Test piece for Brigitte

A little while ago I was asked to produce a test illustration for German women's magazine 'Brigitte'. The brief was to illustrate a well known phrase or saying about love, in this case 'We depend on our partner as a child on it's parents'. I had a couple of attempts at the image - the first idea was to draw a penguin couple because I thought it was a nice story of dependency - the male looking after the egg while the female looks for food, plus the egg is suggestive of the child which will then become dependent on it's parents. The second (more immediate and preferred idea) was of a bicycle made for two! 

Secret 7" exhibition

Last month I took part in an exhibition of seven inch record sleeves at Idea Generation Gallery in Shoreditch. Around 700 designs were on show, each inspired by one of seven tracks by The Cure, Florence and the Machine, Bombay Bicycle club, Noah and the Whale, Ben Howard, CSS and DJ Shadow. Similar to the RCA's secret postcard exhibition, the artist's names were not revealed until a piece was bought - whereupon the purchaser could find the name of the artist hidden inside, plus a limited edition vinyl of the relevant track. My chosen track was 'Black flies' by Ben Howard and the artwork is inspired by the lyric 'Maybe you were the ocean when I was just a stone'. Sleeves were sold in aid of the Teenage Cancer trust.

Chile and Argentina!

I haven't posted much recently as I've spent the last month or so travelling in Chile and Argentina. It was a great trip and we saw some incredible things, including the Atacama desert, salt flats in Bolivia and Iguazu falls in Argentina. Here's a few of the many photos from the trip!

Bologna book fair

Last week I was at the Bologna book fair where I had a busy but great time as usual. A huge range of inspiring and beautiful books and illustrations, lots of nice people and of course delicious food and sunshine! This year I was very happy to have some work selected for the Illustrator's exhibition, and also rather shocked to be nominated for the Astrid Lindgren award. The award is anounced live from Sweden during the fair, and went to Dutch author Guus Kuijer. Here's some pics of the exhibition and fair, as well as the temporary book shop in Piazza Maggiore, with my chicken or egg illustration above the doorway!

New York Times

Here is a recent image about bilingualism which appeared in last Sunday's New York Times Sunday Review.

Boogie Woogie time!

I was recently asked to produce some visuals for Eagle Rock Entertainment for an album called the A B C and D of Boogie Woogie - so called because the names of the musicians begin with the letters A B C & D, one of them being Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones. Here are my covers - unfortunately they decided to go with a photographic solution in the end, but I really enjoyed working on the project and it was great to try my hand at sleeve design, something I haven't done much of before.

Moon Pie

Here is my cover for Moon Pie by Simon Mason, which comes out later this month, published by Random House. It is a children’s book, but the subject matter is quite heavy – it’s about a little girl and her brother trying to cope with their alcoholic father after the death of their mother. Although it sounds like it could be rather depressing, it is actually extremely well written and sensitively handled, and at times quite funny as well as being very moving.

Their brief was to do something typography based, along with any of my own ideas. Here are some of the initial roughs as well as a few colour ideas.

There was quite a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and changes to make until a final consensus was reached. I thought the large moon with a slice taken out of it like a pie worked well, but in the end they decided to go for a crescent moon. The Dad character was difficult to get right, as it couldn’t be too obvious that he was an alcoholic. At one stage he was on the roof, wobbling as if about to fall off, but this idea was a bit over the top! - so he ended up perched on the end of the moon.