illustration friday - carry

One for my children's book illustration portfolio, which I've been working on this week. I've been out drawing in the play area near home, so I had plenty of sketchbook material to turn into something fun. 

Clearly, drawing some dogs while I was at it would be helpful too, eeeek. Does anyone else find it tricky to integrate animals in the same style as people? 

Guess it's really a question of more practice, like all drawing wobbles.

out of the woods in photoshop

This was coursework - I've just finished seven weeks of a Photoshop course at City Lit.  My first ever image done entirely digitally, though incorporating scanned paper bits and pieces and hand drawn outlines for the shapes. 

It's a pretty big thrill to feel confident using the software at last. As opposed to stumbling around the layers palette, stuck, or taking endless time on getting at things that I now know might take a simple click of the magic wand tool.

The course was geared towards designers and illustrators, so not too much of that retouching malarkey. OK in its place, but not so much for my kind of work.

I'm looking forward to finding natural, playful ways of introducing Photoshop into illustrations, particularly the collage images I sometimes do.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

more wildflowers

The poppies and nigella in the top watercolour are perhaps not really so much wildflowers, not here in Hackney, at least not without the help of a pack of wildflower meadow mix.

I did the painting outside, on Midsummer's Day at the wonderful St Mary's Secret Garden in Haggerston. 

It's a community gardening project that is my midweek break from studio life. The new ecominds garden there is full of lovely flowers at the moment, so much so that its hard to stick to just wild flowers, but a narrowed focus is probably no bad thing for productivity and concentration. 

Do you have a favourite Summer flower?