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
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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)
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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
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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
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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.
Bolinda Vale
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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
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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
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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
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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.
