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.

The Pelican Chorus

Some illustrations for 'The Pelican Chorus' by Edward Lear: a heartwarming tale of matrimony between wetland Royalty, and the empty-nest syndrome felt by the parents of the pelican bride.

Different Seasons

 "I scrambled up the cinders to the railroad tracks and sat on one of the rails, idly chucking cinders between my feet, in no hurry to wake the others. At that precise moment the new day felt too good to share.

Morning came on apace. The noise of the crickets began to drop, and the shadows under the trees and bushes evaporated like puddles after a shower...

"I don’t know how long I sat there on the rail, watching the purple steal out of the sky as noiselessly as it had stolen in the evening before. I was about to get up when I looked to my right and saw a deer standing in the railroad bed not ten yards from me.

My heart went up into my throat so high that I think I could have put my hand in my mouth and touched it. My stomach and genitals filled with a hot dry excitement. I didn’t move. I couldn’t have moved if I had wanted to. Her eyes weren’t brown, but a dark, dusty black – the kind of velvet you see backgrounding jewelry displays. Her small ears were scuffed suede. She looked serenely at me, head slightly lowered in what I took for curiosity... What I was seeing was some sort of gift, something given with a carelessness that was appalling.

"It was on the tip of my tongue to tell the others about the deer, but I ended up not doing it. That was one thing I kept to myself... I have to tell you that it seems a lesser thing written down, damn near inconsequential. But for me it was the best part of that trip, the cleanest part, and it was a moment I found myself returning to, almost helplessly, when there was trouble in my life... I would find my thoughts turning back to that morning, the scuffed suede of her ears, the white flash of her tail...

 

"The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them - words shrinks things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out." 

- Stephen King, The Body

The Big Lunch

Year 3, project one: an editorial illustration for a Sunday Times magazine about The Big Lunch.

Below is what it might look like if I was paid to do this, instead of just pretending for my school work.

End of Year Two

To celebrate the end of second year, I made some book covers.

The three books that I chose are not part of a series, but appeal to similar audiences, and handle quite serious themes in a similar way. This time I dropped the watercolours in favour of printing (with woodcut), to try out a more graphic approach. These novels also all deal with polar opposites (life/death, religion/science, faith/doubt, heaven/earth, etc.) so black and white imagery seemed fitting.

In Terry Pratchett's Nation, a boy called Mau returns to his home island (the Nation) to discover that his whole village has been wiped out by a tsunami. As the only surviving member of the island, Mau is tasked with forging a new nation from the broken pieces, with grief for his loved ones and his shaken faith in the gods weighing on his mind.
 

In The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, 14 year-old Susie Salmon is raped and murdered in the opening chapter. The book deals with the lives and relationships of Susie's family and friends - and her killer - in the days, months and years after her death, with Susie watching over them from her own personal heaven.

 

Early in the book Susie remembers seeing a penguin in a snow globe when she was very young, and being worried for him. Her father reassures her that he is "trapped in a perfect world." Following her death Susie narrates the novel from much the same position - trapped in a world that is superficially perfect (i.e. heaven). She can no longer be harmed by anything in the real world, but can also no longer interact with any of her loved ones on earth. While everyone outside the 'globe' changes and grows, Susie remains an observer.

Ian McEwan's Enduring Love is a "pyschological thriller" about a middle-aged scientific journalist named Joe Rose, whose comfortable life and long-term relationship become threatened when a ballooning accident brings a delusional stranger called Jed into his life. After a passing glance between them Jed instantly falls in love with Joe, and his obsessive stalking tests the limits of Joe's rational mind.

This is the cover I had most trouble with. I was happy with my concept, but found the execution difficult. Turns out it's not that easy making a rose petal turn into a hot air balloon with woodcut printing!