Fishy business

It was my intention today to do a post about a show and tell illustration session I did with a lovely group of kids at a local library yesterday morning as part of a half term project. I was meant to take pictures of all their fab work and character drawings, but unfortunately in all the excitement I completely forgot to take a single photo so that post has kind of gone out the window.

Instead I thought I would share a work in progress in its sketch stage.
A little while back I mentioned that the writing bug had bitten me, at which point there were 3 complete picture book stories. Now however there are five and this image is for one of the newest. I wasn't actually going to do any images for this but I have had a bit of interest from a publisher and they wanted to see some artwork for it so this is mainly for them:

Will update you if anything exciting comes out of it, fingers crossed.

New brooches

Yippee i'm pleased to say I have finally two new items for my shop which have been in the pipe for what feels like ages now.
A while ago i had some ideas for new brooches and its taken me about four months for me to finally realise them as a) it took a LOT of searching to find local company to laser cut my designs, and b) as per normal i've had several other projects on the go at the same time.

But now finally three prototypes later, I can share the two new finished pieces with you which i originally sneakily posted the designs for here.
Before I reveal all I must thank Jonathan at Laser Cut Hut for being so incredibly helpful and creating the wooden brooches from my designs and here they are in their original unpainted state:

They're cut from oak and made from two component layers.

I then hand-painted them which is a bit of a fiddly process, but in a moment of serendipitous timing I was asked out of the blue by the daylight lighting company if I would like to test out their new MAGnificent lamp in exchange for a guest post on their blog. Of course i practically bit their hand off, particularly as i'd been thinking about getting a lamp anyway.
The light has a built in magnifying glass, created with artists and designers in mind and I used it to make the painting process for these brooches a LOT easier.

I actually don't know how i would have managed without this lamp.

Anyway the brooches are now complete and are available on Etsy and Folksy. Here they are:

Hope you like them. I've got another couple of ideas for designs so depending on how successful these are you might see more in the not too distant future.
I only just realised it was a bank holiday Monday, not that it really makes any difference to me anymore; what with paying myself it will be a typical working day, but I hope you all have a good one.

Doodle bug

For no other reason than I couldn't really think of anything to post about and as I didn't have time to spend more than about 10 minutes on writing something, I opted for a doodle. Which ironically took about 20 mins to finish. However it also gave me a good excuse to try out some recently acquired Tombow brush pens.

So here is a Doodle for Illustration Friday whose drawing theme up until this morning was 'Voyage', and I did this last night whilst watching Man vs Weird on catch up. Can't beat a bit of trashy t.v. every now and then.

Actually there sort of is another reason for this non post. I have a project nearly finished which is going to be making an appearance in my shop soon, but as its not yet ready to show off, rather than blog 'radio silence' instead I thought a doodle would do(ddle).

*Note to self: This needs more mountains*

Fin.

Done!

As i've now written 3 picture book texts, i'm trying to get a few illustrations together for each to send to potential publishers. This illustration is for the second manuscript I wrote called 'Come out and play' a kind of tongue-in-cheek, humorous story poking fun at modern society, in a child frienly way of course.

This illustration is a double page spread for the last part of the story. It started life as a pencil drawing:

Then it was worked up into a painting. I had to split it into two separate sections, as a) I didn't have any suitable paper big enough, and b) my scanner only takes up to A4 size paper. I think i may have to invest in a larger pad.

Lastly it was finished in PhotoShop. Ta da! Heres the final thing -

Hope you like the cheeky egg on head detail which came to me in a moment of sillyness whilst was working up the original sketch :^)

A party fit for a King

The weekend before last we went to Amsterdam. We booked the trip a while back to coincide with the King's Day festival on 26th April. This annual festival is in honor of the monarch's birthday; now Willem-Alexander who was inaugurated last year when he took over from his mum. So this year's festival was the first King's day as previously its been Queen's day.
http://www.iamsterdam.com/en-GB/experience/kings-day/all-about-kings-day-in-amsterdam

Now in England when we think of celebrations for a monarch's birthday the imagery that comes to mind would be the sort of canons blasting, trumpet sounding, busby donning marching guards and such. The usual po-faced pomp and regalia you associate with the English royalty.
Well my friends in the Netherlands (well in Amsterdam at least) his majesty's birthday is celebrated with a city wide techno rave, where everyone gets dressed up in as much orange garb as possible and wonders round from street party to street party.

We got into the city at about 9.30 on Friday night when the festivities had already began so we had to get into the spirit pretty quick. As various forms of dance music (i'm not complaining) seemed to be the staple, our first outing on the Friday night was a King's Night drum and bass event at a club not too far from where we were staying.

Having got back late from the club or should I say early, and given that neither of us are spring chickens anymore, we foolishly considered skipping a good chunk of the Saturday daytime celebrations to have a long lie in. But still bleary eyed after breakfast we decided to venture out.
And blimey....were greeted with a sea of unexpected orange madness!!
We swiftly dived on a nearby stall for a much needed orange accessory, this was mine (pretty tame i know):

Then went on an adventure. All the streets are closed as are most of the shops which are instead replaced by LOTS of random stalls dotted around between numerous street parties, most seemingly playing techno.
The general order of the day is to wonder around by foot (or bike if you dare) stumbling from one crazy event to the next. There are ticketed official, pay-for events where you can while away the hours but you don't really need to bother with these as there are loads of free stages set up about the city. Once such was the 'Pacha' stage (complete with bar and many an orange reveler) which we found at around 1pm. Guess what...they were playing techno.

Unfortunately we'd made the mistake earlier of not bringing a proper camera with us, so only managed to catch the action on a mobile phone. I desperately wanted to take a pic of a guy sitting, bopping in the window of his apartment overlooking the crowd. You might just be able to make him out in the middle pic above.

Then we moved on and found a massive parade on the canal. The boats just kept on coming.

Some were moored up and holding private parties. Most of the boats were playing music, can you guess what kind of music? Yes you got it techno! Lucky that Dave loves a bit of techno haha:

Like everyone else we spent the rest of the day ambling around being totally bemused. By 7pm it was carnage as you can imagine and I couldn't help but have sympathy for the poor buggers who would have to clean the mess up.

Still it was one of the most surreal and bonkers experiences i've had for a long while.

So who's up for King's Day 2015?