Children's book cover...

We were given the story The White Cat to read and were asked to either illustrate the cover page or a double page spread. 

I chose the cover page... I was a bit worried about this assignment as I hadn't had much experience in drawing cats in the past.  But I decided to treat the cat as one of my girls and just give her cats eyes and a cats mouth and ears instead of hair.  I wanted the illustration to have a slightly dark feel to it, and a bit magical.  This is where I came up with the idea of the castle in the clouds with ladders connecting it to the ground. 

I had an idea of a colour scheme below... soft sea green/blues, ochre and pale pinks.

{colour scheme inspiration for The White Cat}

 

I wanted it to feel like winter with the bare trees but not completely desperate...  I had fun with the dogs dressing them in their little coats.  I also had a go at painting some flowers with watercolour paints rather than my usual watercolour pencils.

I thought the flag and the little mouse might be icons that can pop up in each illustration so children can make it into a game and see if they can find them.

I really enjoyed doing this illustration and am excited to hear that Lilla Rogers is going to do a Children's book illustration course later in the year!!!

{The White Cat cover illustration}

Staffordshire pottery...

We were asked to use Staffordshire pottery as inspiration to design a series of plates.

I found the  pottery a little unsettling at first... but the more I saw of it the more I warmed to it.  I found a lot of the animals were in twos, so I kind of went with that idea and started drawing animals, some I drew with watercolour, some with pencils and some I drew digitally.

I got a bit stuck there and thought I needed another element, maybe trees... I remembered when we went walking in the woods a few years ago there were these native New Zealand Beech type trees, that had quite mossy mottled trunks... so I tried a few drawings of these to add to the plate.  I imagined my plates being a type of stoneware with an ochre rim.  

{plate #1 so far...}

I added red thread... I love the story of Ariadne and the maze in Greek mythology and have used red thread a lot in my work over the years. 

plumb bobs...

As part of the uppercase Magazine assignment we were also given a brief to design the cover of the Surface Pattern Design Guide...  The brief was very open and we could use anything we wanted for inspiration.  My mother had just given me her grandfathers plumb bob {I love old men's tools}.

So I decided to use plumb bob's as my inspiration... they have wonderful shapes and I did a lot of drawings of plumb bobs and a bit of internet research on shapes.  Some of them like the one below were so beautiful!
 

I used the same technique as in the pyrex dish brief to get the plumb bob shapes.  After I started to decorate them I was horrified to realise they looked like Christmas decorations!!!

 {Christmas plumb bobs}!!!

I decided to try putting feathers onto the top of the plumb bobs to maybe make them look less like Christmas decorations and more whimsical... Ben {my son} said I have just made plumb bobs look silly.  

 {final design for the Surface Pattern Design Guide brief}

I picked some colours that were not traditionally Christmassy, but then again they could be used as a modern Christmas look if need be?  I arranged them into a repeat pattern and added strings... 

Pyrex and pasta...

For the bolt fabric assignment we had to take inspiration from pyrex dishes and pasta... it was quite fun as pyrex and pasta were not things I had ever really drawn from before and their shapes were really great to work with.

After doing lots of dish and pasta drawings I decided to use a different technique for image making and did some shape drawing on the computer and then put them together to make the pyrex dishes and bowels.  The pasta was done on the computer using the freehand brush tool and the little fern fronds were hand drawn with coloured pencil and scanned into the computer.

The salt and pepper shakers and colander were a happy accident, I made the shapes and then accidentally used the eraser tool and made holes in the shape... I thought this would look quite effective with a few layers underneath to show the difference in the light salt and dark pepper.

{bolt fabric submission}

{with a few of the co-ordinating pieces I designed to go with the submission}

Uppercase Magazine...

Hello and welcome to the first post of my new blog...

I have just started the Make Art That Sells course with Lilla Rogers, I did start this a few years ago but accidentally fell in love and couldn't keep up with the course.  Sooo... at the beginning of this year I decided I was ready to jump back into Lilla's 'make art that sells' world again!!!

This is my submission for the Uppercase Magazine assignment... we were asked to illustrate who we are as a creative for a possible editorial spot in the Uppercase Magazine {my most favourite magazine in the world}.  

{and the world spins madly on... submission for Uppercase assignment}

I feel imagination is an important part of my creative process and I have tried to incorporated this… {all the wispy white dreamy bits}.  So this is me all packed up and ready to go on a journey to the far north where I want to be a full time illustrator.

A few people have asked about where the rabbit comes from... When I was little I had two special friends, a toy rabbit called Rabbit and an imaginary friend called January who looked a bit like Abraham Lincoln.  Unfortunately the latter disappeared soon after my little brother was born… but I still have Rabbit.

I am very excited to say I was lucky enough to be picked for the live review by the wonderful Lilla Rogers and Janine Vangool (editor of Uppercase) such a lovely surprise! Lilla said she thought my piece was very pretty and she also liked my colour palette.  It was a nice feeling being picked and has inspired me to create some other works around this theme... moving to the Far North {shown below}

{the above three are still being worked on 

but I thought I would share them as they are so far...}