The Lancet

Test cover

I was recently asked, along with several other illustrators to do a test cover for the Lancet Neurology journal. The brief was about Motor neurone disease and quite a challenge! Here is what I came up with - a simple idea of a motor neuron 'tree' with the nerve endings (dendrites) forming the branches, the axon the trunk and the roots being formed by the terminal endings. I wanted to show the tree - normally something strong, natural and healthy, slowly deteriorating with the addition of a woodpecker pecking away at the neuron trunk, showing the damage in a gentle, subtle way... I wasn't picked for the final cover, but I'm told I got second place, oh well, next time...

New Era Cap

90th Anniversary exhibition

I had a really great day a couple of weeks ago decorating this baseball cap for New Era, who celebrate their 90th anniversary this year. My idea was simply to do a 'thinking cap' with various things that the cap could be thinking written on and illustrated - for example 'I am 90 years old - don't I look good for my age?' and 'I love baseball' etc. etc. Great project - and it was really refreshing to get some paints out and get away from the computer screen. It was also quite a challenge to imagine how my design would translate from flat paper on to the 3 dimensional cap, I realised how much of a 2D thinker I am! Here's the finished design, plus some work in progress pics.

New Era provided each artist with an amazing boxed cap kit, containing blank canvas cap plus an array of coloured markers, and also encouraged artists to document the process of creating the designs. The caps will be displayed in New York and LA later in the month.