wearing Blake's shoes

Here are a couple more illustrations for Cambridge University Press based on Quentin Blake's style.

I call the top one "iClean" :)

wearing Blake's hat

As an illustration gun-for-hire, or more accurately: pencil-box-for-hire, I am at times asked to emulate iconic styles. There are few illustrators as iconic as the legendary Quentin Blake, who famously drew Roald Dahl's classic masterpieces, too numerous to single out here.

His site is full of wonderful things, I highly recomend having a look at it,  my favourite being this gem - the master at work. I also found this lovely blog article about him and his landscapes.

I was commissioned by Cambridge University Press to adopt Mr Blake's style because they had used an extract of "Danny, champion of the world" in their Grade 7, English language schoolbooks.
I enjoyed the style so much that I used it throughout the Grd7 material I was assigned!

This last panel comes from Danny, I drew on Roald Dahl's own gipsy caravan for inspiration...

Imagine owning your very own gipsy caravan!

beastly fun

Recently, I found myself in the middle of a publishing maelstrom, the deadlines for next year’s school sylabus had everybody in a frenzy! With more work coming in than ever before, I had to get creative about stretching my styles without losing time…

These illustrations come from a couple of different stories for Cambridge University Press, do you see the subtle variation in style?

This next one featured a “funny” dog, that’s all the motivation I needed to cast my Una as the lead role :)
(Una is a basset, they’re pretty funny… but next time I’ll use Zoe [the pug] they’re even funnier)

snowy blues whale and a bunch of talking-heads

Like the title implies, here are a few random illustrations from a recent project.
Published by Cambridge Uni Press, this is one of the endeavours that has kept me quiet lately.
When it comes to illustrating school books, I like to vary the drawings as much as possible and keep a little room for experimentation.These are some of the prelim sketches, can you spot the differences?
This one was dropped altogether...

remember the Morse Code?

The third book I illustrated for CUP's Rainbow Reading series was about Samuel Morse and his invention, the Telegraph Machine.

This one was a particular challenge for me, they wanted a comic-book format (which I was only too happy to do) that in itself was great but researching everything proved tricky as it juuust pre-dates the first Daguerrotypes (photos), in fact it turns out that old man Morse was the first one to also obtain the licence to produce daguerrotypes in America! He was also an accomplished artist, busy fellow, AND led troupes in the Civil War...

Anyway, I digress, I used every trick in my book on this story, rendering inkwash bacdrops and adding cartoony characters which I thought 'popped out' very nicely. In comp, I treated the illustrations to give them a Victorian feel and added what photographic textures I could.

If anything, I got to draw many ships... as you can see :)

coupla faerie's tails

Immediately after the book on Phosphorus, Cambridge University Press hired me to illustrate a book collecting 2 fairytails: The Emperor's New Clothes and The Musicians of Bremen.

The latter of which I knew nothing about (hiding under a rock an' all) and has since become my favourite!

I went a bit more 'old school' on these but kept the 'photoshop' attitude from the previous book; basically the inks, colours and shadows were all drawn seperately to give me the most control over each layer... I'm padantic that way ;)

For the emperor, I broke out the ol' markers left over from college but not dry; then for the musicians I opted for watercolours to give a subtle difference between the two...

alchemy goodness

This is one of 3 installments to show some extracts from books I illustrated for Cambridge University Press last year.

The first was about the discover of phosphorus through alchemy- "Take one cup of urine; let it lie in a tub until it breeds worms..." reads the back cover :)

I must thank my editor, she gave me the perfect theme to explore with techniques I'd been thinking of. This gave me the perfect opportunity to experiment and get a lot of 'brain clutter' out of my head tomake space for new ideas!

I adopted a 'photoshop' attitude with these, drawing straight away in layers that I could then scan individualy and comp together with relative ease. The medium is a mixture of inkwash, pen&ink, photography and whatever odds and ends I had at the time...