for the Tart

 

been scanning some older work for an online food portfolio, and remembered that I haven't put this one up yet. it was made to thank the lovely appletart, for the plates she gave me, one of which is pictured here.

a week of warmup drawings

it's been a slow few weeks in terms of new illustrations, but these are drawings I sometimes do to warm up and to keep the magic of brush and colour flowing onto nobbly paper alive. my lovely mum often sends me wonderful seedpods and things to remind me of home; the pebbles follow me home from the sea. watercolour.

birthday card

And now her mum has seen it, here's the birthday card for baby Olivia's first birthday too.

birthday invitation for Olivia

Hope I made this card a teeny bit as bright and full of fun as the delightful Olivia is. Off to Stockholm to celebrate her Big One this weekend. Happy Birthday, gorgeous girl!

summer holiday wildflowers

Painted one rainy morning in Blekinge, Southern Sweden, in a teeny wooden housie with a red wooden table and chairs, listening to a Beethoven piano concerto on an old skool crackling radio. Oak trees, wildflower meadows and murder slugs just outside the door, the placid Baltic and my sis's summer house a two minute walk away.

broadway market

Sketched one rare sunny day back in May, where the combination of bench in sun and detailed shopfronts was just too good to resist. Two more Hackney street drawings here.

central line to epping

 

Curiously, older people are harder to draw unobserved. Perhaps they aren't so used to the invasions of privacy a younger generation regards as unremarkable - the constant photographing, blogging and sharing images of ourselves on facebook.  I try to be discreet when drawing on the train, and hope that at the very least I'm celebrating people's individuality in a sensitive, if not always conventionally flattering way.

early summer

on the road to taos, new mexico

From our trip to the Southwestern USA, this was a quick stop to have a look at the river,  and drawing spruce trees 101 for me. More drawings made on the road are on my flickr page, here.

Interstate 40 to Flagstaff

From our trip to the Southwestern USA, a drawing made very much on the road, in the car and on the move.

illustration friday - layer

I'm working on some spreads with these characters, and could see them playing in a stack of mattresses right away. better scan to follow.