Bunnies and raisins

Here's an illustration for the current issue of Red magazine, about how your life changes when you have children. Are those raisins next to the bunny, or something else?!

Drawing tomorrow at the Museum of Childhood

In the future there will be dinosaur proof hovercars, everyone will eat sugary foods all of the time (even the dinosaurs), buildings will be made of gold, and spiders are huge and elephants tiny! This is what the future holds according to my 8 year old art director, Joe - and what a fun brief it was too!

Several weeks ago teams from my agency CIA and ad agency AMV BBDO met at the museum of Childhood to run workshops with children aged from 4-11 to find out their ideas of what our future world will be like. Some amazing ideas were born and then given to us illustrators to interpret. The artworks were on display at the museum on Saturday as part of the The Big Draw. It was a fantastic event with live drawing from fellow illustrators including Sarah Coleman, Jill Calder, Jessie Ford, Brian Grimwood, Stan Chow and Rose Blake.

Here is my piece and a few pics from the day. Incidentally there were some great bits from the brief that I didn't manage to include - people have no teeth (because of eating all those sweets), Australia is cold and rainy and Iceland is the hottest place in the world. Santa has moved to Australia. Great ideas, thanks Joe!

The Caterpillar

The Caterpillar is a new arts and literature magazine for children aged 7 - 11 and the summer issue is out now. It is brilliantly quirky and very funny with an old fashioned feel.  With short stories, and poems such as 'A poem which aims to dissuade you from bringing your horse to Tesco' and 'A week in the life of Mr Potato head' it is a great and entertaining read. It includes work by Michael Morpurgo, Andrew Kaufman, Julie O'Callaghan and lots more. I was happy to be asked to contribute some illustrations - these were originally done for Food and Wine magazine, but seem to fit in with the feel of the Caterpillar rather well! You can order copies from the Caterpillar website. 

The Silver spoon in German

The Silver Spoon for children is now available in German, bringing the total number of available languages to 8 (Spanish, French, Danish, Dutch, Russian, English and Japanese!). That's an awful lot of re-writing... It's actually been out a while now and is published by Edel in collaboration with Phaidon. Here's the cover and a few of the spreads.

Work for COOP, Italy

Earlier this year, I worked with Edizioni Corraini on a project for the Italian Cooperative. The project explains the work of the COOP, who for the last 30 years have worked extensively with schools, providing many interactive workshops for children. These focus on educating young consumers to help them make good, responsible choices about what they what they are buying, and to become 'aware consumers'. 

The information pack comes in an illustrated envelope, and consists of a sixteen page graphic novel, an  illustrated essay and one of several regional texts which contain details of workshops available. More information and an online version of the project can be seen on the project website! Design by Pietro Corraini.

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!

The Silver Spoon for Children

Spaghetti Blog naise

I thought I’d start with a couple of images from what was my biggest project (and probably most time consuming ever!) from last year: ‘The Silver Spoon for children’.  Published by Phaidon press and aimed at children aged 10-14 it teaches kids to cook authentic Italian food. It’s also pretty good for adults and most of the dishes are really tasty. I tried quite a few of them during the photo shoots, which was a lovely perk of this job! I thought I would be sick of Italian food after months on end of drawing it, but I love it just as much as ever, and even attempted one of the recipes at the weekend for my parents (the lamb with a herb crust)!  Anyway, here’s the cover and a couple of the inside spreads.