Creative Daemons: illustration

Showing posts with label illustration. Show all posts

Wednesday, 3 April 2013

2013 Bologna Children's Book Illustration

Strange to think that my trip to the Bologna Children's Book Fair and time with the Cambridge School of Art is all over now. I saw so many fantastic illustrations and received great (if sometimes curt) advice from publishers. What have I learnt so far? Well...I'm not 'commercial' enough, that's for sure. I really need to travel a bit more in terms of my 'style'. The whole trip taught me that simplicity is a child's best friend when it comes to learning the world around them, and how to engage stories with them. I guess it explains why there are so many picture books where characters are living in a constant flux of white limbo (ahem... Emily Gravett's 'Orange Bear Apple Pear', you have been poked). Seriously though, I need to learn how to tone down the texture, but that's going to be so hard as I adore it so much. Some of the publisher's liked my work, but they said it wasn't for them as it was too 'mature' (which they assured me isn't always a bad thing). I don't know if I'll get a contract or anything out of this, but it's really opened my eyes.

Monday, 4 March 2013

Flying my dragon.

Quick little sketch of a mini-me flying Guzzler the dragon from my children's book. It looks weird without its scales, hehe.

Tuesday, 22 January 2013

'Rooster Loses His Voice' (pending picturebook)

Story about Rooster who loses his voice and has to use alternative means of waking up the farm animals. This was partly inspired by Eddie Izzard's 'Jazz Chicken' and had an idea of creating a back story as to how or why this chicken / rooster wanted to play it.

Left: Animals tell Rooster to stop waking them up with his 'rude' methods
Right: Rooster walks off dejected, but hears some jazzy tunes on a radio. Hmm... inspiration?

Rooster uses things he finds round the farm such as party horns, banging on buckets, blowing in empty bottles and other musical ways.

I know this is a repeat image, but I wanted to indicate a light source and experiment with mono-printing under the linocut.

Saturday, 5 January 2013

Hiccuping Dragon

Here's the latest of story I've been working on over this past 'semester'. It's about a dragon that gets the hiccups from over eating cattle and crops. And as humans do, they get very upset about a dragon eating all their food and complain to their king, who in turn, sends his best knight to rid his lands of the greedy beastie. However, rather than slaying the dragon, the knight ends up hedging a bet with the dragon that if he can rid it of its hiccups, it must promise never to trouble his people again. And the mayhem begins....

I think I had too much fun drawing dragons, I went from very Eastern, to cute chubby child-like, to finally, a 'sensible'-ish western spotted gecko dragon. Yes, I have returned to the Lino-lands, and they have given me a lovely callus on my left middle finger and nice numbness to half of my index finger. Anyway, disregarding that, I've really had a lot of fun with this project and the amount of background research involved.

Dragon hiccups (without 'hic' type)

I think when my tutor sees this page with the 'hic' type on top, he might have a fit, or just roll his eyes and growl my name, hehe.

Dragon Tries to Drink Water Different Ways

This was one of the very first lino-plates that I did, so there's no circular border running round it. Apologies to the scary bright colours, but hope you like the design. It's looks better on paper than on screen.

Well...that's all you're going to get in terms of a preview. You'll just have to come to Foyles Bookshop gallery (4th - 9th February) in London, or Ruskin Gallery in Cambridge (27th Feb - 14th March) to see the rest of my book. Hope to see you there!