I’ve really missed London Zoo since I left London last year, I spent days and days drawing there. Luckily we have Paignton Zoo in Devon so I’ve been able to collect some photos, which will be used in a new book I’m working on.

I have no idea where the last couple of months have disappeared to. Suddenly its summer (well sort of!), the bluebells in our local woodland have gone, and its been warm enough to spend a few evenings after work at the beach.

Heres a very quick re-cap of some of the things I’ve been doing over the last couple of months…

Since January this year, I was fortunate enough to be commissioned as a Creative Partner for Victoria Park Nursery in Newbury and Creative Partnerships. This has involved answering this question:

“How do we create a shared language
so that we are able to talk together about
learning so that we can create a community
of confident successful learners?”

This question has been answered in several inventive and creative ways, inspired by the values of Reggio Emilia and keeping Illustration skills, risk-taking and a process led solution at it’s core.

Here are a few photos of what we’ve been doing over the last seven months…
















If you would like more information about this collaboration, then please get in touch.

There are now some prints and books (and a few originals) of my Imagined Birds series available to buy on-line from only £2.00, you can find them at the following links…

Folksy

Etsy


Dawanda

“A love that hurt everyone it touched”

Cover for the complete and unabridged version of Andersen’s Fairy Tales. I prefer the original versions of these fairy tales, they are gritty and often dark, and haven’t lost the original messages that they were intended to communicate.

I decided not to use a character for the cover, as most versions of this cover usually do. As this particular version was aimed at adults, I decided to keep it fairly abstract, hinting at the colours, forests and settings of the fairy tales rather than the narratives within the book, I think thats been done a few too many times already.

This drawing was created in brush and ink, in several layers, from a photograph I took of the woodland here in Devon, just down the road. There was beautiful lighting that day, that had awoken a medley of colours I’d never noticed there before, so this image somehow seemed perfect for this cover.

The hand lettering was inspired my a typeface of the same period.

A book cover for ‘Victorian Diaries’ which shares excerpts from genuine Victorian Diaries, giving insights to the lives of men and women of that period. I’ve always found the Victorian era to be an inspiration. I love the literature of that time, the costume and the beautiful handwriting. I bought a genuine Victorian Diary at an auction a few years ago and used some of the pages as background texture for this design, and imitated the style of handwriting for the titles and author.

The people are drawn from my own collection of Victorian photographs.

something from this week…

an illustration for an article called ‘Bread is Rubbish’ for Cakes and Canapes Magazine.

My website is currently being re-designed and built to reflect the progression in my practice to date. Its something I’ve been trying to sort out for over a year now, but have had to bite the bullet and start from scratch with a brand new website. Unfortunately the last one was really difficult to manage and reduced the quality of my illustrations when they were uploaded, so I’m looking forward to a fresh start!

There’ll be a holding page up there until its ready.

I’ve just put together my first little package for the wonderful artist Chloé Regan.

We will be sending each other pieces of our work and other paraphernalia that the other can react, collaborate on and respond to. We’ve so far decided to let the work develop quite organically via post and some meet ups, seeing if a theme arises naturally, and possibly resulting in an exhibition later in the project.

I’ll let you know how we get on.

Thanks to MISC magazine (USA) for featuring me in their Spring issue.