Illustration course!

I'm delighted to announce a new illustration course that I have been invited to lecture at in Giddy Studios!
After the great success of the last courses and all the great work produced, Giddy Studios are opening their doors again to another intensive four weeks of illustration madness.

If the last course and the work that was produced is anything to go by then I cannot wait to meet our future students. It was an honour to be involved with such a talented bunch.

The course is great way to meet like-minded people and walk away with several bodies of new work.

Details for this seasons are as follows:

The Lonely Beast US edition

I just received some copies of the full HD Hardback version of the US edition of The Lonely Beast from the lovely folk in Andersen Press. With fancy dust jacket and everything! It's amazing to see it in hardback after getting used to the soft cover. I guess it's usually the other way round.

Endless Summer Campaign

 

 During the course of the Summer I worked on this great campaign with the lovely folks in Cawley Nea for Carphone Warehouse. They didn't want a dreary 'Back to School' campaign (I always hated seeing those signs during school holidays, invariably in July!) so the concept was to capture all of the fun of the Summer holidays and keep it going into the Autumn. The illustrations are based on doodles from the back of copy books, I still have a pile of mine and went to them for reference!

I will be doing live versions of the drawings on big canvases in the Carphone Warehouse stores in Galway, Limerick and Cork (starting tomorrow in Galway).

Click the Read More link below to see some of the places the artwork ended up...

Amongst Inspiration

I was honoured to be asked to be the first contributor to James Coopers lovely Amongst Inspiration shorts that he has just started producing. Thanks James!

From James: 'As an Australian creative based in Dublin, I have met & been inspired by a number of talented Dublin creatives working across all disciplines in Ireland's capital.'

Alphabeast App!

Alphabeast from Pilcrow on Vimeo.

Very excited to announce a great new project I am working on with Simon Judge and James Kelleher. We want to bring the world of The Lonely Beast to life on the iPad and iPhone as an interactive A-B-C app for kids called Alphabeast. I will be creating 26 all-new scenes featuring the beast and his friends so that kids can learn the alphabet, discover new words and have heaps of fun all at the same time. watch the video below to get an idea of what we are up to.

We need your help to do it on the youfundit site!! Your contribution will go towards the production and development costs of making sure the Beast finds a happy home on the app store. There are lots of great rewards for each contribution. You can read more about it here.

ESB Electric Picnic illustrations

If you're in Electric Picnic over the weekend keep an eye out for the Sparkhead illustrations etc that I did for ESB with the guys in IIBBDO. There's a big recharging area with swings, seesaws and running wheels!

The Great Explorer Picture book

 

My second picture book 'The Great Explorer' is finally finished and winging it's way to the printers! It will be published on 2nd February 2012 by Andersen Press and is now available for pre-order on Amazon. This is the cover!

 'The Great Explorer' tells the story of a young boy named Tom, whose Dad is a famous explorer. His Dad goes missing in the North Pole so Tom decides that he must go and find him and sets out on a perilous journey across Oceans, snow and ice, braving dizzying heights in a hot air balloon and helicopter. He also crosses the path of some scary large animals!

For my second book I wanted to make a fast paced rollicking adventure so I arrived at Tom as the main character to battle the elements. I am a huge fan of the great arctic explorers like Shackleton and Scott and of all the astounding feats of bravery they achieved at the turn of the century but the character that I hold dearest to me is of course the great Tom Crean. I have a mild obsession with him, as do many Irish people, so this story is a tip of the hat to the great man. My story is set in the North Pole as opposed to the South Pole, mainly because the animals are better :-)

I'll post more images and info from the story closer to the release date of the book! Also I'll post here about the launch for it which will be some time in February.

The Beast at Edinburgh Book Festival

 

Very excited to be doing some book readings at the Edinburgh book festival tomorrow afternoon. Do drop in if you're in the vicinity! Click here for info.

Any recommendations for shows on over the weekend?

The Lonely Beast in New York Times

I was delighted and very surprised to have The Lonely Beast included in the New York Times Sunday Book Review in last Sunday's book review section ahead of its release on September 1st in the U.S. Hooray!

You can read the review here.

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...

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!

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.

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

FBD Insurance

I recently worked on a really enjoyable hand drawn typographic project with Sally O'Sullivan in QMP for FBD insurance. I'm really enjoying projects involving hand drawn type at the moment, it's a great learning curve. When I studied design in college way back when I loved working with type but over the years pure illustration had taken over from any contact with design so it's great to be able to mix the two.

The illustration appears in today's Independent and tomorrows Herald newspapers.