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Train doodling

Posted by June 18, 2012

A few pages of my sketchbook from our trip to Scotland at the weekend.  Rather than beautiful landscapes and buildings I seem to have only drawn people from the train journey.

Night Night Pooh

Posted by May 28, 2012

Here’s a recent storyboard for Night Night Pooh, a soft toy nightlight for children which also plays music. I used to love my gloworm..

Kapow! (or in Costa outside)

Posted by May 21, 2012

I went to my first comic con, Kapow!, this weekend, mainly out of curiosity.  I wanted to see what it was like to hang out in that world; storyboarding obviously isn’t far removed, and I’m wondering where else I could go with it.  I was hoping to sketch some fan boys/girls but there wasn’t really a quiet corner, so I ended up drawing a statue outside Costa Coffee instead.

I also bought some stuff from the Nobrow stand.  They’re a small publishers in East London who I’ve got a bit in to; their books smell amazing and everything looks like it’s been handprinted.  I really like the quality of their colours.  This is from The New Ghost by Robert Hunter:

Mm love that space observatory.  The below is from Pebble Island by Jon McNaught, a wordless look at life on the Falkland Islands. It’s small, about 15cm squared, but the tiny frames manage to evoke the space and solitude of life there.  I really love it.

Bolinda Vale roughs

Posted by May 16, 2012

Some roughs for the watercolour landscape of a few posts back (see it here).  Because this project was quite a learning curve, I took several roughs nearly to completion to check my methods were working!  Click on the pictures to view them bigger.

 

 

Raa Raa storyboard

Posted by May 15, 2012

A page from a recent Raa Raa The Noisy Lion storyboard.  He’s a toy lion and comes with various safari friends. On this job I did 4 storyboards in 3 days; they’re all for different products in the range but the same sort of set up each time – this one was for the playset.

You can see the rest of the storyboard here, and the finished ad here.

Elsie asleep

Posted by May 14, 2012

Dog sleeping.

Bolinda Vale

Posted by May 8, 2012

A friend commissioned me to paint this watercolour recently as a present for her in-laws; it’s of their farm in Australia.  This was actually one of the hardest jobs I’ve had; it may look simple but watercolours are a lifetime’s learning so there were a few trial runs!  I often use them but this was the first time as the primary medium (as opposed to the drawing being the focus); also there was a challenge in keeping the definition and features of a landscape that’s set into the distance.

The picture was drawn with diluted waterproof black ink and the dimensions are 7 x 23.5cm.  I find scanning doesn’t pick up the paler washes of my watercolours, I’m going to look into how to improve on that.  Having said that, I quite like that the transparency and delicacy of the medium is a bit beyond a clunky digitising machine.

Click on the image to see it bigger.

NB – you can see the roughs for this painting on my later post here.

Dizzy

Posted by May 4, 2012

Some socks I knitted recently… The pattern is from The Gentle Art of Knitting by Jane Brocket and I used self-striping yarn, which is fun.  I enjoy it when something happens like a heel but not sure how patient I am when it comes to the long straight bits.

Better to have loved and lost

Posted by May 2, 2012

A sad tale – this is a little phone bag I knitted for my spanking new smartphone.  But alas it was lost in the pub.  So now my screen is slowly getting covered in little scratches.

 

Business card finally materialises

Posted by May 1, 2012

I’ve spent rather too long working on my business cards.  I had an idea which was never right, but I kept working at it like throwing good money after bad.  Eventually in despair I scrapped the whole thing and started over, with a better idea which meant it all happened much faster.

Here’s one side:

And here’s the other:

It’s not quite as random as it might appear.  I wanted a person in it – they’re the prominent feature in most storyboards and my favourite thing to draw – and an animal because they’re important to me.  The bird is a Cock-of-the-rock, which is a daft but beautiful species I got quite attached to in Peru.  I wanted a sequence to take place over the two sides, partly because it was possible (by using moo) and partly because it would fit with the storyboarding theme.  There are a few tweaks I’ll make for the next batch, but for now this idea can stay.