Merry Christmas

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

The Darling Children

These are the Darling children from Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie.  The first chapter has a lot of nice descriptions in it that feel very visual.  I love this one of the kids going to school.  I think it's the 'in a row' part I like so much. 

 '...and soon, you might have seen the three of them going in a row to Miss Fulsom's Kindergarten school, accompanied by their nurse.'

This image was made digitally in Procreate.  I like the ease of digital black and white drawing but I'm not convinced yet that it's a way for me to work permanently.  I still do love drawing in pencil.

Mr. Darling and Wendy

 

This is an image for J.M Barrie's Peter Pan.  Mr. Darling is trying to calculate whether they can afford their baby, Wendy.  I always find it a very funny moment as it's obviously too late.

This image was created in Procreate.

New cards

 I've added some new card designs into my shop this week.  You can view them here.

Here is a look at the new single card designs.

Mirror, Mirror

Season's Readings

Toot Your Horn!

These Highland Blues are based on my #illo_advent drawings 2020 and are sold as a pack of three.

Highland Blues

Feel free to have a browse around.  I also sell screen prints and risographs.

Mirror, Mirror

This weeks #colour_collective fit in nicely with an illustration I did yesterday.  

Now available to buy as a greeting card.  Click here to go to the shop.

Final image.

I finally finished some pieces I'd been working on this week, had a tidy and decided to have a day drawing whatever I wanted.  And I had no idea what to do.  What do you draw when you can draw absolutely anything?  I usually revert to animals I like the look of, or things I've sketched before but never explored properly.  I find I think best when I start drawing.  I remembered a badger I'd drawn a long time ago so I drew badgers until I had an idea to make an image using only black and white animals.  

I liked that it looked like a Rorschach test.  I've been playing with Procreate lately and there's a symmetry function I hadn't used before and it's a lot of fun.  It's also so much faster to only draw half of an image.  I usually draw my outlines onto paper.  This is the first time I've really drawn everything onscreen. 

Procreate has a time lapse function so you can watch all the decisions being made in real time.  I finished the image in Photoshop so you only see up to a certain point here. 

Here's the original sketch.

What do you draw when you can choose whatever you want?  Do you have too many ideas or have to work them out on paper like I do?

Going underground

I've been playing around with black and white images again.  I've never really found a way of working that I'm completely happy with but I quite like this one.

I've been playing around with different ways to colour black and white images and I've found a nice digital brush that I like.  It's a lot faster than my usual method so that's a bonus.  Here are a few of my experiments.

The bear and the star

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

I've been listening to an audiobook of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll today so here's my White Rabbit.

and Alice falling 'down, down, down...'

and the sleepy dormouse, who's my favourite character in the whole book.

Northern Lights

I've been re-reading Northern Lights by Philip Pullman recently.  I first read the His Dark Materials trilogy when I worked in a teeny tiny workshop as a model tree maker.  Yes, I made model trees.  We worked in the middle of the Welsh countryside down a windy narrow track that delivery men could not find, and lunchtimes were spent reading and eating packed lunches.   There was no phone signal and nowhere for us to go so we dove into our books and visited lands far and wide, real and imaginary.  It was a pretty perfect way to spend lunch.  I was lucky enough to have the set that was beautifully illustrated by John Lawrence.  As far as I'm concerned he's untouchable and that is the version I always think of, but I've been having a bit of a go on my own, just as a sort of personal project, to see how I would do it.  It's very experimental so far, there's so much atmosphere to capture, but here's how it's going... 

I initially had something much darker in mind, concentrating on the lights, but there's something so appealing about the cleanliness of snow.  One of the beauties of working digitally is that you can chop, change and generate new ideas quickly as you work.

Original sketches

The original cover idea

The drawings for the cover.

Some drawings of our heroine Lyra

Playing with watercolour brushes this time.

Hedgepigs

After a day of photoshopping my book together, sadly not over-also sadly one of two, I thought I'd share the little hedgepig I drew on the train yesterday.  She's very nonchalant.  A hedgepig for anyone who doesn't live in my house is a hedgehog.  I love the way they teeter about in the dark.  Hopefully she'll have a starring role soon.

Nice day for a swim

                         Lazy as I am, I have not been swimming.  But I know some folks who have...

                                                       They've also been busy elsewhere...

And now they're getting ready for bed.

What's a day without beavers?

Another day, another beaver.

Sick day

                     Have been struck down by the common cold all day and so let there be beavers!

                                         Sadly after a bit o' photoshopping I still prefer the original.

The heavily patterned man

Whilst sketching today I found a man so heavily patterned as to be almost invisible to the naked eye.  I'm sure he must be plastered on missing posters country wide for he is camouflage itself.