Map of Great Britain

I created this for Pedlars Product of the Month Competition. The theme was to create a piece of Wall Art on the theme of Great Britain. I think this is quite a nostalgic view of Great Britain – our industries have declined, our buses and Jaguars aren’t so beautiful now and our hedgerows don’t seem so full of flowers! Though we do still have lots of deer and puffins.

Work for Illustrated Ape Magazine

In the autumn I was asked to contribute a double page illustration for a special issue of Illustrated Ape  - and my fourteen year younger self was super excited - I can still remember the thrill of seeing the first issue of the magazine in 1998 and feeling like it was a sign of a new emerging illustration "scene". The fact they asked me to contribute to a comic themed issue, printed in red and black and to illustrate a section of a really dark torch song seemed like a slip up - don't they know I mostly draw dogs in clothes and flowers?! However I loved the challenge as so often having a colour palette that isn't a natural choice to me or subject matter I wouldn't normally be asked to tackle are the types of things that move my work on.

Four Seasons Illustrations

This was a project I did in December - it was a commission from a friend's husband to do four illustrations of his wife and dog through the seasons as a Christmas gift from him to her.

I loved working on this and producing a set of four meant it gave me the opportunity to play around more with scale and composition and viewpoints.

Drawing New Lines in the Sand

Sometimes I love to do really detailed work but I also love it when an art director is happy for me to go with a simple drawing as the solution. Looking from the objective outside I'm totally aware the idea/message the illustration is conveying is key and the length of time to produce it is irrelevant...but I do still have a small interior "voice" that sometimes says I should be working hard and long for my fee! It must be my Scottish work ethic :-)

New Family Traditions

I loved illustrating this book so much!

It was for Running Press in the US and written by Meg Cox. It's packed full of great suggestions on  how to create personal family rituals and traditions - it has a really imaginative and cosy feeling text. I also loved working in two colours plus tints for the interior illustrations and as well as the forty illustrations I also produced a few repeat patterns that were used as backgrounds throughout the book.

This project was a bit like reading a good book because as I got near the end of it I felt a little sad it was almost over!

An Angel by Your Side

I did the illustrations for the book "An Angel by Your Side" by Jane Smedley back in the springtime.

I think it was my first project on my new iMac. Having had hand me down computers for the previous sixteen years of my illustration career and for the last few years used a laptop with a monitor plugged in it was super exciting to work in front of a huge new screen. Having a new computer seemed to give me a push towards becoming more tech savvy as I also discovered - only sixteen years late - how to make palettes and store in the library in Illustrator without making little squares and copying and pasting them between each file! :-)

Dinogami - Paper Props and Styling Project

I loved making the paper props for this project. It's the third origami book by Mari Ono I've worked on for Cico Books. When I first heard it would be twenty five backgrounds all for dinosaurs I thought they might all end up being really similar but once I cleared out all the dinosaur books from the children's section of our local library and also watched "Walking with Dinosaurs" I became fascinated by the different forms of life on the planet at the time and ended up with too many different background ideas. I also thought since it would be a lot of fanatical eight year old boys making the origami dinosaurs that it was important that I got the facts right. So the dinosaurs in the third period - Cretaceous have some flowering plants in the backgrounds but the dinosaurs in the earlier periods just have ferns.

I think one of the great things about being an illustrator is that you end up researching subjects you might not otherwise go to. I remember in primary school the only things I ever received prizes for were art and projects...which is exactly what illustration is.

Isn't the Tyrannosaurus Rex at the bottom just the gentlest, sweetest looking dinosaur.