Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Oi! Put That Bloody Kettle On!





My obsession with tea has finally led me to pull together a tea based print project mostly revolving around the most important tea-making tool - the pot.

I love tea with a passion, with a cup of it almost consistently within arms reach, and those who know me can vouch for my incredible ability to always want another one, no matter how many I've had already.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent several days sitting in the V&A drawing some of their vast collection of pots, cups, saucers and spoons specifically for this project. I'm sure there will be more to come, as my sketchbook has quite literally dozens and dozens more, but in the meantime, anyone want one? A tea I mean...



Thursday, March 21, 2013

Hand Drawn Type






Since the 'In My Mind' project a couple of weeks ago, I've been playing around with hand drawn type.

Having no printer means I can't trace digitally generated type, so it's all doodled just straight off my pencil from scratch, often with pretty crude and naive results. But I quite like that.

I was considering speeding up my process by simply generating an alphabet to cut and paste from, but I hate those hand drawn fonts where you can see the repeats, so each phrase is written out in full instead.

To get some consistency however, I've devised a technique that uses a fixed cap height by using my cheap yellow plastic ruler. Two parallel lines are drawn using the top and bottom of the ruler's edges, meaning the height of the letters is always the same, even if I return to redraw something weeks later. Unless of course, someone steals my ruler.

Being left handed, I have to write everything backwards, to avoid smudging the 7B graphite as I go...



Tuesday, March 12, 2013

The Dangers Of Staying Sharp

'The Dangers Of Staying Sharp'

A personal piece that I won't explain other than to say Sedgwick, my extremely lethal mechanical pencil slayer - is a metaphor for the sort of day I've had.


Official Windows Magazine, Issue 5...



Issue 5 of the Official Windows Magazine tells the story of how we all have a twisted version of ourselves online that isn't quite as it is on reality street - how we all tell little fibs about how great we're feeling, and only upload the very best pictures of ourselves to Facebook. Me? Never!

Visually, it's based on a earlier illustration I did, as seen here... 

Monday, March 4, 2013

Danger, Danger, High Voltage!

Facelift, the platform hire company, has just released my poster for March which promotes the dangers of high voltage power lines. It's entitled Pylons!

My ongoing set of posters features a character to highlight the main message. This month, he looks worryingly at the crackling lines that could end his existence. Different distances are relevant for different pylon types, as highlighted by the supporting message.


The Health & Safety downloads page on Facelift's website can be found by clicking here.