30.12.12

Christmas Tile

In the spirit of thriftiness, I made all my Christmas presents this year. Here's one - a tile-inspired papercut with gold leaf 'grout' for my sister Daisy. I'm planning on doing more of these to sell in my online shop early in the new year...

21.11.12

You Make It Real

Another wedding present papercut to share, this one has lyrics from the James Morrison song You Make It Real - super romantic!!

14.11.12

Oscars frocks!

I've been doing some work on my illustration portfolio, and thought it would be nice to show something a bit more fashion-y than usual... here are some Oscars frocks, hopefully the actresses ring a bell!

9.11.12

I Have Never...

It seems to be papercut city around here at the moment... here's a recent one for commissioned as a wedding present, quoting a poem by E. E. Cummings that was read during the ceremony. Doing these papercuts is giving me an education in romantic quotes and lyrics!

31.10.12

Art Attack

Last week I had an artistically inspiring couple of days, visiting the Affordable Art Fair in Battersea, and the Tim Walker exhibition at Somerset House (highly recommend both)! Here are my favourite artists from the AAF:





 Phil Shaw (look closely at the titles!)



Rob Tucker (my top fave I think)

1.10.12

Rainbow Polish

With all this changeable weather we've been having I've seen more rainbows in the last 2 weeks than ever before, one right over the sea so that you could see the start and end. And that's a roundabout way of introducing a new beauty illustration I've been working on this afternoon!!

11.9.12

Short Cut

I've recently had quite a drastic haircut, from really quite long to pretty short!! It was time for a change, although I'm still not sure if it's a change for the better (!) but anyway, I thought I should update my picture on my blog and website to reflect reality, so here's the new me (plus the initial sketches I chose from):

9.9.12

Cut!

A couple of papercut commissions from the past week - a wedding heart and a new christening design that I was really pleased with...


24.8.12

I Love You Because...

This is a papercut I've just finished - some lyrics from the lovely and romantic Leon Payne song "I Love You Because", commissioned as a wedding present...

18.7.12

One Kiss...

My latest papercut, commissioned as a first anniversary present from a wife to her husband...

25.6.12

Neal's Yard Remedies

At the end of last year, I worked on a really lovely project for Neal's Yard Remedies (through my agent Lemonade) - a pattern design for their new mother & baby gift boxes. Since then I've been checking their website and looking in their shops every now and then to see if the products have been launched, and hey presto, the other day I saw that they had been! Very exciting to see them in the flesh, and although the design has been slightly tweaked here and there since my last version (see swatch at the bottom of the post),  I think they look really lovely!


17.6.12

Happy Congratulations

A couple of cards I made for friends last week, using some lovely patterned papers I bought the other day - total bargain from the cheap and cheerful Tiger...


17.5.12

Flower Power

A bright new pattern for a bit of a grey day...

11.5.12

I Can Colour Everything

I'm very excited that finally a colouring book I illustrated at the end of last year has been published and is available to buy on Amazon! It was the biggest project I've worked on, and was a real challenge - it really did feel like I was drawing everything - but I'm really please with the result. Here's the front cover and some of my favourites from the baby animals section.

Buy a copy here for any little artists in your life!

19.3.12

Spring Has Sprung!

Do you know the great website Print & Pattern? Well, they have a couple of really inspiring books out and just ran a call for submissions to an upcoming Kids publication which I just entered at the 11th hour. Here are a couple of suitably springy patterns that I sent in...


28.2.12

Black Beauty

Just thought I'd share this painting I did recently (well, as a Christmas present so not really that recent any more)...

26.2.12

A to Z




I'm on a paper cutting mission at the moment, having realised it's one of my favourite things to do creatively. So, I made a big alphabet for our wall at home, and am now doing a series of smaller pictures to sell in my online shop (hopefully done and on sale in the next few weeks).

Oh, and I thought I was very clever in realising that the H and the I in the alphabet would be next to each other and could make a nice message picked out in gold leaf, then found out by doing a Google images search that plenty of other people have already realised the very same thing (although executed differently)!!

23.2.12

Flock

Here's another new pattern, inspired by some flock wrapping paper that I have covering my desk drawers...

Birds

My sister Sasha has an enormous - and scarily comfortable - new sofa and she asked me to make her four big (50x50cm) cushion covers to add a bit of colour. And these are them...

21.2.12

On The Case

I've been very neglectful of my blog, and that's going to change. From today I'm self-imposing a new routine on my freelancing days as motivation has been running a bit low, so part of that is going to be to post new work here MUCH more often. To start with, here's a slightly Scandinavian-inspired pattern I've been doing this morning...

2.2.12

London Art Fair

A couple of weeks ago the London Art Fair was on. I'd never been before, but went along and really liked it. Usually I go to the Affordable Art Fair, and some of the same galleries were exhibiting here, but there were also a lot of very unaffordable pictures that were good to see. There were a couple of paintings by one of my favourite artists - although embarrasingly I didn't know his name until now - William Scott:

My other faves were... Chris Kenny who does brilliant and funny things with pieces of found text:

Simone Lia who has a great simple, quirky illustrative style:

Christine McArthur who paints simple subjects with lots of lovely texture and muted colours:

Charles Jamieson - that red!:

22.1.12

Cake Maker

I've been working on some new-year-new-ideas for a portfolio update... this is my favourite so far, a very imaginary cupcake making machine: