National Vegetarian Week

Blackbird singing in the dead of night

I'm just working on a poster for National Vegetarian Week.

A lot of the posters I've looked at on-line are very preachy and I really want to avoid this, so I'm doing quite gentle, playful images of famous vegetarians, with living animals frolicking around them and examples of vegetarian food.

I'm probably going to do individual posters for Ghandi, Morrissey, John Peel, Kate Winslet, Brigitte Bardot, Spike Milligan and The Beatles. It would seem that all of the Beatles were vegetarians, apart from John Lennon who was an on-off vegetarian. (Also, I'm having trouble finding evidence that Kate Winslet was vegetarian, there are lots of sites that simply say she is without quoting any sources...)

Anyway, here is my initial drawing of Paul McCartney (with "Blackbird"). I think I need to work on the hands a bit...

it's a wild world

I finished my website which you can find here
I had a little chat about my portfolio with Fig Taylor from the AOI (she was helpful and to the point, and said that I should focus on working in my linear style, look for editorials which have a more narrative focus, and to develop my illustrations of famous people).
Then I rang Greenwillow (an imprint of HarperCollins) in New York and arranged a portfolio drop-off for a group of us.

Oooh, it all seems so professional.


(On a less serious note, I had the most wonderful dream in which I had a pair of sunglasses which made colours go fantastically vivid - lots of bright turquoise and fuchsia.)

3 Women

I've just finished some work which I'd had to put on hold for a while.

This is a self-initiated project, a theatre poster for Three Women, which was recently staged at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London. I read the Sylvia Plath poem the play was based on, and to begin with I was really inspired by the animations of Lotte Reiniger (and the BFI have just released a collection of her short films), so I started making all these little silhouette people, pregnant women with conch shells for bellies etc. But they seemed a bit lifeless without being animated. And too subtle to work as a poster design. So instead I developed the same sort of technique into this more conceptual idea, which (I hope) sums up a lot of what the play is about.

Dalmation Horse

I bought a Diana+ camera last year and took lots of rolls of film with it...it made me really think about composition and tone and made me pay more attention to the things around me (even though my Dad likes to joke that it would be better to put the film in a paper bag and punch holes in it.)
I left one roll undeveloped (probably because 120 film is so expensive to develop unless you have your own darkroom) but recently, it kept niggling at me and I decided I couldn't leave it. The wait seemed endless, but the results were exciting...

I feel slightly reluctant about starting a blog, and at the moment the writing feels very awkward and self-conscious, but I have decided that it will motivate me to work harder.

I spent a couple of days visiting London recently and my boyfriend took me to Forbidden Planet, which was very exciting for me, never having been in a comic book shop before (despite writing my dissertation on "Social Commentary within the Graphic Novel Genre"). I bought home with me a 50p book on Joe Sacco (his graphic novel Palestine was a big eye-opener for me) and Jeffrey Brown's "Miniature Sulk" (captivated by the name...being prone to miniature sulks myself) and more and more I'm wanting to make my own comic books.

(He also took me to Dungeness which was sunny and otherworldly, and a perfect place for black and white photography.)


Here are some things I've been working on recently (click to enlarge):

An image for the Quote Book (published annually by University College Falmouth) to illustrate the quote "A gentleman is simply a patient wolf" - Lana Turner.



And a couple of images for a double page broadsheet editorial on films adapted from books.


(left to right: Sophia Coppola, Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut)

(Akira Kurosawa and Stanley Kubrick)