Wild rose hips

I picked these on Hackney marshes a few weeks ago and brought a few tangled, hairy sprays into my studio. 

Who knew rose hips smelled so good, they have a kind of orangey apple freshness going on. Partly explains why they are used dried in tea, I guess. And jelly, and, in Sweden so I read, in soup. 

And as a treat for pet chinchillas. It says so in Wikipedia, it must be true folks.

Still working on leaf painting, but for now, this is how my leaves look. 

I looked through a most worrying selection of how-to books online on greens and leaves, books on botanical illustration and the like, and there certainly are some authoritative publications around. Do this, don't do that, never mix these and so on. Like I said, worrying!

Might be better to keep looking at flower painters I love, like Elizabeth Blackadder's work. 

Still, in the end, the only way to improve leaf painting is most likely to um, keep painting leaves. What say you, any ideas?

A quick drawing done at the kitchen table while I was waiting for lemon and millet muffins to bake. The recipe is super quick, with ingredients that are usually around already. Which means something warm, a bit healthy and lemony crunchy can be ready for tea in half an hour to cheer up a drizzly Monday afternoon. 

Hey, you have to make working from home fun sometimes too, right?

Colourwise,I thought that was deep blue I was stroking out into the shadow areas, but it was Windsor Purple pretending to be French Ultramarine. Heh. It needs replacing!

Monday blues...with red and green and yellow bits.

Sometimes it's good to play with a theme. Stripes.

This time in watercolour and cut paper strips, inspired by an Ikat robe from Uzbekistan that I saw at an exhibition at the V&A ages ago (more of my experiments with stripes live here). I do love an Ikat weave a lot, always the subtle blending of colours and the mystery of the rhythms in the warp and weft.

I have been sorting out my portfolio and getting work further out to the world, which is all very well, but there still has to be time to have fun with colour and brushes, right? In fact, it's essential.

illustration friday - tall

A quick one to stretch my newly acquired Photoshop skills - I guess the 'Limpicks seeped into my consciousness after all! The setting was inspired by Clare Mallison's lovely  illustration for a Young Times story, Garden Olympics.

nasturtiums and cosmos

Aargh...am I turning into a flower painter? Is that a Bad Thing?

Well, the fact is my friends, I enjoy painting flowers, a lot. And have been since I was about 8 years old. So somewhere, somehow, it's my thing.

Is it my only thing? This is the question. 

For now, I see some flowers, I paint 'em, I enjoy the looking(and it's like shooting fish in a barrel too I might add). 

Then I share them with you. That's cool with me. 

This is teeny, postcard sized. The vase was a present from my lovely sis, who is always so thoughtful with gifts.

poppies

The peas, beans and lettuce in our tiny back garden all got razed by slugs this Summer, but the poppies escaped. I was especially pleased to be able to paint these poppies in situ as they don't transport well at all. As you can see, the never ending quest to find the right green mix was a struggle. Oxide of chromium, I'm still not sure about you.

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?

midsummer wildflowers

I picked these in Hackney Marsh on Monday, almost in the shadow of the barrier around the Olympics/Radio 1 concert venue which is all fenced up and ready for weekend. Urban pastoral perhaps, but I love the wildness of the marshes, so close to where we live in Hackney, East London. Long may they stay that way. I had to paint quickly - these guys wilt, or the petals drop off, in no time at all. Happy midsummer!

Some afternoons...

 

 ...the sun shines for a bit, I have time, the itunes random works just right and some magic happens. One hour becomes two, colours and textures lead one to the next to the next. From my World Famous Razor Clam Collection. More stripey themed warm ups and other bits on flickr.

Illustration Friday - faded

 

Not sure about this one, it was pretty last minute and late night, but it was fun to make it happen anyway. Lovely to look through a pile of old World of Interiors magazines for references.

Illustration Friday - sight

I had in mind a line from The Famished Road by Ben Okri, which has lived in my notebook for years. In this image, the line has a completely new context.

Constellations were visible in the sky, each star a different colour, luminous and pulsing.

The waves are inspired by an illustration by Dorry Spikes, one of my favourite illustrators.

 

new card design

My sis asked me to paint a card for a friend, who is a lover of, amongst many other wonderful things, flowers and fynbos, the indigenous vegetation of the Western Cape, in South Africa.

2012 Serco Prize submission

Entry for the London Transport Museum's annual illustration competition, run in collaboration with the AOI. The 2012 theme was 'Secret London'. I had a lot of fun thinking about the unexpected surprises you very often come across wandering the neighbourhood streets, far away from the main tourist attractions. This way of working, I'm finding, is a great way to be expressive and graphic. Painted acrylic collage paper on watercolour paper.