The Namesake.

These are illustrations for Jhumpa Lahiri's wonderful book The Namesake. We were asked to six full pages of illustrations but we could divide this up anyway we wanted to (12 1/2 pages, 24 1/4 pages etc).

For this project I thought I'd try something a bit different.

Here are a selection of images from the finals...

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!

Kingsgate.

Every year Middlesex has a show where we do observational work in a place in London. This year it was Kingsgate. We enter our work and the tutors pick a select few to display and sell.

Two of mine were selected so I was chuffed!




At the show this one was the second to sell after one that our our tutor had done. Made me very happy indeed!

Meow!

My illustration linocuts from the summer project have been used in Meow magazine! They even featured me on the cover! Yay me!

Five of a kind.

This one all started with picking a number out of a bag. We had three days from that point to make that number of books. Moreover, the content of the books also had to relate to that number too!

I originally got 100 but my lovely friend swapped with me (I think she was worried that after the owls project I might have abit of breakdown) and I ended up with the number five.

I decided to base my books on the 'little five'.
In SA when on safari they tell you to look out for the 'Big Five'. Many travellers regard a visit to South Africa as incomplete without having spotted, and perhaps photographed, the Big Five. It consists of the elephant, buffalo, leopard, lion and rhino.
The little five is a simply a list of smaller animals whose names contain those of the big five. They are the elephant shrew, ant lion, rhinoceros beetle, buffalo weaver and leopard tortoise.

I made five papercut books. Each is like a mini safari with the animal being revealed as you go through it.

N.B. Sorry for the qulaity of the photos. Papercut is very hard to photograph!

Buffalo Weaver

Rhinoceros Beetle

Elephant Shrew

Ant Lion

Leopard Tortoise

Cockles, Enin, T.H, Double Carpet, Tips and Neves. Second Part!

Second part of this project was to find out what the list actually meant and illustrate it literally. These words are to do with tictac, betting slang for horse racing that is. You know those old men in at the races in white gloves who make lots of strange hand signals? Well that tic tac. Its a secret language that is dying out, that the bookies use to signal the odds to each other. Did you guess the words right?
I printed a man doing tictac and then copied and reduced it into a flip book. Voila! A tic tac man.

Here are a few of the printed originals.

And copied into the flipbook:

Cockles, Enin, T.H, Double Carpet, Tips and Neves.

What do these words mean to you? For this project we had a list of words. We weren't told what the words meant and the first part of the project was to illustrate what we could imagine the words to be. I know Burlington Bertie is a music hall song and Cockles are a seaside food, so I decided to make the words acts in a old timey music hall.
The poster was linocut and the printed on white paper and also a on a collaged background I put together.

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!

Day Project 1.

This was a day project we had which involved illustrating the opening line of various books. The catch was were weren't allowed to use images, only text and font. The final had to be A1 size and capture the feeling of the line.

My opening line was from 'The Name of the Rose':
"It is cold in the scriptorium. My thumb aches. I leave this manuscript, I do not know for whom; I no longer know what it is about. Stat rose pristine nomine, nomina nuda tenemus."

This is still the News!

Just to show you the massive amount of drawing for the animation!

A page with part of an owl sequence.

And the pile of sequences... each sequence probably had at least 20 images... some more!

And finally part of one of the children sequences.