Rainforest Collage

This was the final result of my Rainforest project. It is made out of coloured paper, painted over with watercolour and layered for 3-D effect. It's A1 in size and took me a week to make.

The idea for the image came from researching how products such as coffee, tea, cocoa beans and bananas are grown and how some organisations - for example the Rainforest Alliance - are working to protect rainforests and encourage sustainable farming methods. I wanted to create an image where rainforest and farm, humans and animals are coexisting together in a harmonious way. The purpose of this image would then be, for example, an advertising or publicity campaign.   

Paper Animals

I haven't managed to post for while - the last few weeks have been a whirlwind of completing work, assessments and setting up the degree show - but now I've got some time on my hands I can post up my latest work, which has taken a slight twist.

I have recently been experimenting with cutting my drawings out of coloured paper and painting over them and it's been working well for me and I've really enjoyed it. The theme of my last project was 'Rainforest' so I spent a week or so making over 20 different Amazon rainforest animals out of paper. This is a selection of them. 

Iguana

Tapir

Giant Anteater

Marvellous Spatuletail

Black Caiman 

Red-eyed Tree Frog

Jaguar

Harpy Eagle

Hoatzin

Toco Toucan 

Stripe-Breasted Starthroat Hummingbird

Scarlet Macaw

Capuchin Monkey

Cats - Sox and Nellie

This was a little painting I did yesterday inspired by my two cats, Sox and Nellie.

... and for my next project

This is a little part of my next project... a little poison dart frog. I was experimenting with cut paper collage and watercolour and I'm liking the result so far. More to come! :)

Peacock

Really enjoying painting various colourful creatures at the moment. This is yesterday's painting of a peacock.

Life of Pi

This is a project I did to start off my Final Major Project at uni - which I have decided to break up into smaller projects.

After recently seeing the film (which is awesome by the way!) I was inspired and wanted to do some of my own artwork for it, so I decided to design a book cover.

One of the major themes in the story is Pi and the tiger Richard Parker's fight for survival strong life force. I wanted to find a subtle way to represent this and came up with the concept of a 'yin-yang' - that neither could have survived without the other. Therefore the final artwork is set into a circular composition in which the tiger (who could be seen as a representation of Pi's survival instinct) is the dominant element.

Bear

Just a little practise painting I did today. After a few weeks of writing my dissertation and then a report I felt I just needed some time to get back into drawing and painting again :)

Card Competition

This was an entry for a greetings card design competition - with kitties ^_^

'Women In Art - Behind the Canvas' Museum Project

For this project, we teamed up with some students on the Creative Writing course. They were writing some creative and critical pieces to go into a booklet and they asked us to provide the illustrations. This booklet (one for adults, one for children) is going to accompany the current exhibition at the Plymouth Museum called  'Women in Art - Behind the Canvas'.

These were two of our cover ideas for the adult booklet - though a different design was decided on eventually. These covers were a joint effort with fellow illustrators: Abby drew the frame design, Rhiannon did the typography, whilst Andjela and I drew the objects and women to go into the frames. 

Cover 1

Cover 2

These next illustrations were to accompany two pieces of writing inside the booklet. We agreed as a group that we were going to illustrate our own interpretation of the original paintings/objects that the written pieces were based on. This first one is 'Mrs. Osborne'.

This next illustration was for the story 'The Lady in Lace' which was based on a piece of delicate lace on show in the museum.

Thematic Project

This was work from my last module at uni. We were to choose a theme to start off and then take the project off in our own directions. I chose to base mine on a song called 'Song of Myself' by Nightwish, which in turn was inspired by Walt Whitman's poem 'Song of Myself'.
For me, the song represents all the different sides of life, the good and the bad. I wanted to design a concertina booklet - one side the good things - one side the bad things.

After doing some research I designed the booklet so the image flowed across all the pages to make up one long image. 

This is my final sketchy dummy book - this is roughly what I intended the finals to look like. 

The bad side 

The good side 

I chose two sections from each side to work up as finals but they didn't go quite how I wanted. Later on I would like to re-visit this project and complete final artwork for the whole booklet. 

These are some parts of my final artwork.

Addition to the Illustration Window

This was my contribution to decorate the window of the illustration studio at uni - a happy cat ^_^ 

Hand-Drawn Typography Competition

These were my entries for a competition where the brief was 'hand-drawn typography'. I haven't done much work with typography so it was new for me. It's something I would like to experiment with more.

Business School Competition

Ok so these were my entries for the Business School competition at uni. The brief was to choose a course within the business school and create a image that could be used as a logo. These two designs were for Marine Law and Marine Crime.

Long time no see...

Eek! I haven't been here in a while! It's time I did some updates :) Trying to set up a website and a tumblr blog too at the moment... I never was great with digital stuff but I think I'm getting there. I will post up some previous work from last term at uni and some more recent stuff that I'm now working on.