Mega Catch Up!

Hello everyone,


Right. Time for a mega blog catch up. A lot has happened in my illustration life in the last six months and it will be hard to cover it all, and to track my development in drawing style totally, so instead I am going to focus on four highlights:  'Love & Lament' (my graphic novel), 'Parallel Lives Exhibition' at (culmination of 6 months scholarship in comics at londonprintstudio), illustrating Moomin's Adventure Book (Self Made Hero), and throwing myself head first into the world of hand-painted signs. Here goes with some images from each of these projects:


'Love & Lament':


Here is a synopsis of the book:


Delve into the private love lives of some of history’s most impassioned figures; from the hysterical, pot-bellied naked Napoleon to the spit-fetishist composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Love & Lament takes the original love letters of historically great men and women and plunges them head first into the world of comics.

Tracing love’s phases from birth to death, this graphic novel sweeps from 2,500 BC to late C20^th, uniting its characters and letters in their shared experiences of love and lament. Consisting of the adapted text of twenty-three letters that have never before been published alongside each other, and 120 illustrated copper etched pages, it is a labour of love in itself. It aims to bring these beautifully sage, touching and tragic classic texts to new audiences by adapting them into the form of a graphic novel.

Opening with a rather disgruntled council meeting between all the deities of love, Love & Lament presents us with the first item on the god’s agenda: the state of man’s current relationship to love. In an age ruled by e-mails, tweeted ‘I luv u’s’ and augmented reality girlfriends, man has lost the ability to feel love and loss as deeply as he once could. The deities are not being worshiped. They are bored and rather lonely.  It is decided that auditions should be held, collecting together all the spirited ghosts of the greatest, most romantic letter writers of the past for one last romantic performance. Each ghost is to read one of their penned love letters to the deities, with the most powerful and touching love letter recital winning the ultimate prize; the chance to live, love and lament for one more whole lifetime on Earth with whomever they wish.

And here are some pages from Napoleon's love letter to Josephine 1796:

Parallel Lives Exhibition:

Moomin's Adventure Book (Self Made Hero)

A sneaky peak at a couple of the b/w line drawings I did for this book ..... to see them all, go out and get yourself a lovely copy!!

Hand painted signs:

So, I have always had a soft spot for typography and hand-painted signs. I think they are pretty great really. After some encouraging words from other sign painters, I completed this job for Basil cafe (all painted freestyle by hand in the chucking rain up a wobbly ladder) :

So, that's a start I think at catching up. I am just putting the finishing touches to a book illustration design this week, so will blog about that and the process I went through creating it very soon. Thank you to those who have kept viewing this blog in the last few months. I hope I can provide some lovely new illustrations for you over this sunny May and into June...

Merlin xx

ooo - my cushions have been blogged about!

Check out this little website - http://theworldofkitsch.com/?tag=cushions - they have kindly linked to my john lewis cushions :) Hurrah! Thank you very much! Do look at this link, lots of nice things on it. . .

Sketchbook Anatomy and Portraits . . .

Helloo,

I thought it might be nice to upload some sketchbook portraits and anatomy studies that I have been doing instead of just uploading illustration specific pieces of work. I do these pencil studies to just try and gain a greater understanding of the human figure and I find that the more I do of these more 'realistic' images then the easier it is to create more stylised illustrations from them. Anyway, here they are :

Cheltenham Illustration Awards - photiiees

Here are some photos from the Cheltenham Illustration Awards which I attended on Wednesday 26th October - thank you so much Shaun Tan and Cheltenham Illustration Dep for this fantastic prize - it means a huge amount to me :) And thank you to Joe and my Nan too for coming! :)

Art Eduction Workshops: Medieval Comic

Hello,

On 18th October Lynn Weddle http://www.lynnweddle.com/ ran a workshop at londonprintstudio for the comics interns on how to run an arts workshop. It was a fantastically brill day and learnt lots of tips from creating unusual ice breaker activities, to planning,delivering and evaluating our own comics workshops that are coming up in next four months. I created a little comic in the style of Medieval Illuminated Manuscript about the keyt things you need to remember when running an arts outreach workshop. Thank you Lynn!

Here it is:

Bonnie Brûlée - food blog coming your way :)

Hello folks,

I just wanted to update this blog as it has been a while and a lot has been going on. Firstly, I would like to show you some of the most recent illustrations I have been doing for a fantastic entrepreneur, food business- savy lady and generally all wise dude - Bonnie of Bonnie Brûlée http://bonniebrulee.com/. I was asked to do some b/w illustrations and one spot colour illustration for her fantastic new food blog which I will link to here shortly (still under final touches of construction) Below is a little taster of what will be on her site. Updates to follow . . .

Stop-start clay animation workshop with Corali Dance Company

Hello,

Spent a marvellous 2 hrs running a dance/animation/illustration themed workshop with Corali Dance Company. They made some fantastic 'creatures' that lived in the bottom of their childhood gardens and created an animated film of the creatures dancing! We did it all in such a short space of time it was a great achievement! Lovely to work with you guys. Check out their brilliant dance shows here: http://www.corali.org.uk/. And their brilliant creatures here:

      

What I have learnt so far . . .

Yo folks,

For my first week at LPS (London Print Studio) I had to do a presentation on 'What I have learnt so far' . . I brought in my portfolio and talked it through, but I also made this box to summarise my key influences/learning path if you like. I suppose my style can be summarised as b/w detailed line drawing, insipired by early pri

nting techniques (woodblocks/etching ect) mixed with bold vibrant autumnal colours as the backdrop to my b/w objects. . I am very interetsed in the framings of narratives, and exploring how we contain images - particularly in sequential art and so this is why I decided to frame these 9 images in a wooden box rather like a butterfly collector would. Each image is cut out and mounted on raised foam . . .Enough words. Here it is. Sorry for poor camera quality, my two year old has got her paws on the lense . .