Lovely window display at Dublin’s Hodges Figgis (which also happens to be Ireland’s oldest bookstore) featuring my illustrations for The Nutcracker and copies of the book.
Photographs by Hodges Figgis on Twitter.
21 Saturday Nov 2015
Posted Books, Illustration
inLovely window display at Dublin’s Hodges Figgis (which also happens to be Ireland’s oldest bookstore) featuring my illustrations for The Nutcracker and copies of the book.
Photographs by Hodges Figgis on Twitter.
19 Thursday Nov 2015
Posted Illustration, Personal Work
inTags
animals, Birds, Carlos Guastavino, Dove, Poetry, Rafael Alberti
‘Se equivocó la paloma,
se equivocaba…’
This was inspired by a song by Carlos Guastavino, which in turn is a setting of the poem, The Dove, by Rafael Alberti, to music. I particularly like this choral performance of it. The drawing isn’t meant to illustrate the poem/song as such, but was more a reflection of my own thoughts which took the opening lines and refrain as inspiration.
11 Wednesday Nov 2015
Posted Illustration, Personal Work
inTags
animals, Cory Godbey, Horses, Humour, Pudgy Horse, Redbubble, Unicorn
One of a few recent drawings I didn’t quite get a chance to post. I’ll try to intersperse them along with work from The Nutcracker in the coming weeks. This drawing has now found a new home with the brilliant and much-beloved illustrator, Cory Godbey, who shared a picture of it on his Instagram.
You’l notice that my signature appears in the bottom left corner of the original but not in the scan. That was simply because I’d forgotten to sign it prior to scanning, then promptly forgot to re-scan the piece again before posting it off to Cory.
Pudgy Unicorn is available as a print from my Redbubble store.
10 Tuesday Nov 2015
Posted Books, Illustration, Personal
inLast winter, whilst working on The Nutcracker, I shared this little detail on a few social media platforms and said how much I’d love such a blue jasperware bauble as the one I was painting.
Today, I discovered that of course Wedgwood actually do produce such things. It seems perfectly obvious now, but for whatever reason, it didn’t occur to me then!
Incidentally, Wedgwood blue is one of my favourite blues ever.
09 Monday Nov 2015
Posted Books, Illustration, Magazines, Personal
inTags
Christmas, ImagineFX, Jingle Bells, Oxford University Press, The Night Before Christmas, The Nutcracker, Walker Books
For aught that the five persons reading this blog might be interested. 😉
I moved house back in May, which in large part explains the lack of recent updates. I have more space in which to work, to breathe, to move around, to reach for and find things. No more leaking roofs and subjecting my books, materials and things to water damage. No draughts, cold and mould. I won’t list them all, but the new home is, in short, so much better in scores of ways.
I had a small spot in the October 2015 issue of ImagineFX magazine in a feature about artists who work monochromatically.
I must admit that I’m a little disappointed with the reproduction of the images. Because I work intricately at a small scale and the subjects within the images themselves are small, having them greatly reduced means that one can’t see very much at all. Oh, well.
The Nutcracker, published by Walker Books, is now out! I was signing some 200-odd copies at the offices of Walker Books back in September. As I understand it, these copies are going to a number of independent booksellers in London. I will be sharing a few things from this book from now up to Christmas.
Also available now is a mini version of Jingle Bells, first published last year. A follow-up to the happy reception of the mini edition of Night Before Christmas.
Finally, for now: I’ve recently finished work on a small collection of four Grimm tales retold by Joanna Davidson, to be published by Oxford University Press. Strangely, I got to draw rather many curtains for this book. They were necessary elements at key moments in at least two of the tales, and for the rest, they simply had to be there by virtue of such things as bed and room furnishings. For me, they also make good compositional devices in interior scenes, much as trees do for outdoor ones. I didn’t get to draw many trees (disappointingly); but many curtains.