A Fish of the World

So, my most recent Falmouth project was a children's picture book based on 'A Fish of the World', by Terry Jones (Monty Python). It's a story about an adventerous but self-centred herring, and I had 4 weeks to make a 24-page dummy book of neat roughs, and 3 colour artworks. Here they all are:
















And the colour artworks:




The end. I'm definitely happier with the roughs than the colour artworks... It would've been nice to properly paint the scenes, rather than just sort of colouring in the line drawings in the last three sleepless days of term. Oh well, that's still my Christmas cards sorted. Merry Fishmas!

The Alligator Whisperer

These were for a second year young adult narrative fiction project. The text I chose was The Alligator Whisperer by Wayne Milstead. It's a story about an alligator-loving young boy, who one day has his hand bitten off at an alligator preserve. The offending alligator is shot and the boy's hand recovered and re-attached, but the boy becomes morosely fixated on the dead alligator. He takes to wearing a glove over his re-attached hand at all times, and develops ambitions to become an "alligator whisperer".

During this project I learned a lot about alligators - including that they have 80 teeth, live for approximately 50 years, and can be trickier to draw than you might first think!

Dam Totes

Second Year Editorial project - illustration for an Utne Reader article (which you can read here) about the environmental perils of canvas bags.

I should mention that the print texture used for the background here was not created by me, but was 'borrowed' from a friend and colleague of mine, who did definitely not make a big deal out of it.

Monster Triptych

This is what I did for our major assessment at the end of first year, and it's basically a kind of Where's Wally meets early Christian altar/panel paintings (there's a definite gap in the market for this kind of thing). It's a fold-out educational triptych, based on the 'Monster's Park' entry in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.

The story goes that one day Alexander the Great decides to build the city of Alexandria on a beach in Egypt. Only he has some trouble with these sea monsters, who come out onto the beach every night and keep destroying the foundations. So Alexander sends an artist down into the sea in a glass box to sketch the monsters, and these sketches are used to make giant replica statues of the monsters on the beach, facing the sea. So the next day when the monsters come up to cause some more destruction, they see the statues of themselves, which are so scary that they go back into the sea forever.

But that was a long time ago, and nowadays the children of Alexandria happily play amongst the ruins of these massive scary stone monsters.


(above) - triptych when folded up - painting of the five monsters terrorising the beach.
(below) - inside of triptych - the beach as it is today, with children playing on the ruins.


What I did for the project was to give the monsters silly names and make up a story about how they each embodied a different deadly sin. There was the Jeasley Kephals (envy), the Gastry Havity (gluttony), the Torrid Storgon (wrath), the Graspacarpus (greed) and a personal favourite - the Knobby Snidle (sloth)... (sadly I did not incorporate lust or pride into proceedings). And now some of the children who come to play in Monster's Park are "following in their monstrous footsteps" and behaving angrily, jealously, greedily, etc.

There are five children to find for each sin (25 overall), as well as the artist who did the sketches, who got lost and needs to find a way back to his boat. The point of all this was I think to educate kids about allegory and metaphors, as well as the importance of not being as badly behaved as these sinful and aptly-named monsters!




My main inspiration for this was Hieronymous Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, which is also a triptych featuring nightmarish imagery and a moral commentary, and is almost as good as mine.