Commission to Draw a Historical House

I haven't published a lot of my house illustration commissions but recently I had the pleasure of completing a commission of a local house of historical significance. It was a District Governors Cottage, built to house gas workers in 1894.

The owner of the house wanted a good representation of the house and it's original features. I've enjoyed drawing the shape of this house, with the decorative brickwork on the facade. With the combination of fabric, lace, water colour and pencil, this was the result.

Doing the Fruit Fandango for Food Fight 2013

This year's Food Fight theme for Sweets Workshop's annual exhibition and publication is 'The Festive Feast'. My festive idea for this is 'The Fruit Fandango', ie. fruit pieces dancing. I used water colour and played with the structure of some water melon piece to create a female figure. What could be more masculine than a hunk of green melon? Huh?

The Fruit Fandango

Sketches, practice runs and fun.

Stacks on (super) Cats

Recently for the MCA zine fair I launched a new piece called 'Stacks on Cats'. It's a double sided mini poster about cats balancing stacks of things – What could be more fun than a cat balancing act. It's a digital collage of water colour, paper patterns, fabric and pencil line work. I've kept the line work quite loose and sketchy, I wanted the illustration to be light and just a little silly.

I've now submitted this design for the threadless 'Super cats' T-shirt comp. If you are interested in supporting my illustration, head over to threadless and vote for it to be produced as a t-shirt.

 Side 1 – Stacks on Cats

 Details from Stacks on Cats 

Side 2 of the poster

I've split the second side of the poster into three panels of line drawings. The left panel features Cats in Stacks of things like pancakes, tea cups, fruit and macaroons. The middle panel is a Stack of Cats – no explanation needed. The right panel is Stacks and Cats, featuring stacked items such as books, buildings, clothing, cars and cats.

 

For this project I was collecting a stack (get it) of cat and stacked items from magazines for inspiration for my illustrations. I couldn't help but to create little stack compositions as I went.

Over all producing Stacks on Cats was a stack of fun.

Railz Zine Launch

I've illustrated my local train station previously. A customer had commented while browsing my illustration catalogue, that "train stations, are you know... Not that nice..." I only hope she was talking about the subject matter and not the drawing.

Train stations are a drawing challenge, but the repetition of lines and patterns from the cables, the pillons and the tracks can be quite interesting. Growing up in the western suburbs meant that I spent a lot of time travelling to work on the train.

This zine is however, about a shorter journey, my trip from Lidcombe station to Summer Hill. It includes a bit of photography and drawing. It's predominantly black with a yellow dot grain texture. I've used a zigzag fold to keep give the zine direction  - as you unfold, the image on the back stretches out into a train track. The cover is printed black on orange card, I've hand drawn a metallic silver line over the railz to highlight the metal. This was quite a hands on assembley which I really enjoyed.  We'll be having a stall at the MCA zine fair on May 20, I'll be launching Railz along with my mini poster, stacks on cats to the masses ; )