I have a lovely husband :-)

This one is a little bit of a random (and a little sickening perhaps too?) post. James went through a short phase of making my food/drink look pretty :-)

Eden Project Trip

the eden project...

me drawing at the eden project!




lots of tiny ants!



snow outside the eden project






We went on a college trip to the Eden project back in December. It was a very surreal day with snow still on the ground outside and temperatures of 30 degrees in the tropics dome!! Our initial brief was to do 6 A4 pages of drawings of plants from the Eden project. This was a pretty massive task to do in such a short space of time- I'm not particularly confident in my drawing and to produce something that I'm pleased with usually takes me hours (for just one drawing!). Anyway I gave it my best shot and the results are above- I'm not particularly pleased with any of them but I guess that it's all good practice. We now have to develop these drawings into 'monster plants' more about this to follow in a later post!

Christmas Baking Fun

The pie is taking shape...

Before cooking!

Me with the pie.


Finished pie!



Coffee muffins.

Before cooking...


Just out of the oven.


The finished product!

It's hot!

James is testing them out- he said they tasted good although he doesn't looked too convinced here!

Me with the pie again!

I used the Christmas holidays as a chance to do some baking- mince pies (as promised to James), muffins (as I don't like mince pies) and a creamy gammon, onion and mushroom pie made with left over gammon from new year's eve in James lovely new pie dish which he got for Christmas. Yummy!

Christmas Card 2010

This is the Christmas card I made this year (and by this year I guess I mean last year seeming as it's now 2011!)

Paul The Octopus- final design

So.. this is my final design- it's 380 mm wide and 260mm high and has a 5mm bleed around the edge as specified in the brief it also allows for the center fold of the magazine (it is intended for a double page spread). We could opt to leave 'dead space' for text if we wanted to but I thought there was already quite a lot going on in the piece. I'm reasonably pleased with it- again I'm not sure my style of illustration really suits editorial stuff but I've given it my best shot!

Paul The Octopus

We had to start off by doing 8 thumbnail ideas before choosing 2 of them to take further.


This was the first of the 2 ideas I chose. This one is a more realistic take than the other- the other idea was favoured by my tutors and other students on my course so I developed that one more.

This is the initial development of the second idea in black and white- this idea was liked by my tutor but I'm still not sure that my style of drawing really works in this context.... my tutor did make the point that if I was in the position of doing an editorial illustration in real life they would have hired me after already seeing examples of my work so I wouldn't have to worry about them not liking my style...

This one is collage on request from my tutor- I think it would be more at home on a birthday card...

This is my favourite- much more subtle and detailed than the others (it is done in coloured pencil).

Here the top one is done with coloured pencils and the bottom is done with watercolours. The top one is way to 'garish' (unfortunately it was all I had with me at the time) and the bottom one isn't detailed or 'exact' enough for my liking although I much prefer the subtle colours.

The second part of our module (after the Darwin bit) was on editorial illustration. We got a choice of headlines all about animals and had to pick one to illustrate- mine was on Paul the psychic octopus. This isn't my preferred area of illustration at all and I'm not particularly pleased with any of it but here is some of my initials ideas etc for you to have a look at.