My first linocut

Living in Bedford means that Edward Bawden's illustrations are often on display as there is a large collection of his work at the Higgins. A lot of it are lino cuts, so I thought I'd give it a go with my fox character here.

Here is my lino. You carve the lino where you want there to be white space. I got a bit carried away and went through to the back! I patched it up, no problem!

I rolled on some black acrylic printing paint, pressed some paper on top and lifted it off and... It actually looks really cool! I'm so pleased with it!.

Here is the dining room now. Er, I think I got carried away. I started printing on everything! Now to tidy up before my boyfriend gets mad!

Animal Pirates

This is a scanned watercolour painting of some cute pirate animals on a voyage out to sea. It's just some personal development work. I wanted to use my dip pens on watercolour paper and try out the different nibs in the context of an actual illustrations rather than just mark making. I feel a bit sorry for the cat clinging on to the crows nest like that! They should have got themselves a bigger boat!

Illustration Friday: Freeze

This is my original pen sketch.

Above is my drawing scanned and manipulated in Photoshop. 

When thinking about what to draw for Illustration Friday's theme of 'freeze' I initially thought of drawing a frozen landscape, but I've been looking at a lot of photography books. I have a book from Bedford library on Humphrey Spender's humanist landscapes and his photographs are like a freeze frame from history. My illustration is based on a photograph he took in 1939 of a street in Tyneside (North West England). The weather must be pretty cold, the people are wrapped up in furs and their faces reflect the hardships of the economic depression of their time.

 Spender's work appeals to me because it is a historical document.

Now that the majority of people have a phone some do feel the need to broadcast themselves doing the most mundane things. I like the ones that include a lot of environmental context. A simple picture of a busy street will look so interesting in years to come! Our architectural landscape is shaped by the people who use it and in twenty or fifty years time it will be a shame if the only photos that exist of our era are an excess of out-of-focus instagram self portraits!

Hand Embroidery With Cheap Thread.

Some time ago on Ebay I bought a bumper amount of embroidery thread at a low price in various shades and colours and I was pretty chuffed with my purchase... until today! When I washed away the soluble paper after I had stitched the design ( I had spent many hours stitching whilst watching Olympics this week), the bright blue dye on one of the threads bled uncontrollably like a broken fountain pen. It has stained my material. Argh! Two technical blunders in as many projects. Perhaps fate is telling me to give up!

 It doesn't look too bad, I suppose, but it is annoying.

 I like Meagan Ileana's hand embroideries. She uses clean lines with painted watercolour to shade parts of the background. I'm not sure how she stops the paint from getting out of control and bleeding all over the cloth, maybe it's something to experiment with.

It's the last day of my exhibition with the Circus of Illustration at the Place theatre in Bedford. Here are some snaps of the work. I can't wait to exhibit some personal work again soon.

Embroidery Mistake

Usually when I do hand embroidery I draw my image onto soluble paper, which I baste onto my fabric. The paper dissolves straight away so I was really confused when this didn't happen to this piece. It turns out I have used fabric interfacing! What a dope! The plastic iron-on side was touching the fabric so I was able to fuse it, but I'm not happy with it...

 It's not perfect, you can see the texture of the interfacing as it is lighter in colour to the beige background and the creases in the face can't be ironed out or stretched. I felt so depressed about it last night, five hours of work thrown away! And it was going to be in an exhibition next month! I've learned a few lessons and everything in my craft box is going to get labeled from now on. Not sure what do with her. Have her in my house as a reminder to pay attention, perhaps.

New pens

I've got some new pens. Dip pens. There are so many nibs to play with and they are so cheap I decided to buy a selection from the Art centre in Bedford. 

I don't really hold my pen 'properly'. At school I was still writing with a pencil when everyone else had advanced to using ink. I use it in my right hand but hold it like a left hander. This makes the line very scratchy.

So this is taking some getting use to. With the finer nibs I draw a line and no mark is made because of my cack-hand. However, when the mark is made, especially with a really fine line... It looks really tasty, if a little shaky.

Here are a few experiments from my sketchbook using my new toys.

Drawing hair with super fine nibs was fun.

This bear is my favourite!

Spotlight Exhibition

If you're going to be attending one of the amazing acts for this year's Bedfringe festival, then maybe you'll be going to The Place theatre on Bradgate Road. If so, be sure to check out the Circus of Illustration's 'Spotlight' exhibition. Andrew Foster from the circus designed our eye-catching poster!

We'll have some illustration work up in the foyer and bar for you to admire. Something to look at as you're having a tasty beer before the show or interval. How exciting!

 This our the website for the Circus of Illustration

Playing With Oil Pastel

Recently half of my dining table has been commandeered by my inks, oil pastels, watercolours and pencils. It's the best way to keep me busy whilst Jack is busy working on his next album. During the day, I'm upstairs doing the cutes on my computer for Doodle Press and in the evening, when I need to get away from the screen, I can play around with my toys in a different room.

I like trying new things. I've had oil pastels for ages, but it's only until now that I've decided to experiment. These are the better drawings from my sketchbook using the pastels. I referenced the models from my 1950s Good Housekeeping magazine. The bright colours make them look more like 1980s fashion illustrations. I like the loose style. I put a few pencil lines down on the page as guides then just broadly used the blunt pastels on the whole page without worrying about the little details.

The Jumblies

This is an ink and watercolour piece that I have done for an illustration exhibition. It's going to be at the Place theatre, Bradgate Road in Bedford between 13th July and 28th July. I'm exhibiting with other illustrators from Bedfordshire (The Circus of Illustrators). It being focussed on 'illustration', rather than 'art', I felt as though the submission had to be a drawing that represented some sort of literature, editorial or text... Otherwise it's just art, right? There's pressure on me to show some of my embroidery... A lot of people seem to like it... I will probably, although I consider that cheating a bit! So this painting is based on The Jumblies by Edward Lear. A poem I learnt at lower school. I get goosebumps whenever I read it.

Circus Homework

A watercolour and pencil drawing (Yeah! It's not digital!) for the Circus of Illustrators in Bedford. Our homework this month was to draw something from the circus that hadn't been depicted yet so I combined both elephants and a little clown character.

Bedford Clanger April 2012

Whoops! I can't believe I haven't posted this image yet! I drew the front cover of April's edition of the Bedford Clanger. It was a shop local special. A guide to shopping independently in Bedford whilst avoiding the major chains. I wanted the character to be chic, confident and proud of her town and to illustrate that there is plenty of choice and interesting things to buy outside of the usual pull of the huge supermarkets.

Circus of Illustration

The Circus of Illustration is an illustration group I belong to in Bedford. We are professional doodlers who meet up once a month for a chit-chat and to plan workshops in our area. We assign each other little drawing tasks too. This month we had to draw each other. We picked a name from a hat and I got Katy Dynes, aka Kitty Dinners! She's the smiley funny red-head of the group.

Medieval Fair Part 1

During the May bank holiday the Bedford members of The Circus of Illustrators are putting together a little exhibition. Over the Easter break I have been working on a couple of themed pieces for the gallery wall and I've just finished the first character. I'm working on a princess to go with him so they can hang together side by side. I drew him in pen, scanned in my sketch book and coloured him up using photoshop and painter.

The Circus of Illustration

If you use facebook, we have a page: Circus Of Illustration We are trying to bring local illustrators together to run drawing events & exhibitions for our local community. This trapeze artist is my contribution to a project that our group are working on at the moment.

Just a Jester Illustration

It's Sunday, it's raining... What do you do? Do some doodling whilst watching 'The Mysterious Cities of Gold' of course. My boyfriend suggested a jester character. I decided to stick to pencil and watercolours. It's a very soft image, I wonder if I should start using a black pen to do my outlines? I've totally lost the plot when it comes to using real paints, I've been using the computer to do my day to day artwork for so long, I finding welding a paintbrush a bit baffling!

Tattooed Lady Embroidery

This is an embroidery of a tattooed lady, I imagine her as a performer at the circus. She may be a contortionist or a magician's assistant. I drew the line illustration as I was thinking of characters for the circus themed illustration exhibition we are planning on hosting in Bedford later this year. She ended up looking good enough to stitch.

100 followers: Thank you!

Today I have discovered that I have 100 fellow bloggers following this blog. Thank you so much for your support! It's great to know that there are people out there who are reading my rambles!
I've photographed some more embroidered illustrations. I'm still experimenting and not everything is a success, but I'm enjoying the process.

Illustration Friday: POPULARITY

The bear mayor was re-elected due to overwhelming popularity. His policy on keeping honey tax low and increasing spending on the picnic basket budget was very popular with the voters.
This was a quick illustration I did specifically for illustration friday in photoshop.

Circus coming to Bedford

The Bedfordian illustrators team who created the We Are Bedford: Monster Event for the Big Draw back in October, have decided to create another themed illustration event for Bedford in the summer. We are still finalising details, but I am so exciting about doing another doodle day in my home town I've started doing some homework. These are drawings I did in watercolour and ink, but the characters are from one of my favourite books: The Great Alphabet Race illustrated by Tom O' Sullivan. There's plenty of inspiration in there as the next theme will be based on the circus.