Merry Christmas

 Wishing you a very merry christmas and a happy new year.

Nutcracker

 A little Nutcracker I made before Christmas.  This was made digitally using Procreate.  I then added texture in Photoshop.  It's a two colour image and where they overlap the darkest tone is created.

Shop Small

 Just a friendly reminder to shop in local, small or independent stores when you can.  It makes a massive difference to small businesses.

Thank you to everyone who has purchased something from my shop this year. 

  You can find my shop here

Winter Blues

 Heres my finished #illo_advent for 2020

Have a lovely Christmas.  See you in 2021!

Some of the designs are now available as a set of notecards.  Click here to go to the shop.

Illo Advent

Every year on Twitter a bunch of illustrators get involved in #illo_advent.  The task is to draw an image every day leading up to Christmas.  And all things festive are welcome.  

I've done the advent in the past and have learned that by limiting my colours and the size of my images it's a more a more achievable and enjoyable task for me.  It also means that I don't spend hours on each one.  That can happen.

This year I'm using two coloured pencils (polychromos, if you're interested) and white gouache.  The images are about 2.5cm wide by 5cm tall so there's no room to fuss.  I'm trying to draw something I see every day so my village and the surrounding area feature heavily.  

Here are my Winter Blues...so far.

They're hard to photograph well but here's a shot of a few of them together.

Click here to see my ghost of illo_advent past.

A Christmouse Gift

I've been seeing a lot of really cool painters online recently and it made me want to have a go.  This week I took a morning off from photoshop and dug out my old paintbrushes and some gouache paint, which I've never used.  Using different types of paint is a real learning curve, I'm more used to oils (although I haven't used them in 10 years), but what I did love about gouache is that it dries very quickly.  As someone who smudges everything this is a real advantage.  I also like that you can repaint areas that have gone wrong very easily, which is a must when you're new!  I didn't quite get the thin layers of paint I wanted but this was only my first go and I'll definitely play around with them some more.  The draw of painting for me is the looseness, my book work tends to be very precise and I wanted to move away from that.  All of the finishing details are in pencil because I love the texture of coloured pencils and I can control them far better than a fine brush.

It's only little.

Here are a few of the process shots.  The final image is A6 and I used Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils because I happen to have a box and they're really lovely to draw with.

Sketch and first layer of paint

More paint

That's enough paint!

Details

I seem to have an obsession with drawing mice at Christmas.  I like this one, she's pretty cute.  

Hopefully more adventures in paint will follow.

#illo_advent 2017

This December I decided to take part in #illo_advent again, where you draw a different festive illustration everyday.  If you follow the hashtag on twitter you can see many different illustrators taking part.  It can become quite time-consuming so this year I decided to limit my colour palette in an effort to keep them simple and save time.  Here are this year's batch.

Here's a closer look

Week one

Week two

Week three

I gave up on day 21 as I'd just finished the artwork for a new book and as much as I wanted to complete my advent set I was eager to begin my holiday.  I did do one final image for the 25th though.  We have a Christmas day birthday in our household so I try make a card that covers both occasions.

Shop

Just a little reminder that Santa is coming and my shop is full of screen prints and Christmas cards for those, like me, who leave it to the last minute.  I will be panic buying very soon.  

My shop is here.

Happy holidays!

#illo_advent

This year I've decided to fully commit to #illo_advent (which I say most years but this year I haven't failed!  Not yet anyway)  The point, for me, was to draw something everyday as somedays are spent entirely on my computer.  For this reason I wanted to draw on paper, and to post it online no matter what it was.  I'm really not keen on showing sketches so this was to spur me into showing whatever I drew, whether I liked it or not.  The bonus of paper is that I'm able to give my favourites away.

So here they all are.  Some better than others, some have already gone to good homes.  My advent only goes up to day 24 like the chocolate calendars, at least that's how they worked when I was a kid.

For all the Christmas babies, happy birthday!

I made it to the end this year!! Merry Christmas folks. See you in the future...anytime from now.