Family Portrait

A coworker from the library commissioned me to do a drawing of her family from a photograph, and this is the end result! Her son is very cute.

I don't think I ever posted them here before, but this is a bit like the baby portraits in that it's something I don't really advertise, but seem to get asked for a lot anyway. I've even been hired to do them at a wedding, and to this day I have no idea how the client knew that was something I could do.

Pocket Witch Gravity

Introducing Pocket Witch Gravity! Sammy has drawn a lot of free pictures for me recently (she's been offering commissions of things like 'you as a Pokémon trainer' and 'you as an Inkling' and I kept asking for them) so I offered her a Pocket Witch of her own in return. Gravity was very excited to meet Sammy and demanded a two-page comic to introduce herself.

The spot colour on these is actually neon ink, but that naturally doesn't show up in a scanned version so I'll post some photographs later showing the neon ink on the original pages.

EDIT: Here's the close-up photos showing the neon ink!

Oliver

Another baby portrait, this time with a jungle theme. I had a good time shading all the foliage on this one.

Barnabas Oley Bookplates

Finally, things that aren't fairies!

I was hired to make some designs for my old primary school (Barnabas Oley), that could be used either as certificates or as bookplates for excellence or progress in handwriting. I hand-wrote the text using the letter forms the children learn.

I said 'things that aren't fairies', but later I was also asked to do some powerpoint slides featuring Poppet the House Hob for the awards assembly, so there were fairies involved after all!

Baby Portraits - Effie

Since I’ve recently added a commissions page, here’s one I did this January as a christening present. I’ve done these baby portraits that incorporate birth information several times before, but I think this is my favourite so far.
I was given no guidelines aside from ‘they like purple and butterflies’, so I was a little relieved when I heard it had gone down well with the parents!

poetry illustrations

Since a copy of the book arrived in the post just before Christmas, now seems like a good time to show you these!

These are a pair of illustrations I made for a Save the Children poetry book called Born to Giggle. I was assigned two poems, called Hair So Long Song and I Like A Wood. I thought they were both sweet, and I like having the chance to work without shading. I think the second picture is my favourite, but I'm pleased with both. Later I got given an extra one about a missing tortoise, so I got to draw a tortoise as well!

I forgot I had more paid work to show you! I did this one a few months ago, it's a logo for a baby swimming school. I had no idea how you teach a baby to swim when they can't even walk yet, so watching the lessons was really interesting. Apparently there's a few tricks to it, like if you start before the baby starts trying to sit up then they'll be much more comfortable on their back in the water, and will have an easier time learning to float later.

The swimming school is called 'Dinky Dippers' and it's run by Nadine Santus, if you're reading this from the Cambridge area and you have a child under 4 who could use some swimming lessons.

Graham's ghosts

One of the first commissions I got after leaving university was to design a ghostly string quartet for an animated band. It was commissioned by a student called Graham Porter, and I has a lot of fun designing the ghosts. The commission included a painting to use for promotion, and some fairly detailed designs. These are some of the pose and expression sheets I was most pleased with, and a slightly terrible photo of the painting.

Time for some cute things!

Ta da! This is one of the commissions I've been working on. It's a logo and some decorative images for Kingsley's Cakes, a sweet little independent bakery. The image above is ever so slightly different from the one I used eventually, I took out a few of the finer details so it would look better when shrunk onto a business card and such. Below are some other pictures that should be going to decorate a new website. This is the first time someone has commissioned digital work from me, I'm very pleased with how it turned out.

Bonus feature! Some of the preliminary sketches. I thought it would be sweet to dress the mascot character in clothes based on some cake flavours, specifically cinnamon and ginger, rose and pistchio and mint chocolate. I was having so much fun I designed a bell-dress and a shift-dress for each one. The final design is a slightly different version of the rose and pistachio theme.

The Vixen and the Lioness

These are some illustrations I made for Ollie Tigwell, a graphic designer I know from university, to use in a small booklet containing the fable of the vixen and the lioness. I did them in a bit of a hurry, having been ill for a few days, so I was very pleased with how well they turned out in the end.

The fable goes like this, by the way:

A vixen was taking her babies out for an airing one morning, when she came across a lioness with her cub in arms. 'Why such airs, haughty dame, over one solitary cub?' sneered the vixen, 'look at my healthy and numerous litter here and imagine, if you are able, how proud a mother should feel.' The lioness gave the vixen a squelching look and, lifting her nose in the air, walked away, saying, 'Yes, just look at that beautiful collection. And what are they? Foxes! I've only one, but remember that one is a lion.'

I think the moral is meant to be quality over quantity, but I actually like foxes better than lions so to me neither mother came across very well. Woops.