ll have to chalk it all up to experience.
here are some photos of a piece I completed a couple of weeks ago. it’s the first in a series of 4 pieces i have planned and ready to go. most of the work i’ve produced over the last year or so has been drawn by hand and coloured digitally – this has meant working more often than not with drawings of a4 size and then staring at the computer for hours while i apply the colour and collage using photoshop. for this series of pieces i decided that i wanted to go back to my more traditional
method of cut-paper collage. this meant that i could work on a slightly larger scale and that the working drawings would have to match this scale. while only 89x42cm, the work was quite labour intensive and as a result i’ve not yet started the second piece (this was the reason i stopped cutting everything out by hand and developed my more digital-based work in the first place!). i also wanted to produce these larger scale pieces by hand as i intend to exhibit these at some point soonish. anyway, i was pleased with how it turned out.
it’s based on an area near to where i live, along a riverside cycle path where wild plants are able to grow freely; i’ve been observing their growth and change every few days as i’ve passed by over recent months, some of them (like these thistles), taking over large areas for a period before they die off and other plants take over. it’s a subject matter i’ve not found myself that interested in before, but have recently become really inspired by what’s going on in these areas along this riverside cycle path.
i’ve been working flat out on artwork for the last couple of weeks, working on four different projects at once. this one had been rattling around in my head for quite a while after a friend talked about a nightmare scenario: if an octopus can fit through a 1 inch hole, what’s to stop them invading our homes by coming in through pipes, drains, etc? i’ve entered this into the association of illustrators, images 36 competition. it’s quite different from anything else i’ve been doing recently and i was really excited and pleased with how it turned out – fingers crossed i’ll get somewhere this year.
i would like to
publicly extend my thanks to the frog in the garden for making an appearance this afternoon and staying still long enough for me to draw him.
he was also good enough to pose for some photographs too – soon to be seen in the new issue of ‘amphibian fashions’. thanks mister frog.
