They say a picture says more than a thousand words, which I am not sure is true in this case. If it does, I wouldn’t have thought those words make a lot of sense. To illuminate my mental image of Helium as it appeared in the previous post, in which it displays its unreactiveness.
Note the bunny-slippers, Andrew!
The Havock educational service, here to provide you with some information on the element Helium! I absolutely love rasters and lament not having used them before. One of my favourite illustrators, the late Marten Toonder, was a master in their use - particularly in his Bommel and earlier Tom Poes stories, where he used them to astounding atmospheric effect. And on the subject, allow me to mention that the Bommel radioplays currently being broadcast by the NPS, the Dutch public radio, are available as a podcast. They’re in Dutch though and they haven’t got any pictures, so something for the enthusiast, I suppose.
Hold on for a full colour version of Helium, to be posted soon!
Two illustrations done in 2005 in response to a competition set by Dutch publisher Lemniscaat. Both illustrations set in the context of a (very) loose concept of a pink elephant disappearing with a young girl’s cat. The illustrations were politely sent return, but all the same my entry was a good exercise in getting things ready, and also a welcome challenge to work in colour.
And speaking of pink, Hoegaarden is doing a rather splendid white beer with added raspberry juice (or so the label tells me). I had not seen it in the UK, but it appears to be on sale in Belgium.
The Corporate Responsibility Index is (according to the blurb) “a strategic management tool to enhance the capacity of businesses to develop, measure and communicate best practice in the field of corporate responsibility in Australia.” To depict the absence of such a tool as a ship without a rudder - without an ability to revise it’s course and merely be guided by the wind in its sails - seemed appropriate.
Plus, I’ll grab any excuse to draw rigging and sails.
I don’t know whether it’s the hot weather (not that there’s much of that around at the moment) or the memories of empty streets as half the country was in France and the other half stuck in traffic queues on their way to the beach, but summers always make me feel faintly apocalyptic. So.
Perhaps not surprisingly the March issue of Living Ethics took Kevin Rudd’s apology to Indigenous Australians as one of its main issues to look at. With the accompanying illustration I wanted to emphasise that while the apology is a step in the right direction, it is a first step - with many more to follow, some of which will be equally (if not more) challenging.
The next St James illustration is done and will be on here in a bit, plus some of the other stuff that I’ve been working on the last couple of months.
One of the illustrations I did for the set of cards last year (you can find two others, the Floating House and the Attic, among the samples on the front page) - trying to capture the sense of walking into another world when reading a book. The sense of being so completely absorbed by what you are reading - so wrapped up in the words on the page that when you look up from the book you are mildly suprised at the world as it is around you.
A sketch jotted down on the Easter weekend - biro-on-paper and about an hour and a half of painting. An enjoyable exercise as well as something to take away from a lovely weekend. I love the look and feel of the spaces behind parades of shops; areas built up without any sense of aesthetics. Inanimate objects left to their own devices. The back of a nice Chinese in Kingsbridge, Devon.
See, you say that they’re just a one-off and before you know it there’s an ‘episode 2′. Another birthday card, this one.
They keep on coming, birthdays in my family around this time of the year. Here’s another quiet and chirpy birthday card picture. I am enjoying doing these little exercises in working in colour - they are good practice and (hopefully) nice to receive.