Wednesday 14 May 2014

Latest Projects...

It's been a while since I wrote properly on here, the last few months have been crazy! I've been super busy working with the lovely chaps at Green Android on a brand new set of kids craft books - 'Mini Crafter' to accompany the 'Mini Artist' series I did a couple of years ago. As well as producing hundreds of new illustrations for the third and fourth books in our 'How to Draw' series - Space' and 'Vehicles'

They've both been brilliant projects to work on. For the Mini Crafter books, I was commissioned to design, make, and photograph all 11 step by step projects in each of the 4 books. They're quite a diverse range of titles - Junk Modelling, Puppets, Masks, and Clay Modelling, and together they saw me making all sorts of fun and messy projects, from bin bag snowmen, to vampire masks, and Toilet roll tigers. I can't say I didn't enjoy it!



I'm particularly pleased with the clay modelling title, which I was (if i'm honest) a tad apprehensive about. I'd not really done much clay work before, so it was a bit of an unknown. However, It's the title i'm most pleased with and i'm over the moon at how some of the models worked out.




For each spread, I designed how I wanted the project to look and went about planning how the steps would work. Then began working them up into roughs.

Once the roughs had been approved, I made a couple of practice runs of each project and then got to work building the 'extra' models to be used throughout the books. Finally, I settled down, book by book, making and photographing all the step by step projects. Each project had to be carefully arranged, and photographed in my little photo studio, to make sure the lighting, and positioning were all consistent. 





The chaps at Green Android have done a brilliant job on the design, and have just sent all four books to print. I can't wait to see the final books in the flesh!



Alongside all the craftiness, and hundreds of drawings for the next 'How to draw' books in the series, i've also been working on some other brilliant client briefs, Beast collective projects, exhibitions, craft markets, new products, and some other personal projects too, but more on that another time!