Gallery - Julia Donaldson Competition Entry
This image was submitted in a Waterstones competition to illustrate the Julia Donaldson story ‘Freddie and the Fairy’. There were 950 entries and I did not make the final six.
I like it though!
I like it though!
Gallery - Hair
The illustrations for ‘Hair’ were created for a Picture Book masterclass arranged by SCBWI with Little Tiger Press. Chitra Soundararajan's text challenged me to think about illustrating many styles of hair. It took much thought but ended up fun to do.
In the images for 'Hair' I used different colours for the line work.
Little Tiger Press commented on these images that, "There are some great characters here. The humour on the text adds visual narrative - and with more detail this could be stronger still. The use of different coloured linework and textures and patterns is interesting and in some details, very effective, eg the woman's dress.
Little Tiger Press commented on these images that, "There are some great characters here. The humour on the text adds visual narrative - and with more detail this could be stronger still. The use of different coloured linework and textures and patterns is interesting and in some details, very effective, eg the woman's dress.
My work relies heavily on the strength of line. Each each image in this gallery started life as a pen and ink drawing, often traced from a rough sketch. These are scanned into my laptop and two copies made – one with the original linework, and one for colours and textures to be added. I lighten up the line work on the colour image, and then start dropping in textures from family photos. I then use filters on an old copy of Paint Shop Pro to knock back the colours and make them look painted, before dropping the original linework over the top – often slightly offset to highlight it. I also experiment with negative colours, dark, muddy browns and greens become vibrant purples and pinks when reversed, great for night scenes!
Gallery - New Fairy Tales
This is a picture of a troll, drawn to illustrate a story in online magazine New Fairy Tales (www.newfairytales.co.uk). To loosen up my line work I painted the lines with a brush and Indian Ink.
Gallery - Single Line Artwork
A lot of my artwork is drawn with a single line. A style I adopted to illustrate my Squiggle stories. I felt that following a line added an extra element of interest to the story. One of the biggest compliments to the style was paid to me by the SCBWI Editor of Words and Pictures, she wrote, “Your Squiggle drawings kept my two elder sons busy for half an hour ... I'm not kidding. My 8-year-old was fascinated by how you drew all of the images with one line ... he traced his finger over all of the illos to be sure!”
