Big Update!

Oh wow, so much has happened since my last post!

At the beginning of May, I went to New York with my course. It was absolutely amazing, and definitely gave me the travelling bug! We had the opportunity to show our portfolios to some amazing publishers and agents, and I got some great advice and feedback.

Not long after that, I handed in my coursework for the last time, and set up my space for the degree show! Now, I am well and truly nearly a graduate - which is scary, but also very exciting.

The private view for our show is tonight, 6 - 9pm (if any one of you is coincidentally in the Falmouth area, ha!), and goes on until the middle of next week - pop along if you can!

I will also be updating my website soon with some work I have done recently - amongst other things, I worked on a little advertising campaign which you can see here: https://www.facebook.com/IamProHeart , which was super good fun (my work is the informative illustrations, I particularly liked drawing the man on the bench!).

Hopefully I'll be able to update you on more of my projects soon - I've got a couple of things going on, so stay tuned! I'm also thinking about selling prints more seriously now, so if any of you have anything you would particularly like to see me selling, let me know!

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My next post won't be birds, I promise!

Smews are my new favourite ducks

 Smews are my new favourite ducks.

 A Mandarin Duck.

 A preview of a much larger picture (it just needs a few tweaks).

Just a few peeks at what I've been doing lately (it's mostly sketches and experiments) - hopefully I'll have some finished things to post in the next few days.

A look at some birds

Some computery sketches. Birds are cute!

The end of another year...

A design for Gerda from my 'Snow Queen' project

Wednesday was hand-in day, which means I've finished all my work for my second year of university (and suddenly have a bit more free time on my hands)!

In other news, on Monday I went to the private view for the Macmillan Prize, where I got to talk to lots of lovely people from Macmillan, and of course other prize winners as well. I didn't go alone - my flatmate, Emily, was highly commended for her entry, so we made the long trip up to London (and back again, the day after) together. All in all it was a great experience, and my first taste of what might happen after I finish my degree... though I've still got another year to go yet!

Fresh from the Sketchbook

So right now I'm having fun with some character design -these concepts are based off the story The Snow Queen. I'm looking at just a few characters, mainly Gerda (the heroine), the Witch of Finland (or maybe the Lapland lady), the Grandma, the Snow Queen herself (the thing that set this project off was the above photoshop doodle), and perhaps Kai (who somehow happens to be one of the only boys in the story...).

Aaaaanyway, here are some bits and pieces from my sketchbook:

 

And there's lots more where these came from...

The Macmillan Book prize!

The day before yesterday, I got a very good phone call. My children's book, 'No Such Thing' (that's the thing I posted a sneak peek of), has been awarded 3rd place in the Macmillan Book Prize for students, yay!!! :D

It's certainly a nice way to finish off my second year!

I've been busy

Over the past few weeks I've been working on a quite big project for uni, but I can now say that it is pretty much finished, yay!

Here is a sneaky peek:

It's another children's book; but this time I wrote the story as well (which took far longer than I anticipated)! A lot of experimentation went into this project, and overall I think it was a good thing for me to do.

Oh, and I've decided for my next project that I will be doing character design (it's my favourite thing to do, and I feel like I haven't done it properly in ages), so expect lots of updates over the next couple of weeks :D

Furniture

A bit of playing around for the project I'm working on at the moment.

I've thought about 'furniture' too much, now it doesn't feel like a real word anymore...

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

So, for my first self-negotiated project I designed a bookcover for one of my favourite ever books (this isn't the super-final colour adjusted version, because that is on my memory-stick, which has decided it does not want to connect to my laptop anymore...)!
A bit of a self-indulgent project, but it was lots of fun coming up with concepts and compositions :D

Infact, here are a few of the other (very) rough concepts, just to prove that I have been doing something these past two weeks!!

In the end, I can't resist a starry-sky-night-scene...

Monkeyology

So, my information project is done and handed in, and I have 2 weeks of relative freedom, during which I have to get an idea of what projects I want to do next! This was our last set project ever (I think), from now on we'll have a lot more freedom, yay :o...

This project ended up as a set of three, double sided accordion booklets, which would come in a slipcase (the very bottom picture). I only illustrated one of the booklets, and there is a surprise mandrill in another one of the books (because I love their faces so much)! I like to imagine the monkeys on a long branch would make a nice wall decoration or something...

I feel like I developed my style quite a bit during this project as well... it's funny how drawing something different can make you look at the way you work in a shiny new way, hmmm.

Monkeys!

Sorry for the complete lack of updates lately, now Christmas break is over and I am back at uni hopefully I can get back to being productive again! 

These are some rough bits from my current project - it's information this time. As you can probably guess, I have chosen to do a project on monkeys.

In the Attic

Here are the three finished colour spreads from my latest university project, where I illustrated the text 'In the Attic' by Hiawyn Oram. The cat picture is tall because it is a fold down page in the dummy book. This was a super fun project, and working traditionally made a nice change from all the photoshop I've been doing!

There are mice in this post!

Here are a few sketches from the uni project I've been working on right now. It's the children's book project, which is super fun, but also super-lots-of-work.

Friday is Deadline Day

Hello! I've been busy with uni stuff (and it's only the beginning of the year :o), and the past two weeks we've been working on a book cover project. Here's my make-believe book. It's probably about some sort of storm...