Trouble

For Illustration Friday - mixed media

Golden

Golden - for Illustration Friday

A child stranded at sea, the burning sunset behind her casting golden light across the deep ocean in which floats.

Repeat

Illustration Friday sketch - topic - Repeat

Red Lighthouse

For Illustration Friday and the theme is Red

Hybrid

This week's Illustration Friday topic is Hybrid. I had a lovely idea for a red London bus powered by a water wheel (not the most practical of hybrid vehicles, but as I was pressed for time I went for a hybrid tortoise with a forest upon his back.

Jungle

A bit of a rush job for Illustration Friday - but here's a giraffe, who actually lives in the plains according to my husband. It's nice to be drawing again

CSM - counting feathers

Also as part of the Children's Book Illustration - II course at CSM, we had to create a short counting sequence aimed at very young children. We were using inks and liquid watercolours. The vibrancy of the colours automatically made me think of birds.

Central St Martin's Children's Illustration Course

I recently did the short course in Children's Book Illustration II - Advanced at Central Saint Martin's, taught by artist and illustrator April Wilson. I've done the earlier course (Children's Book Illustration I) some time before and I would really recommend both. The courses cover a variety of things, such as different media, facial expressions, story-boarding etc.

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be adding some of the work I did as part of the course - please bear in mind most of these pictures would have been done during class-times and are generally pretty quick, rough sketches, not finished pieces of art by any means.

So to kick things off - These images were part of an exercise on facial expressions. We made a very basic sock puppet then made it make different facial expressions which we drew - simple.

We then developed these into a short sequence - this is mine

A bit more slithery snailness

I had fun doing the Slither picture for Illustration Friday, so I did another.

Slither

This week's Illustration Friday topic is 'Slither' and you can't get much more slithery than a snail slithering across your nose.
This is done in watercolour.

Eat for survival

Submitted to Illustration Friday for 'Rescue' as I think the little girl and the cat could really do with rescuing here

Sketch done in Gouache paint and pencil

We are sailing

Something slightly different here - My sister commissioned me to do this piece. It's pretty much all Photoshop and not quite my usual style, but I found it quite interesting to do and picked up a couple of things along the way.

Fractual Disturbances

This is a really old piece I came across tonight when sorting a few things. It was to illustrate a poem written by a friend entitled 'Fractural Disturbances'. Sadly I no longer have the poem though. It's a really simply, mostly vector illustration. Pity about the tree on the LHS.

Let sleeping dogs lie

This is a bit of further character development of the dog on the beach. Rather than the happy, running chappy seen earlier here he is in his 'home' of a cardboard box in an alley. Caran D'ache Neocolour II crayons and various inks on brown wrapping paper. (There's a more developed version which I'll post soon)

Monkeying around

This is an, as yet unfinished, colour sketch that is part of a book about a Magic Turtle who grants wishes. Unfortunately for the monkeys, my inadequate attention span led me to abandon this picture as soon as I had another idea. Also, I'm not sure I have the patience for colour pencils.

Editorial

This is an editorial illustration done some time ago as part of a course at Central Saint Martin's. It probably looks a little odd out of context like this though.

Work in progress

It's been ages since I've added anything on here. There is a lot of work going on in the background though. I'm working on some mixed media pieces using collage, inks and Caran D'ache. Some of it is a bit of a learning process, so progress is not as fast it could be.

I will add some more work soon, but until then, I'm particularly enjoying Oliver Jeffers' work at the moment. It was great to see some of it up close at the Illustration Cupboard last year too.

http://www.oliverjeffers.com/

Another Caran D'Ache picture

One more little picture done in Caran D'Ache

Caran D'Og

This is another Caran D'Ache Neocolor II picture. I've mostly used the crayons dry here. The dog (it's supposed to be an English Bull Terrier in case you were wondering) is from an idea for a children's book I'm working on.

Experiments in Caran D'Ache

I've been playing around with Caran D'Ache Neocolor II crayons lately. They are really fun to use and versatile - you can you them wet or dry, paint with them or draw with them, and they have a really high pigment content so you can get really bright colours and blend away.
I find them very quick to work with for small colour sketches. These are just little 10-minute colour sketches on postcard-sized colour card.