Proper Chrimbo!!

Merry Christmas Erry'body

New Project... "FRIDAY FACE PLANT"

Yes I know its Monday but you get the idea... a little self initiated project for no good reason.  One mug every week.  Lets start the show with a Toronto Crack-Attack!!

Tons of New Children's Book Work!

I've been busy making a portfolio of children's book work for about a month now.  After I finished the "Dixie Trix" experiment, I was really driven to make more and see if I couldn't branch out into making illustrations for picture books.  I had a lot of fun painting and drawing and have decided to tuck away the tablet for now. Here's a sample few images, go to my main site for more.  Enjoy!

Portraiture Classs Demo

From a model flayed head yes, but still a portrait... Exploring mark making, blind drawing, spacial relationships, line, shape and tone.  From a 10 week adult education course Hills Road here in Cambridge.  It is nice to be teaching evenings again, I get to draw flayed heads!

Kombucha!

At long last I have finished my latest book project.  "Kombucha!" is to be published by Avery, an imprint of Penguin sometime around September 2013.  I've been working hard on the illustrations since December and have had a good time getting out the old ink and brush.  As it is a two-colour book, all the colour work was done in Phototshop to keep everything separated for pre-press by Avery's designers.

For those of you who don't know, kombucha is a pro-biotic, fermented tea brewed with sugar, yeast and healthy bacteria and is celebrated for its many beneficial properties.  Thats the yeast and bacteria gettin' down in the first image by the way.

I was approached by the owners of Kombucha Brooklyn to illustrate the book and thankfully the editor at Avery agreed that I'd make a good match.  The book covers everything from brewing how-to to recipes and chemistry, to the drink's history and origins and contains about 60 illustrations.  It made for a lot of diverse subject matter which is always nice in a project and I had loads of research to do.  I also liked the challenge of making a how-to sequence look interesting and less clinical.  So here is a small sample of the images... I'll post some more up after the book has been published.

Maggie...

Just thought I'd repost this one from a while back given the days events.  And remember kids, get your own milk!

Brush Cleaning Scraps

My latest Illustration project (more on that later) involves A LOT of ink brush and ink drawings and thus, lots of brush cleaning.  These two scraps are my favs so far.  Makes me want to get a little looser in my actual work...