Penguin

If I had a penguin I'd make sure he stayed warm in a little jumper.

Bring on winter!

Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

Christmas card number 2 is done! A festive Swiss inspired cuckoo clock. We had one once, although the cuckoo-ing did get a tad annoying at 3 in the morning... but they're so gorgeous I think it's worth it!

Christmas Carousel

Although it's only October, Christmas is coming up pretty quick. I decided to go all Victorian-esque this year with my card designs, so here's the first one of a carousel horse (or 3!) With the two compositions I have the choice between a square card or a tall thin card, plus I can go over the original drawing but change the pattern or the colours if I feel like it so lots of variations are possible!

'Crooked' - Illustration Friday

This piece I originally did for the Illustration Friday topic 'Swamp', and as I've been super busy and haven't taken part in months I thought I'd pop it up for this weeks topic 'Crooked'! So here's my higgledy-piggledy swamp house once more :)

'Proper Job' Woes...

Finally, a finished piece! It's only taken me about 4 weeks to actually do some work. Unfortunately recently my 'proper job' has taken over and finding time to do any arty bits has been near impossible. So I'm really pleased I've managed to finish this!

Based on a photograph I took in Malta, I decided to make it more of a 'scene', adding the man in the coat and setting it at night with the orange street lamps.

Hopefully in the next few weeks I'll be able to do a lot more work and get back into the rhythm I had before!

Over and over...

Oh I do like a good pattern... this one took me a while as mirroring the birds correctly was a bit of a pain! But I'm really pleased with the outcome. The process involved a dodecahedron split into 12 isosceles triangles (yes it's rather maths heavy producing these!) and each of the 12 triangles has one image within it. It's then mirrored back to back around until the entire dodecahedron is filled.... phew! Quite labour intensive work but I adore the fact they grow almost organically in the paper. And who said maths wouldn't help in the real world?! I based the colours on oriental drawings and paintings, as I thought it would suit the delicacy of the pattern, particularly the pink against the jade :D

Stag-sketch

Apologies for the lack of posts, it's not been the best couple of weeks for doing work with my proper job getting manic, and the Olympics stuff happening! But I managed to sketch out this guy yesterday using just plain old HB pencil. I'm hoping to do a bigger piece maybe in mixed media so this is only a sketch for part of it. I just need the time to sit down and do some 'proper work'! Hopefully this weekend :D

Hope everybody's enjoying the London Olympics so far, it's all been pretty exciting over here as I'm sure you can imagine!

Sugar Skull

So, I've wanted to do more patterns for a while now, but always put if off and put it off until eventually I forget about it. Today I had the idea of doing a Mexican Sugar Skull, but with one of my patterns in the background. This is the result! The colours were tricky to get right and the initial drawing took me forever (I hand draw all of it, which involves a lot of working out and pattern plotting before I make the pen marks!) I think it works really well, and I could see it as a print. So, procrastination over! Hooray!

Blue Sunday Blue Tit

The weather in the UK at the moment is beyond dire, it just keeps raining! And to top it off I've not been well at all, so feeling a bit sorry for myself currently.
To cheer myself up I got my felt tip pens going again, and out came this Blue Tit who I think is rather cute. This one only took me 15 minutes, still striving to loosen up my drawings and I think it's paying off!
Here's hoping to a better week this week!

Bzzz...

Just a simple bumblebee to distract me from the stresses of a manic Monday. A quick sketch drawn on my lunch-break that I actually had a bit of spare time to do something with! Have a good week all :)