Feel kind of bad about putting up such scrappy drawing in the previous post. Here is some recent sketchbook work to prove that I can still draw - honestly! I was, like, using my left hand or something on the foxes...

Seems that this blog is hitting a rythm of updating about once a month, which is not a bad thing. Here are some doodles of what may happen if you succumb to The Bite Of The Were-Fox (note: not actually the title of an upcoming book or anything).

During autumn/winter of last year I kept a visual journal, which was;
a. lots of fun,
b. surprisingly time consuming and
c. extremely helpful in getting a grasp on sequential imagery and using brush & ink.
It is definitely an exercise that I would like to repeat. I think that some of the experiments were really successful and the super-relaxed drawing style is something I probably don't spend enough time playing with, so it's about time some images made it on to the internet. Here are some choice entries from this sporadic and neurotic little sketchbook.

Welcome to my brain. Here, have a map!

 Remember those two comic pages posted up here a while ago? No? Don't worry about it... here is the complete four page sequence made in response to (but never entered in) the Comica/Observer Graphic Short Story competition.

It was an interesting experiment, the whole of which doesn't hang together that well due to long periods of time between working on each page, however there were some interesting developments along the way that make me want to create some more coherent comic strip narratives.

More illustrations and sketchbook work should be going up here soon, I might raid my visual diary from the end of summer for entries that can be displayed here uncensored!

About time to update this blog. Have a few things going that I don't want to put up online until they are finished, in the meantime here is a sketch of a character inspired by Angela Carter's excellent modern fairytale The Bloody Chamber.

Have a few character pieces! That's right, my drawings of children have sprouted into some illustrations. These character studies are of Freya - the main character from Francesca Simon's new book The Secret Army. I have also been working on some black and white interior illustrations based on the book which will get put up here when I have finished a decent run of them.

The first image needs a bit of explanation - Freya is realising that her legs are beginning to turn to ivory.

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After falling off the blogwagon for far too long, here is some stuff. I think I will start posting smaller/single image updates to keep it all flowing a bit better.

First up is a portfolio piece, a book cover illustration for dark & mystical teenage girl fiction set in Venice. Part of the reason keeping this blog updated is taking so long for me is that it takes a good few weeks after finishing it before I can really like a piece of work again - this one is from about a week ago.

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Next, here are some children! Thirteen of them to be exact. The under-18 area of my sketchbook has been sorely lacking recently.

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Finally, I wasn't even sure about posting this, but here a couple of pages messing around with comics for a four-page short story/descriptive exercise. I really haven't done anything comic related and sustained beyond three or four panels since I was fourteen (or younger?!), so these are definitely the early stages of experimental, and some of the dialogue is atrocious, but hopefully there is something in them that will justify getting it finished.