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!

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...

Flower Power

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

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!

House Party

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...

Black Beauty

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

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)!!

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...

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...

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:

Pierre Imhof:

Henrietta Dubrey:

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

Charles Jamieson - that red!:

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:

Happy Christmas!!

Festive Fever

It might be too early to be getting in a festive frame of mind, but the shops say otherwise and it is starting to get quite chilly and dark early, and so here are some new christmas card designs...