Creatures

The Man Of Flowers

A character I drew tonight with a little man taking a ride on his leg.

2 bad dudes

On a side note, I'm just discovering the books of John Burningham (Borka) and they are brilliant. His line, characters, the dissonance of styles used side by side in the same book, the scratchy, unfinished, roughness of everything he does, sparkle. There's magic in his work, it's defiantly unique and daring.

Karakters

Star jig and a lion

A sketch. I'll keep moving things around and redrawing till it's just right.

Spiderlings or Octopodes? (rare plural term)

Toys

Here are a set of toys I designed a while ago...ooh, a long while! They are made with Sculpey and random foodstuffs like rice and pasta.

Green croc-man

A portion of tonight's doodles with some fancy type. Also, I found a great resource featuring videos of British children's book author/illustrators discussing their work and process of putting together books which you can view here:
http://www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/shadowingsite/watch_listen.asp

Cup o' cat

Poor thing! Little does he know that he will meet his soul-mate on his travels.

High-tech bunny

So, after always liking my sketches, doodles more than a finished, clean illustration I've started to experiment with ways of keeping the vivacity and charm of the sketch in my finals. I've started using vellum, the photocopier and lots of white-out to compose the final picture and this is a small experiment. I want to do more and play further but it's a start and I'm quite pleased.

Also, check out "The Magic Pencil" website (http://magicpencil.britishcouncil.org/) for a great survey of current British book illustration including profiles on Sara Fanelli, Quentin Blake, Raymond Briggs and John Burningham as well as others.

Topple

Him

Another portfolio piece. I think I'm happy with this drawing and now just doing different color studies on test-prints.

Stormin'

The results of tonight's sketching session

Homage

Can't resist creating an entry for some of my favorite materials at the moment.
The photo features the great, waxy, 3-in-1 Woody crayons by Stabilo which are water soluble and come in two sizes.
The reliable Staedler Graphite 779 mechanical pencil which feels great in the hand after hours of sketching. The Faber-Castell Perfection pencil for unbelievably precise erasures and finally the amazing range of Conte pencils which are a joy to play with. Ok, enough nerdy-ness.