Folio Society Competition work so far.

Peculiar Bliss Issue 8: Explosive theme

My image has been selected for the current Peculiar Bliss issue. Also shown is the front cover image of Jason Yang.

Angels and Monsters

This was my entry for the Porter and Jenkinson Curious Pursuits exhibition at the Portico Gallery in February 2012, the results will posted in the following week.

Piccadilly Station 30ft commercial showing Preservation Bear

I can't believe that bear has got itself onto Piccadilly station 30 ft billboard now! Pretty amazing!

Front cover of The Drum

The bear has done me proud again, and managed to get itself on the front cover of The Drum.

Degree Show

Finally made it. It all came together on the night, it was a a good show, everyone's individuality shone out, and I had some really nice comments about my work.

The Outsider by Albert Camus/Folio Society Competition

The above two illustrations are about the character Salamano, in The Outsider, and his dog.

Foto-grafik project continued. Themes of Destruction, Erasure and Memory.

A series of old found photographs of bombsites in Oostend, Belgium was the starting point for this work. The destruction and dismantling of something, the blank space left in history, the erasure of communities and people's lives, and the space left for memory, individual and collective, and new narrative to develop. This resonates with the themes in O'Donaghue's work, war and it's destruction, found photographs of his father's during the first world war, and how individual and collective memory is constructed.

Where the Wild Things Are.

my zoo book

Initial stages of a picture book for the Macmillan Picture Book Competition Brief. It is not finished yet.

Dangerous Knitting.

Experimenting with superimposing photographic and drawn image on top of silkscreen background, and rephotographing and printing on inkjet printer. I find the blurry, grainy quality interesting.

Graphic Intervention into Photography.

The Children's book for the Macmillan competition brief was about the zoo, with lots of animals, prior to that I had a narrative developed for another project, which I called "Dangerous Knitting", for which I set up a scene to photograph. The above scene was an amalgamation of the two. The blurriness of the ink which took weeks to dry, and was constantly changing, gives it an interesting quality. Note the giraffe's legs at the top of the stairs.

Foto-grafik project.

Photographing light and shadow after researching the working methods of Hughie O'Donaghue's into the integration of painted and photographic media. I researched a lot into the methods of photographic transfer, especially from the book of his latest exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery, "The Journey" edited by Tanja Pirsig-Marshall. I also experimented with solvent transfer methods, as the thin quality of the paper was difficult to get through my printer at the time, although I am working on it.

continental drift...

Mechanical Camel

Dada Poem.

More First Year work, I'm feeling nostalgic...

Big Bouffant hairdo dancing to the Latin sounds ... Playing with the omnicrom machine.

Some First year work/aiming for a sense of continuity...

Its a caterpillar, a ram, and a zebra, and yes, they are real bones in case anybody is wondering.

Playing with Photoshop or "The Ice Hand Cometh"

Started photographing wool, and this rubber band ball is a variation on this theme. It looks more like the image of the huge ball of wool in the sky in the "Dangerous Knitting" story.



I made a hand out of ice by suspending a rubber glove filled with water and soy sauce in a freezer. Then it was photographed and put into Photoshop, where it was manipulated digitally to look arctic and moonlit, and also frostbitten. It was in response to an editorial article on "What does it feel like ...", and this particular story was about getting frostbite amidst a beautiful moonlit icy arctic landscape, and subsequently sawing off the frostbitten parts back at home in the garden shed.

Le Gun talk and workshop.

Salford Uni had a 2 day event with Le Gun collective members Chris Bianchi and Bill Bragg. They gave a talk about how they started publishing their magazine whilst still at the RCA, and how it has expanded from 1000 to 5000 runs so far. They started off by inviting students, professionals, and anybody whose work included drawing to submit work for the magazine. Last year around 500 illustrators submitted work, according to Peter Lyle, Varoom Summer 2009 edition. Besides Bianchi and Bragg, the collective comprises four other members, Matthew Appleton, Robert Green, Alex Wright and Neal Fox. They said that sometimes, in their drawing collaborations, there can be as many as 30 of them working together on a project. Their main interest is in sequential narrative illustration, and they suggested they have a more fine art approach to illustration, in that they want to take it in a broader context than just the industry at present, and are also more interested in the "drawings you keep in a drawer" than conventional illustration. They use an old fashioned printing press and letter press and produce the magazine themselves, and are intent on producing the work in the best quality they can. They showed slides of their work, explaining how it came about, and also an animation for Pete Docherty. Studio 8 asked them to decorate the Royal Festival Hall with their collaborative illustrations for the D&AD awards in which they produced life-size drawings of various people in the design world.

In the afternoon, Mark and I took part in a workshop of drawing characters, which I enjoyed. The following day we started on buildings and scenes as an environment for the characters to hang in, hoisted up on string, and it all started to come together really well as a collaborative event.