Happy Christmas!

CIA calendar image

This week is my week in my Agency's (CIA) calendar on the theme 'If I were....' My answer (a bit weirdly) was 'If I were an anagram' - 'surreal slither' being an anagram of my name. I've simply produced an image inspired by these words, an elephant with a slithering snake for a trunk.

The Poundshop!

My bike owl tote bags are going to be sold as part of a very special Christmas Poundshop at the price of just £5.00 each. The Poundshop was set up by Household and Sara Melin in 2010 to provide a platform for designers to sell their goods at an affordable price. The launch is this Friday, downstairs at Mother Ad agency, (Biscuit Building, 10 Redchurch Street, London E2 7DD) and there will also be a pop-up webshop over the weekend of 9th - 11th December. Great for Christmas presents!

Animals in Jumpsuits!

Brazilian Fashion magazine Lola asked me to contribute to their 'sketchbook' section, where each month a different illustrator draws on and around photographs of different clothing or accessories. For some reason animals wearing designer jumpsuits seemed like a good idea!

American Illustration

I've had two pieces selected for this year's American Illustration Annual, both from 'Sixty Impossible things before lunch'. The book will be launched tonight, with a party in New York at the Angel Orensanz foundation. Sorry not to be there!

Vogue Japan

Here is my recent piece for Japanese Vogue - it appears in a special children's supplement called 'Angels' and my part was to illustrate some quirky step by step 'experiments'. Flowers frozen in ice, stripy water and fun with cornstarch! The design and layout is similar to my 'Silver spoon for Children' work, as this is what the client requested. I was surprised by the mixture of English and Japanese scripts as I imagined all the text would be in Japanese. I had to think about the layout though - as it reads from right to left!

Last chance to see!

It's your last chance to see our Blue Suede Shoes exhibition as it comes down tomorrow. It's well worth a look and is open until 6pm at the Nancy Victor Gallery, 6 Charlotte Street.

Waitrose Love Life

Here are some recent illustrations for Waitrose' new magazine 'Love Life', on the subject of face massage. These were tricky to draw and it took several attempts, plus a skype call with the writer of the piece before I could visualise them well enough to get them right! As well as being straight-forward instructional drawings, I've tried to add a little bit of humour into them with the little doodles and notes.

Blue Suede Shoes at Nancy Victor

Our Blue Suede shoes exhibition is on until 21st October at the wonderful Nancy Victor gallery in Fitzrovia. It's open every day except Sunday from 10am-6pm. Here's a few pics of the gallery and the opening!

Blue Suede Shoes in Central London!

I have another show coming up, this time with my illustration collective, 'Gumbo'. Our 'Blue Suede shoes' exhibition will be on again in October. This time we have an amazing location in central London - the Nancy Victor gallery at 6 Charlotte place, Fitzrovia. The show opens on 6th October and runs until 21st October. Open Monday - Saturday 10am - 6pm. Hope you can make it along!

Image for Google

I created this recent image to go in a booklet for Google. The booklet was based on the fact that the Google display network offers 4x the click-through rate compared to the industry standard, and contains other '4x' facts illustrated by different artists. My fact was 'Women on average say 4 times more words a day than men'. I have chosen to go for a typographic solution with many words illustrated that mean 'to talk'! I was restricted to using all four google colours, plus black and white.

The Silver spoon goes Dutch....

....and Russian and Danish! I spent endless hours in the earlier part of this year rewriting all the lettering for three more foreign language editions of The Silver spoon for children - (it's already in Spanish, French and Japanese). This is a much bigger job than it sounds, as every single title, plus incidental bit of text including ingredient packets etc have to be translated, lettered, coloured and placed. The Russian was definitely the biggest challenge!

Colibri

Festivaletteratura is on in Mantua in Italy this week - home of my publisher Corraini Edizioni. I am not there this year but here is some lettering I did for the festival newspaper. It's called 'Colibri' which means humming bird in Italian.

Sixty Impossible Things....in French!

Bonjour. ‘Soixante choses impossibles à faire avant le déjeuner’ is now available and is published by Éditions les grandes personnes.

Art Auction for Burundi

A good friend of mine, illustrator Sarah Horne is holding an art auction to raise money for a small team from her church to go out to Burundi, central Africa to support the work of the Batwa project. On sale will be original illustrations, limited edition prints, signed books and original art by many illustrators including Simone Lia, Sandra Howgate and Chris Andrews. I've contributed a bike owl tote bag, as well as a couple of prints and signed books. The auction will be held on Sunday 4th September at Hermitage Moorings, 16 Wapping High Street, London, and is open to all. There will loads of great stuff to buy and bid for, and rumour has it there will be cake too! More info on the auction can be found here.

Bike owl tote bags!

My bike owl design is now available as a tote bag, printed on organic cotton using water based inks, by the lovely people at idressmyself. The full range of t-shirt sizes is now available too - from my online shop.

A few more pics of the show

The show has come down but you can still buy copies of the book 'Sixty Impossible things before lunch' from my online shop. All artworks from the book are also available as limited edition giclee prints, priced at £100 (unframed) or £120 (framed). If you would like to order one let me know!

Last chance to see!

Today is the last day of my exhibition at the Design Conspiracy gallery, 12 Stukeley Street. Come along if you can, I'll be here until 6.30pm....

Sixty Impossible things Private view

A good time was had by all at the private view for 'Sixty Impossible things before lunch', held at the Design Conspiracy gallery last Thursday. As well as prosecco, orange juice and beer, visitors were treated to some impossibly themed food.....chocolate teapot biscuits, chicken or egg scotch eggs, ice creams on fire (which were actually ice cream shaped chilli cheese biscuits), and flying pigs (sausages on sticks with wings!) We had great fun thinking of and making these on the day. Thank you to all those who came. For those that couldn't make it, the show is still on (until Thursday) so come and have a look! Books and limited edition prints are on sale in the gallery.

Sixty Impossible Things....London exhibition!

I'm having an exhibition of work from my recent book 'Sixty Impossible things before lunch' at the Design Conspiracy Gallery, 12 Stukeley Street, London WC2B 5LQ. The show is open to the public from 15th July and continues until 21st. Open Monday-Friday from 10am-6pm and 11am-4pm at the weekend. I will be manning the show during the week so I hope to see you there!

Creative Review

I recently created this image as a piece of self promotion to go on the Creative Review website.

Shop update

I've just added a couple more products to my online shop - this screenprint of a hedgehog (a hog in a hedge) is available in light yellow, green and brown, or turquoise, green and dark red. They are printed on lovely thick Somerset satin paper and are a limited edition of 20. Also available is my silkscreen of a cat in a coal cellar and a polar bear in a snowstorm. You can also buy my new book 'Sixty Impossible things before lunch', priced at £14.00. Take a look!

New book about Illustration

'Illustration' by Andrew Hall is published by Laurence King and is out this month. It's part of their portfolio series and is a comprehensive guide for students or recent graduates wanting to pursue a career as an illustrator. I have contributed one small image - oil derricks and nodding donkeys from 'An Endangered Species' which was part of an exhibition catalogue for the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

Print for Jealous

I was very happy to be asked to contribute a print to Jealous gallery's portfolio and recent show of two colour screen prints 'Jealous Needs you'. Here is my print 'Blue Escapes Painting', a simpler version of the piece I did for the 'Blue Suede Shoes' exhibition. It is now available from my online shop and from Jealous gallery.

Workshop at ISIA

Last week I travelled to Italy to do a workshop with postgraduate students at ISIA, a design school in Urbino, with help from Chiara Carrer and Giulia Sagramola. Urbino is a beautiful walled town with an ancient Ducal palace, cobbled streets and impressive views, nestled in the hills in the Marche region of Italy. The school itself is in a converted monastery and on arrival you are greeted by an amazing circular painted ceiling.

The workshop was based on my book 'A is for Rhinoceros', published by Edizioni Corraini, and was about getting students to look at the shapes of the letters rather than what the letters are 'for'. They did several exercises working with letters, using them as a basis for a drawing.

Then, on the second day they started their main project to work (in groups) on two alphabet books - one of capital letters and one of lower case letters. They were given restrictions on size and colour but were free to choose a theme for their book if they wished.

The 'Capitals' group had to work with blue, red and black on an A3 book and their chosen theme was 'Eros' (Everything Relies On Sex)! The lowercase group worked with yellow, green and black on a smaller, A5 book, and their chosen subject was ingredients. Both groups had the additional challenge of working in English, as the Italian alphabet only has 21 letters and the brief was to create 26!

Both groups worked well, and (just!) managed to finish their books in time. Here are a few of the images produced. Work by Giulia Sagramola, Michele Galluzzo, Alessio D'Ellena, Federica Vaglio, Claudia Polizzi, Giampiero Donno and Antonella Liscita.