Monkey Business (although orang-utans aren't technically monkeys!)

I'm back from Borneo! It was an amazing experience and I was so lucky to get such close contact with the orang-utans and have such a lovely group of girls to share the experience with. I miss them all so much. The orang-utans are incredible creatures, so clever and so naughty. If you take anything away they literally beat their hands on the floor, scream and throw a mega tantrum... just like children.

I didn't forget, while I was way, to take my trusty moleskin and do a bit of sketching... it's been a while!

Here is my lovely group!

Me and Chiquita.

Me working hard while Tomtom (in quarantine) relaxes!

Guerilla Dance.

I was asked to do some illustrations for the fabulous Guerilla Dance Group. (http://www.guerilladanceproject.com/)
"An innovative dance company that creates work that relishes our social interaction with objects within our everyday environment. The Guerilla Dance Project has developed a unique contemporary dance vocabulary by embracing object manipulation as a key component to making our dance 'appear and disappear'."

They wanted a number of "LadyBird Book style" illustrations a new dance game they are doing called Eye-Spy.
Here are a couple of the images I came up with.

N.B. They are performing tonight at The V and A late with these illustrations! Mosey on down if you'd like to see them!

Day Project 2.

Another day project (well actually more like 6 & 3/4 hours) to come up with a series of ten images to illustrate a scale using Italian words that are normally used to describe the fabulousness of dawn in the alps. I completely ran out time here... I never seem to learn! Anyway here are the ones I got done... oooh pretty butterflies!

This is the News!

For this project we had to take a news story and illustrate it using somekind of storytelling technique.
My news story was this:

"Harry Potter blamed for fuelling India owls' demise.

Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has blamed fans
of boy wizard Harry Potter for their role in the dwindling number of wild owls.
He said that Harry Potter books and films featuring his feathered friend Hedwig are popular in India and had contributed towards the demise of owls. Mr Ramesh said there had been an increase in people wanting to buy them from illegal bird traders. He was speaking to mark the launch of a report on India's owl population.
Written by the leading conservation group, Traffic, the report calls for tougher measures to protect owls ahead of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, which is being celebrated on Friday."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11673226

I decided to do an animation, in full pencil and watercolour. "I've never seen that done" I thought, "How interesting, I wonder why? I'll try it, I'm sure it will give an interesting effect."
After three solid weeks of no sleep, minimal eating and a lot of going completely stir crazy I have discovered why noone does it. It's insane! It also didn't help that, due to a mix up with the term timetable, our deadline was brought forward a week!
Eventually it got done. There was lots I would have liked to refine or change but, by the hand in date I was all for getting it done and away!

You can watch the final with sound here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUVU3AHKuNA

Message in a bottle five.

Why Alfie and Billy Love Norfolk.

And the packaging:

And the illustrated message was a little book I made:

Message in a bottle.

To start off the second year and over the summer our tutor asked us to send him six 'postcards' relating to what we were up to. These could be anything and everything but packaging was also to be considered.

I decided to do 6 messages in bottles. I took some old antique medicine (and some poison) bottles painted on them and then put a illustrative message inside. Then (mainly because they had to be sent in the post) These were put into some cardboard decorated boxes and packed with sand. Phew!

The first one I sent was: Visitors to my garden.

Painting on glass in much harder than I'd imagined!

And the packaging for it (sea themed to go with the whole message in a bottle thing)...

And the illustrated message (there was also text on the copy and I'm afraid the watercolour hasn't come out very well in the photo):