Thursday 14 July 2011

Seasonal Skills in The irish Times

This is the first of a series of fun illustrations I'll be working on over the course of the Summer with writer Conor Goodman and will be published every Thursday in the Irish Times. You can see this one in todays paper. I'll post them here as they are published.


 



Beastly Treasure Hunt in the IFI

The lovely folk in the IFI have invited me to take part in the IFI Family Festival 2011 this weekend. There's lots of amazing films and events on over the weekend.

On Saturday I'll be doing a workshop called 'A Beastly Creation' where I will be helping kids create their own Beasts for their own stories. I will also be showing our short film 'The Lonely Beast'.

On Sunday I will be reading by book to an audience (gulp!) in screen one before showing the Beast film on the big screen before The Gruffalo film. Then it's off on a treasure hunt around Temple Bar to find all of these Beasts! Thanks to Dee in the IFI for naming them. More info here.

Click Read More to see all 10 Beasts...

Thursday 7 July 2011

The Tote Bag Book

 



Thanks a millions to Jitesh Patel for including my Tote bag that I designed for Ben and Jerry's ice cream with Thinkhouse in his beautiful new book The Tote Bag Book which has just been published. The cover is wrapped with an amazing tote bag which is something I've definitely never seen before. Check out his website for some spreads from it or better yet buy it!

Wednesday 6 July 2011

Key Frames Project








I've really missed drawing comics and just can't seem to find the time to sit down and draw one as they are incredibly time consuming and hard to do. It's also very difficult to come up a good story or plot an usually after a few pages mine run out of steam (except for the ones my brother Andrew wrote which were brilliant stories).

I'm constantly coming up with ideas and have all sorts of stories scribbled in notebooks and emails to myself but the thoughts of trying to focus on one of them and create a 40-80 page comic terrifies me. I often stare longingly at panels from my favourite comics and isolate panels thinking 'What a perfect piece of artwork it is on it's own'. So a while back I came up with the wheeze of making just one stand-alone key panel from stories I'd like illustrate but leave it at that. As if I've cut out panels from different graphic novels and presented them as is.

I have been working away on them over the last few weeks in ink and watercolour and have been really enjoying it. I am aiming to have a collection of them ready for an exhibition in October but that seems so long away!

I was delighted to be asked by Wayne O'Connor in Sligo to take part in group illustration show that opens on the 17th of July in The Yeats Memorial Building in Sligo so I decided to exhibit six of the more light hearted panels for this show (see above). I would love to hear your thoughts on these!


I have also posted the poster for the exhibition above there.

Tuesday 5 July 2011

Xenon!

This is my contribution to a great new exhibition opening next week on the 14th of July in the Science Gallery in Trinity College Dublin called 'Elements'. I chose Xenon so obviously I drew Xenon Bulb Fish quietly floating in the murk. I mean what else would I draw? It runs for a few months so drop in for a look if your in town, I think it's going to be amazing. Thanks to Gav Beattie for the invite.
 More info here: http://www.sciencegallery.com/events/2011/07/elements-preview