Vroom!

Also, hit a wall with work yesterday, so instead spent time making a card for our good friend J who just passed her driving test ... woo! You go girl!

Oh-deer ...

Sneaky-peek at work-in-progress:

Juggling the work in progress ...

I know its been a bit quiet here on planetmithi - but it isn't for the lack of work! I'm juggling someting like four competition briefs; some personal work for my final project (and also for this group exhibiton); with atleast another three competition briefs coming up that I've put on the back burner for the time being as their deadlines are a bit more far away ... Illustration life is full - and full steam ahead towards the end of my degree! Scary!

To keep you entertained (and to show you what I've actually been doing the last few weeks ...), here's some pages from ye olde sketchy booke:

Some boats and ships and nautical things ...

Some stuff involving deer (they're mighty difficult to draw at the angle I've chosen to do them at!).

And some ideas that then went on to become this.

I am bored of sketching and developing ideas now - desperately want some of these things to come together as finished images!

The Big Team Scribble

I've given myself a break from school by doing a couple of fun competitions lately. Last week we had the Nobrow one, and this week its the "Big Team Scribble".

Intially I did three carriages that would link (as above) ... they're all in black-and-white and line-drawing as they're for a colouring-in zine.




But then I realised that she might not put the carriages back to back, but instead have them linked to each other with something (like in this picture from the blog). So I made another separate one on a completely different theme ...


yes, I do like the word "EXPRESS" ... And for those of you who are interested, here's a bit from my sketchbook showing a bunch of my concept sketches ... I quite like them - don't usually like my concept sketches ...

People I've Never met; Conversations I've Never had.

My submissions for the Nobrow illustration open invitation flickr competition:

Eu de Parfum

Today I have mostly been drawing ...

Meet the studio

For those of you bored of looking at my work - here's a little sneak-peak at the four other aspiring illustrators that I share our third-year studio space with:

Swedish graphic novelist to-be extraordinaire, Miss Jennie Gyllblad.

Far-too-skilled-for-his-own-good concept artist, Mr Richard Partridge.

More-imagination-than-you-can-shake-a-krusczyki-at Polish children's book illustrator, Miss Malgorzata Piatkowska.

And last but not least, all round good-egg, Miss Emily Rawle.

What a smashing bunch they are ... I'm so in denial about how much I'm going to miss this lot next year...

Fisherman ...

Having watched lots of fishermen going in and out of the little harbours in all the seaside villages we have visited in Cornwall, I've for a long time wanted to do a project based on some kind of fisherman-with-a-big-beard narrative. I still don't know what to make of it, but I thought I'd start by geting the fisherman image out of my head. Post assessment, I was given feedback that I worked best with shapes, and needed to break away from the use of lines to explain things. As an excercise, I thought I'd re-do my fisherman image as cut shapes. All experiments and work-in-progress ...

If any of you have or have access to a short, sweet, fisherman story that I could illustrate - would really appreciate hearing about it ...

The Musicians of Brahman ...

My ... its been a long time since I was here, hasn't it? Life has been quite full with family emergencies, assessments and dissertations - but its all done now ... Finally, we're on the home stretch towards graduation ... YIKES!

The last module was called "Preparation for self directed study" - genius title, don't you think? Gave us the freedom to do and explore whatever we wanted. And the assessmnet didn't mean we had to have anything finished, per se, but that we were making good progress towards finding our own 'visual language'. So, as you can imagine, I have a LOT of 'work-in-progress' rather than finished work. Part of the reason I haven't been posting lately - but I think I'm just going to start showing you process; and hopefully some of these things will come together for the final show in June. Enjoy!

Right, remember Mr tabla-playing monkey? Well, he was based on my original Asian musicians ... I then found out that each note within the Asian scale is represented by an animal ... I started running with that.

Here are some developement sketches:

And the finished painted animals:

The plan is to then make little hand-shaped (again, influenced by figures from Indian classical dance) shadow boxes with lots of layering. It hasn't quite come together, but you can see my test, and mock-ups. Am really enjoying this and hope it comes together well.

"Self-directed study", here I come!