Circus Ceramics for Cosmo China

I've been having lots of fun at Cosmo China in Bloomsbury recently painting plates and mugs and eggcups and butter dishes etc with this circus theme. It developed from the blue circus design I did in the spring as part of a collection of circus themed repeats. And they came from the little sketch above from my sketch book in the winter. I love the way ideas, themes and projects can grow and in doing so change form.

Party Pup Pyjamas for Boden

I was waiting until a friend’s gorgeous little girl could model these dog pyjamas for me then Charlie my draught excluder stepped in and volunteered and suddenly he seemed like the ideal model! Though he is a little long on the body for them :-)

They are available in the Autumn/Winter collection as little girl’s pyjamas both on the UK and USA sites. To be asked by Boden(a dream client) to draw dogs at a party(a dream subject) made it a dream commission!

The Homemade Home

Another book I loved working on - "The Homemade Home" - though full of projects I kept wishing I had time to stop and sew and make.

There were so many projects in the book and a tight schedule so the illustrations got divided between me and another illustrator - Stephen Dew. I wasn't sure how it would all sit together but it turned out really well as we were both working from the same colour palette and our styles aren't disimilar - Stephen just obviously knows how to do more clever things on the computer! I'm sure I only learn about two new things a year!

Diagrams for The Gentle Art of QuiltMaking

One of three craft books I worked on that have been published this summer. For "The Gentle Art of Quiltmaking" by Jane Brocket I just had to draw these simplified diagrams as a guide for laying out the quilt swatches. The actual quilts and the photography and styling in the book are gorgeous.

Recent Illustrations for Bulletin Magazine

These illustrations are for a UK based magazine. It’s called Bulletin and it is aimed at people working in the field of Speech and Literacy. I illustrate their monthly opinion column.

Because the text and vocabulary are usually very specific to its field I love the challenge of coming up with “soft” but relevant solutions. Which is what I love about illustrating for magazines is having a text that is a little dry or outside my usual scope of knowledge and finding a visual way of making it more approachable and appealing.

The topics were (from top to bottom) about gathering information to create the society's framework, working in partnership, the difficulties in assessing language in children and gathering data.

On my USA agent's blog there is a longer post about this project.