flower illustrations

i was so pleased with how my series of flower drawings were going that i decided to give some of them a purpose. i chose three drawings that i would develop into finished digital collage outcomes and then produced three more drawings with the intention of developing those too. the blossom piece was based on some sketches that i’d done and some photos that i’d taken. the azalea and dianthus pieces were very similar to the ipad drawings i’d produced and became neater, more refined versions of those original sketches. the forget-me-not and violas became a jigsaw of piecing together dozens of layers of different flowers and leaves. for the rhododendron, i decided to depict all three stages of their blooming. as usual, all outlines were drawn by hand and then colour and texture was added in adobe photoshop.

i had the six finished outcomes professionally printed on heavyweight card as postcards. I also made badges (i print and press these by hand in my studio), as well as A4 prints. They are all available in my etsy store (sorry for the shameless plug!)

the images below show some work in progress screenshots for some of the designs, as well as the finished artworks. the last images are product shots that i used for etsy shop. the first shows the paper binding that i designed to hold the postcard sets – as well as the card being responsibly sourced/sustainable, these are sold in biodegradable plastic sleeves.

godzilla collage artworks

my godzilla obsession continued in 2021. as well as doing lots of drawings from 1962’s king kong vs. godzilla, i set to work on three larger scale collage artworks. these were based on illustrations i’d done previously and released as postcards and badges. i produced three artworks altogether – the first was mechagodzilla which featured over 150 pieces and required over 700 individual cuts – each by hand of course. i loved working on this and the collage assemblage felt really natural for this character who, as a robot kaiju, would have been made from so many pieces of metal. i made two further collages of the king of the monsters himself – one was a side profile to show off those magnificent spines, the second placed him in the landscape near japan’s mt.aso looking out into the distance. it took a couple of attempts to get the right colour and painted texture for his cracked, volcanic, keloid-inspired skin. these two had approximately 60 and 100 pieces respectively, and each required over 500 cuts. i put some (sped-up), time-lapse video on instagram of me cutting and assembling some of these. as much as i love working digitally – i can’t resist going back to these traditional, tactile methods.

home again

well, it’s been another funny year, and one that began with us going into lockdown again here in the uk. this has been the experience of people in different countries around the world at different times this year. all this time at home led to me starting to draw what was around me and i started to record flowers and plants as they began to appear in the garden and near to our home. i’d made a pretty substantial collection of drawings in 2020 and decided to make a real go of it again in 2021. the series of drawings went from february to july and i completed 53 in all – not as many as 2020’s garden sketchbook total of 72, but i was still pleased with this set of work. it seemed more cohesive as a body of work – probably because i’d done a lot of searching in 2020 – working out exactly how i wanted to use the ipad as a sketchbook and developing a process with which i was comfortable. i was also working on a lot of other side projects (some of which i’ll record for posterity in posts after this one).

i was posting most of these on instagram, and if you look on there you’ll see a lot of work in progress videos too. these were all drawn on ipad using the procreate app which has a facility to record every mark you make and play it back as a time-lapse. i like using these because they evidence that very little editing takes place in these drawings – this is something i imposed on myself to try and keep the drawing here more genuine, like drawing in a physical sketchbook where you have to go with whatever mark you’ve made on the paper. i’ve found that my best drawing is when i have to be confident and decisive and put marks down, and not labour over every single mark. some drawings were quicker than others! i tried to catalogue as many of our plants and flowers as possible as well as taking a couple of walks to nearby streets and parks to record other things too. the tulips always seemed to prove popular in social media, but there were some stand out favourites for me – crocuses, azalea, rhododendron bud, honeysuckle azalea, iris, lupin, allium and jasmine.

godzilla showa-era tribute

godzilla vs. king ghidorah

earlier in the year i posted about the godzilla drawings i was doing and it took a few more months before i was able to develop a full series of finished illustrations. some of the illustrations were pretty labour intensive compared to what i’m used to but that was because i was really pushing what i was doing behind the scenes on the mac in terms of layering and textures.

if you head on over to my instagram, i posted a lot of behind-the-scenes images that showed the development of these illustrations from sketches to finished pieces – including the layering and building of textures, and i explored some of the other changes like the background colour on the main godzilla solo image. i might go over some of that on another blog post on here in the future.

for the time being i really wanted to present the final artworks on here and show that i made them into products. The intention was always to produce another set of postcards (like my robot set from last year), but i applied the images to badges (which have proved so popular i’ve been sending them all over the place), and have made them available as A4 prints too.

i also took the sketchbook images from my earlier blog and collected some of those together and printed them up as a zine/artists book. i was really pleased with the front cover – desperately hoping that my copying of the japanese characters for the word ‘godzilla’ are accurate enough (nobody’s said otherwise yet!).

the images of the artwork are all in the gallery below – and the products themselves are available over on my etsy shop – here.

thanks for reading and let me know what you think.

new shop stock

there’s been a lot of activity on my online shop over the last couple of months. after producing all of the flower drawings and getting a lot of positive feedback across social media, i decided to make some of them available for purchase. i took three of the designs (sweet peas, allium and london pride), and had some greetings cards professionally printed.

i also made available a print of the allium image i used for the cards. i made this with two different colour backgrounds – the first was with the green from my original drawing, and the second was with a dusky pink.

i also made some prints of the more detailed and graphic-style two-tone sweet pea drawings i had made. there were two different designs, but i made these available in a choice of colours.

more drawings from the garden

so, after my last post (2 weeks into lockdown), i continued drawing in the garden.

i produced a series of three images that used a lot more colour. i felt like i was painting really, rather than drawing in the way i had been before which (as i’ve said before), appears to be just like using pencil on paper (but on an ipad). There are a few images where i used reduced opacity because i liked the effect of different layers overlapping in places to create some darker shades, but i fell quickly and comfortably into using more solid flat colours. i say ‘comfortably’, but i was conscious the whole time of what i was trying to do (which sometimes made it feel a little forced), and it didn’t always come easy (depending on the complexity of the image). and in some ways i wasn’t sure this was true to my normal way of working (doubting oneself, even when things are going well is fairly typical!), but i reasoned that when producing my collage works with cut-paper, i am essentially producing images that are reduced to shapes (usually textured, but sometimes flat colour) without outlines – in my collages, the cut lines are actually the outlines that i’d previously drawn. so i realised that what i was drawing on the ipad wasn’t that far removed from what i’ve been doing for years.

once i accepted that, i’ve been happily drawing away and documenting whatever has been blooming in the garden. i’m not much of a gardener, and i don’t know what everything is, but i’ve always loved our garden and as i said in my last post, i’ve felt very lucky to have this space to escape to during the corona lockdown and the compulsion to sketch has seen me out there in heat, rain and uncomfortable seating positions. i was a bit annoyed that i didn’t get to record what we think is a type of jasmine as it got destroyed in a heavy downpour, and i’m now overly preoccupied with sweet peas – they bloom and fade so quickly and the layers of vines and tendrils look different from every angle so i don’t feel like i’ve exhausted them yet. as usual, i’ve been uploading videos of many of these to social media. so you can see how the drawings takes place from start to finish: instagram – facebook – twitter or just enjoy the gallery below.

garden drawings

over the last couple of weeks i’ve been drawing in the garden. like most people we’ve been in isolation/lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic. one message that i’ve got through a lot of social media is that we should all be exploring new things, being creative, learning to knit, writing that novel you’ve always wanted to or something, but for me the truth is that this has been such a worrying time that i’ve often found it difficult to be creative even when a small amount of time has permitted. i have however pushed myself to produce a series of drawings from our garden.

i’ve said elsewhere on social media that i’ve felt privileged to have an outdoor space at home to escape into from time to time, and i know that my 4-year old daughter has really benefitted from that over these last couple of weeks. i’ve drawn in the garden for many years now, not that i have a particular interest or knowledge of flowers and plants, but when we moved into our home 8 years ago, we inherited a garden that had some established plants, and we’ve introduced a fair few in the meantime. it’s a space that’s required (a lot of!) maintaining and so i’ve had to be involved in something i had never really had to bother with before. it’s a nice space to have, and when needing to just draw – it has an abundance of subject matter readily available. and as it’s the start of spring, a lot of flowers are appearing too.

so i’ve been drawing on my ipad without any particular aim other than to just focus on something else for 20-30 minutes at a time. i’m not sure if it’s mindfulness, but drawing like this is something that i need to do regularly (regardless of a pandemic). they mostly look very much like drawings on paper, but i keep using the ipad because i love producing videos of how the drawing has developed. if you want to, you can see the videos on your social media of choice (instagram – facebook – twitter).

a week and a half into lockdown, it was interesting to see a bbc news report where david hockney was talking about doing exactly the same thing.

godzilla sketchbook

i recently started a new project based on the king of the monsters – godzilla. i’ve been drawing from the showa-era films (which covers 15 films from 1954-75), and have been working from gojira himself as well as a range of foes, allies and combatants. some people now criticise the first film (and others), because of the dated effects etc, but i think it still really stands up 65 years later as a relatively strong piece of work. the opening credits to the film with its deafening monster roar is relentless and terrifying, and although he’s introduced in the daytime appearing over a hill, the monster is particularly effective when he gets into action in the scenes set at night. i think that the destruction sequences of the original still contain a lot of power, even after all this time.

although i usually like working with characters, i’ve found that the drawings become less effective when you start to see more of his face – particularly working from the later films because the costume was changed and his eyes were made much bigger (as well as other things like his spines being reduced in scale too). the first costume is a monstrous thing of beauty when seen from the side, it’s such a massive behemoth of a beast that you can’t imagine anything stopping it. later on it looks more anthropomorphic, which is i think part of the change in costume design to allow greater movement and flexibility for performance.

these drawings were all done on my ipad pro using the procreate app. i’ve been sketching with the dry ink brush which was a new thing for me, but seemed to give quicker coverage, and at times a more defined edge, than the 6B pencil brush i was using previously. i’ve still not perfected it though, and at times find it a little inconsistent and hard work to be honest. i’m also working with a reduced opacity too, so as to layer up the initial mid-tone before adding darker tones and highlights. i’ve been sharing videos of the drawings on social media if you’d like to see them take place from start to finish. i’m going to do some more sketches and develop a series of refined/finished drawings that’ll be worked up as digital collage pieces. but for now here’s a selection of images and a few i haven’t shared elsewhere – i hope you like them, and let me know what you think.

christmas 2019

season’s greetings! we’re well into the festive season now, and recently i produced two drawings that i initially worked up as digital pieces – the first was of a partridge, the second a stag. now – in all honesty – i wanted to do a drawing of reindeer, but i was finding it really hard so i ditched the reindeer and drew a stag. i drew it; it looked like a stag; great. i scanned it into my mac and then worked it up in purple and blue hues (just as i have with a penguin, owl and sloth in the past) – and it turned out to more resemble a reindeer. i know it isn’t a reindeer (and those of you who might study animals can probably point out why – but just from looking at a few examples i could tell that the nose and antlers are very different), but the simple change in colour made it appear like one. i decided to also work it up in more natural colours and this (as you might expect), does look like a stag (!) i also made traditional cut-paper collage versions of both too. continuing my series of stern looking creatures – they both look pretty serious, but then that’s how they are. anyway, i hope you like them – the different versions are all included in the gallery below.

 

in dreams…

i’d long been working on a tribute to the works of director david lynch and i recently completed the project and so collected and printed the illustrations together in a book format. it’s titled in dreams after the roy orbison song used in blue velvet and the fact that dreams play such an important part in lynch’s work – either the dreamstate used as inspiration or as a narrative element of the film.

The covers feature a series of icons that represent dream-related items from several of the films and the images inside relate to twin peaks, mulholland drive, blue velvet, eraserhead and lost highway (the last i’ve always considered my favourite).

I made some of the images into sets of badges that i’ve put onto my etsy store along with copies of the zine. i’ve bundled the zine together with an ‘exclusive’ set of badges that feature quotations from the films. the quotations initially appear to be like positive, life-affirming memes…

‘go to sleep, everything is alright’
‘in heaven everything is fine’
‘that gum you like is going to come back in style’

…but how genuinely positive or reassuring they are is questionable when considered in the context of the films. i think this might be a little harder to get into than some of the more friendly, upbeat, smiling animal or robot work i’m used to producing – i’m not sure how well it resonates if you’re not a fan of the films themselves. to be honest i produced this work mostly just for myself. i love these films and wanted to produce a tribute to them. and i wanted my own bemused-looking henry on a badge. i’m sure there’s some more of you out there that will enjoy these – i’d love to hear what you think.