Birthday Menagerie

Jaunt of the Penguins

Penguins are known for their tendency to undertake great and perilous journeys, covering vast overland distances in search of breeding grounds, fresh seafood, and, no doubt, adventure. Less well-publicised however are the intervals between these pilgrimages, when penguin life takes on a more low-key, comfortable, pedestrian pace.

But with comfort comes predictability and tedium, and these pastoral penguins may find that the fortitude and grit that serve them so well on the road may be equally called upon amidst this more ordinary existence.

Southeast Asia trip

Trip Montage from Benjamin V on Vimeo.

A little video/photo montage of my recent 5 month trip around Southeast Asia.

Daily artwork!

Wilfred and Friends

Some character artworks I did, for a prospective farm-themed children's book/clothing project; collaboration with Emily Bolter.

Seal sanctuary

Concluding my very delayed featuring of 3rd year uni work...

This was inspired by an outing to the National Seal Sanctuary at Gweek, where there were broken seals aplenty. The artwork was also used in the Falmouth Book of Quotes & Sayings 2011, to illustrate a quote by Charles Dickens:

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”

Book jackets

Here follows a couple of book jacket illustrations I did during my final year as a student at Falmouth, using colour reduction linocut printing.

I enjoyed the printing and cutting process, although sometimes it was slightly exhausting. By the end of the project even my blisters had blisters!

I did have some trouble with the latter illustration (for Andy Merrifield's The Wisdom of Donkeys) in that I was perhaps a bit ambitious in the number of colours (and hence layers) it involved. In the end I was able to achieve the above artwork by printing each colour layer onto separate white paper, and then combining them using the miracles of computer technology.

I feel that this year's sporadic foray into the realms of lino printmaking has been an interesting and worthwhile thing, especially since publishers and art directors who reviewed my portfolio in New York mostly responded better to this "more sophisticated" style of work than my painterly children's illustration.