Scaramouche

Drawing 16th Century Commedia dell’arte characters. 

This is Il Capitano (Scaramouche), a boastful swashbuckling shy coward. 

Portrait of Ed Miliband

Sophie Heawood in today's Guardian - It’s the age of the geek – so why does Ed Miliband still get such a bad press?  (here)

Picasso in Paris - reworking

(larger view)

I decided to rework my Picasso in Paris poster today - the big beige expanses had been niggling at me for a while. Most commissions I finish and move on without a backwards glance, but with this one I kept hearing a little voice saying "perhaps just a little bit of confetti?".

Original poster: 

(I think working on the collages has made me a bit more adventurous with colour and composition)

Art prints available from Society6 - click here.

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water - Alan Watts

My collage made using illustrations and photographs from the British Library's collection of public domain images is nearing its completion.

I worked through 300 pages of the collection (barely making a dent on it's total 10,212 pages) picking out any images which intrigued me. As I began to add images to the hexagons, I would make connections with other images, or find ways to manipulate and change them. Since nearly all of the images in the collection are black and white, I also added colour and adjusted the levels to suit my own purpose. Many of the images become visual metaphors, express feelings, or suggest part of a narrative.

The collage is A1-sized and comprised of 63 hexagons, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges' Library of Babel.

Highland Cattle (from my location sketchbook)

Our new neighbours: a small herd of highland cattle have moved into the conservation area close to where we live, and I've been spending some time drawing them.

More collage close-ups

close-ups from a larger collage made with public domain material from the British Library 

brush pen drawings from my sketchbook...

Wolpertingers in the Woods

Not usually drawn to make something this busy, but I felt a certain folkiness was called for.

(see larger version)

This comic about snow doesn't read in a typical left-to-right movement, and there are no words to guide you. Instead you have to follow the snow, or the tracks in the snow, or make sense of a series of moments.

I've shown it to a couple of people and I can see that there are clearly problems in following it, but I like the idea that you might get lost in it and have to try to work out how things connect together - because that makes you an active participant in the creation of a snowy dream cat.

Follow my comics here: http://emmycrayon.tumblr.com/

Cookie the Hamster

a little thank-you card for a friend's daughter

Self-portrait

Miniature Schnauzers

A recent pet portrait commission. 

Process picture - pencil prior to adding watercolour:

Garden

Dan and I are growing gem lettuces, tomatoes, kale, courgettes, peppers, chillies, french beans, strawberries, rosemary and mint.

I know it's not the done thing for an illustrator to have so many different styles, but I am always fighting between making nice little neat tight drawings and making big loose messy paintings, and I can't see how the two can ever be reconciled. I love working in a detailed and precise way in ink or gouache, but it's so much harder to be loose and it's what I admire in my favourite painters...there's something more human and authentic in going against the urge to make things look perfect and tidy, and it feels really good to paint without worrying what anyone might think about the end result. 

If you're in your comfort zone drawing neatly, I suggest you buy a big paintbrush, maybe a Daler-Rowney system 3 SY21 Long Flat Acrylic brush (I know...very precise - it happens to be my favourite brush). You can't be neat with it. It holds too much paint and water. You can use the edge to create lines, but not so precise and not much in the way of detail. But that's good - it's liberating to face up to your weaknesses. It's a challenge to try to suggest something with as few brush-strokes as possible.

Le Jardin de la Mémoire - Episode 2

(click to enlarge)

to be continued...

(If you're on tumblr, you can follow the comic here)

Le Jardin de la Mémoire - episode 1

(I drew this last night and coloured it today)

Visited my family back in Stafford over Easter - spent a lovely day working in the garden with my mum, accompanied by her two guinea pigs. We have some red tulips that my Grandad Cyril planted before I was born which come up every year. I love how eternal flowers are. (I planted freesias, which are her favourites, and lettuces, which I suspect the guinea pigs will gobble up).

(Bacon the guineapig)

My Grandad Geoff sat for me and let me paint his portrait, which was lovely...I hardly ever get chance to paint people from life any more. It's nice to paint someone you love and admire so much. I was so impressed with him for sitting still for so long too - he never, ever sits still. He always has to be busy doing something. His childhood nickname was "lightning".

Later, while having a sort out and throwing away sentimental ephemera I came across a couple of bits and pieces I made a while back:

(the piece above was from an idea for a comic about Prosopagnosia or face blindness)

The Library of Babel

I had the idea for the hexagon maze as a way of depicting solopsism (the idea that only ones own mind is sure to exist and everything else is a creation of the mind) - I sketched an image of a man in a hexagonal room with each wall as a mirror reflecting endless crowds of other people. 

In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", Borges also imagines a land with a language which lacks nouns, where things are only understood in their relationship to other things, and events are only recognised as part of a sequence. Lost objects are duplicated with gradually lessening precision, archaeological finds can be brought about by hope or suggestion, tiny items can have the mass of giants, while towers of blood and transparent tigers are hardly worth mentioning. So I experimented with illustrating these ideas across a maze, almost like the panels of a comic. 

It was only more recently, when I was developing the hexagon mazes into collages, that I happened to start reading Borges' The Library of Babel...which to my surprise was set in a huge labyrinth of hexagons. 

(In short, I began illustrating one Borges story and ended up illustrating another I'd not yet read.)

Peryton

Peryton: a mythical deer-bird hybrid with the shadow of a man. After killing a man, it casts it's own shadow. Thought to have flown from Atlantis as the island was being destroyed by an earthquake. Possibly invented by Jorge Luis Borges in his "Book of Imaginary Beings"

Interesting fact about Jorge Luis Borges: his grandmother Fanny Haslam came from Hanley in Staffordshire, and she used to tell him stories when he was small. Occasionally Borges slips her surname into his stories.

Alternate version:

Wolpertinger

The Wolpertinger is a fanged rabbit-deer-squirrel-owl-hybrid from Bavarian Folklore.