Ta for the post! & I'm not slacking!

My thanks to Dave Coustan and Tom Harris over at "earthling blog" for posting a link to this blog in their list of sketchblogs to look at - "blogs without all the reading". Just to be mentioned in the same list as DRAWN is very flattering indeed. It's a great boost to know that there are some people who tune in from time to time ... if you are one of them, THANK YOU VERY MUCH! I'll try to make it worth the visit! :)

If you are wondering why I've not posted to Illustration friday for the last couple of weeks, I'm not slacking, honest. To cut a long story short I was very lucky enough to be posted on drawn.ca last month which then lead to me being contacted by an children's book illustration agent over in the US who expressed an interest in wanting to represent me in America...woohoo!!! My heartfelt thanks once again to John Martz at drawn.ca! So all my free time is now spent working up pieces which my agent (that sounds really nice to say) can show to publishers. Like many illustrators out there I have lots of ideas for children's picture books, and now is the perfect time to bring them to life. Expect sketches and page layouts in the near future... At the moment I'm writing and rough sketching...watch this space!

Elephants for auction

Here are watercolours which I'd promised to do for a charity auction: elephant research I don't know that I'm totally happy with one of the more naturalistic of the watercolours but Its's made a pleasant change to work with real paint again after all my digital work of late. If anyone has seen my earlier posts you might recognize that a couple of the watercolours are based on a digital elephant I did last month. I found it really useful to go back into my original psd document and switch off layers to plan out my painting. I didn't try to recreate the digital with watercolour (that would just get frustrating) but it was great to have something to aim for.

Xmas elephant

This is a design I've been working on for an elephant charity xmas card. I've tried to appeal to as wide an audience as possible with this (unlike some of my other elephants perhaps...), after all we want to sell as many cards as possible. Fingers crossed it's suitable.

G is for Giraffe

Here's the latest in my ongoing animal alphabet. This one took two just to fit her all in!

"Early Bird Beware."

Could also be called, "Let sleeping Elephants lie".This is a photoshop piece to allow me to plan out colour and composition for a watercolour I'm going to do for a friend's Elephant charity. It's been a fun picture to do, and unlike some, has come from sketch book to finish quite quickly. I decided not to overwork tone on the elephant, just let the texture of the background do the work...(incidently the background is a scan of recycled coffee paper).

Illustration Friday (poem). "Tyger Tyger".

I've always had a hard time appreciating poetry (unless it's Roald Dahl, Spike Milligan or Edward Gorey), but that said I do like William Blake's "The Tyger":

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

and so on...

(& I don't think I've gained "an immortal hand" or eye as a result of working on the image...!) :)

I did another version of this piece a few years back and wanted a fresh look at things now that my working style has changed. With IF having the topic "poem" this seemed as good a time as any to give it another go. You can see the earlier version and sketches for it on my website.

Illustration Friday "Discovery"

The Elephants continue... Didn't think I was going to have enough time for IF this week but I managed to start this in my lunch hour at work and finish it off when I got home.

"Citrus Elephant."

Elephants just keep appearing out of nowhere! In close-up the skin of a satsuma has a texture very reminiscent of an elephant's, and if you peel it right here's what you get.

MTV "Pimp our logo" competition.

Here's my entry for the MTV "Pimp our logo" competition. I'm not at all sure this will be the 'old school' that MTV suggested in the competition details but nevertheless I had a good time doing it and it forced me to use a colour palette I wouldn't have otherwise touched!

MOTEL project, give it a go!

After my drawn posting last week I was delighted to be contacted by Clay Sisk regarding his intriguing online illustration project "The Motel Project", created to promote his short live action film Motel. Clay's asking artists to download a sheet of headed stationery which he's created for his fictional motel and then work with it in any way they see fit.