My First Children's Book!

Front cover

Back Cover

This is my finished children's book, I'm so happy with it it took so long to do and neaten and adjust and re-adjust! It's only a dummy book to send into the Macmillan Children's Book competition but everything had to be done and because I choose the hard route of having Bert eat lots of items from each letter of the alphabet it was very fiddly drawing them all together!

Any ways I hope you all like it! It's not bad for a first attempt, don't know whether I'd ever want to try doing a children's book again though!

Psychoville

I am soooo excited! Psychoville starts again on BBC 2 next Thursday, if you haven't seen the first series you should definitely get hold of them and watch them! If you liked the league of gentleman you will absolutely love this. Heres a few images from the new series and the old series.

Poster for the second series just above. (Even the poster is exciting!)

The majority of the cast at the end of the second series.

The Crabtree Twins from the first series.

Maureen and David who are mother and son but they have a very strange relationship and also like going around murdering people! They are in the first series and will be in the second series too. David even has a site on his morbid fascination with serial killers. http://www.bestmurders.co.uk/

Joy who has a doll that she thinks is a real baby! She is crazy and Dawn French plays the part very well! Joy even has her own website on child care. http://www.freddyfruitcake.co.uk/site.html

Mr Lomax is an old man who has an obsession over collecting cuddly toys, to point that he gave his eyes to the Crabtree twins for a cuddly toy. He calls the toys his 'commodities' and he has a website too http://www.lomaxcommodities.co.uk/

My Jolly and My Jelly are arch enemies because Mr Jolly who is the nicer and cleaner looking clown is the reason why Mr Jelly lost his hand and can't get any work. Both of them are always mixed up at birthday parties. My Jelly has his own website for his children's parties http://www.jellyparties.co.uk/ And Mr Jolly also has a website http://www.jollyparties.co.uk/

And these are some sketches by David Sheersmith creating the characters. I thought I'd add these in because its amazing to look at these and then see the characters, from small drawings fantastic and surreal people have been created!

Anyhow thought I would share this because with you all because it's just one of the best dark comedy series i have ever seen! The main website is http://www.bbc.co.uk/psychoville/.

Glastonbury!

I decided to enter into the Glastonbury t shirt design competition to go towards my projects this term. I went for something a little different to my usual style something brighter and more fun! I've been looking a lot at the 60's groovy style from posters to art! Especially Heinz Eldermann who was one of the main artists for the Beatles and did the artwork for the yellow submarine. His work is so bright and bold and although it looks simple to do, after working with all the colours I did on this piece it really isn't as simple as it seems! I hope the judges like this fun and funky Glastonbury stage bursting with patterns and wearing very groovy wellys!

Inspirational illustrator of the day!

David Hughes! Love this guys work and if you haven't seen his work before and you are into pen and ink like myself you should definitely check it out! This is his website : http://www.davidhughesillustration.co.uk/

The Rat Catcher!

Another recent project I have worked on was a fairytale project. It was really quite an interesting project because I learnt a lot about the origins of fairy tales, and how brutal nearly all the early versions of them are. For instance in the original sleeping beauty, the princess is raped in her sleep my her father and gives birth to two children and the only reason she wakes is because on of the children sucks the prick out of her finger. Gruesome!

The story I decided upon was 'the Rat-catcher' also known as the Pied Piper. This tale again had many various endings and reasons behind the story. Some included the children perhaps having a 'dancing disease' so they went crazy and danced out the village to their death and the Rat Catcher himself being the symbol of death, others referred to the children having the plague and that's why they were led out the village. More lurid variations had the Rat Catcher drugging the children and leading them off to a cave were he had his wicked way with them. The one I settled upon to reinterpret was the idea that the Rat Catcher in his rage led the children off to the river and drowned them. The images above are only five of the seven I did because I felt the other two not included were not as strong.

My favourite ones are the first were the rats are invading peoples houses, the second were you can see them been chased out by the Rat Catcher and the final image were the children are drowning. They have all been done in watercolour, pen and ink and on my three favourites i have adjusted the colours for stronger contrasts in photoshop.

Queen Bee

Just a bit of fun really, a fast ink drawing on some old fashion design instructions with a sprinkle of photoshop!

James and the Giant Peach!

I have been trying to enter some competitions recently and one of them was the Puffin Book cover competition. The children's cover was to re-create the cover for 'James and the Giant Peach' which I thought would be a great one to do because the story itself is so fun and magical.

I decided upon the idea of arranging the characters into the shape of the peach, I think trying to create the charters them self was probably the hardest part without been too influenced by either the film characters of Quentin Blake! But I managed to do them with my own style! I went for a 60's poster style for the cover with block colours and groovy lines and letters, the brief stated that typography was important so I thought the 60s theme would give it a something a little different! I was very happy with the end result I feel it will attract not only children but adults too.

Pencil roughs that I used the vector pen tool to neaten.

watercolour roughs for the lines

Finished piece.

Puppet Show

After the seven deadly sins project I thought 'woop yeah no more 3D!' then however they sprang a puppet project on us! I was excited at first but then struggled with how I was going to execute my ideas into a 3D puppet! The theme was 'social stereotypes' so I focused on the idea of a damsel in distress but with a twist as I focused on the problem women have with growing old gracefully without the use of plastic surgery. So my lady 'Barbara' is an older lady who dresses like a teen, and has massive fish lips from plastic surgery and a bottle of wine to drown her sorrows with. Then for her husband 'Trevor' I focused on the idea of a couch potato with the beer belly string vest and a chocolate bar in hand! The child 'Toby' they have is a boarding school stereotypical 'bad boy'. Like a more modern 'Just William'.

I made them all out of thick card and painted them all with acrylic.

The Circus!

Just realised I never put any of my completed Circus pieces up! These are my 4 best finished ones. We have the clowns from my page on Coulrophobia (the fear of clowns), my freaks for my history on freak shows page, the ever so lovely Lady Le Gros from my profile of a famous circus star, and the lobster-boy for my crime page! It was a really fun project and I worked all the images digitally after I had inked and water coloured them before hand. Even a few months down the line now I'm still really happy with the end results.