I drew this today.

For Unstruck... (you can see an explanation of the Unstruck project here)

You can see the piece which my illustration relates to here... A bit of a struggle to come up with anything particularly literal! I enjoyed this though.

Minglin'

Well now. This was TWO WEEKS ago! Bit late on the blogging, and for that I apologise.
The opening night of the Haiku exhibition which I took part in was an delight.

You can read a bit more background to the show here

The venue was the Maison Bertaux in Soho, which has in the past played host to various creative types, perhaps most notably The Mighty Boosh's Noel Fielding, whose vibrant, surreal paintings are perhaps best known for their part in the Mighty Boosh DVDs and books.

The actual gallery is in the basement - the upstairs street level is a delightful little patisserie, which was a strange combination of granny-like charm, and neon/feathers/glitter which wouldn't have been out of place in an episode of the Mighty Boosh.

I had a ridiculously jammy biscuit.

Anyway, the show itself was very well curated and hung, with the poems displayed in black frames, and the accompanying artworks surrounding them in pale wood frames. The artworks were varied, with Bonnie Friend's beautiful traditional illustrations contrasted with Chrissie Cant's more abstract interpretations, and my somewhat non-unified, varied attempts.

Overall, a lovely little show to be part of, and if any of you DID make it over there to see it... thanks :)

Here I am (Right, very sunburnt, pulling silly face) with my friends Rosie and Hannah... Thanks especially to Hannah, Rosie and Michael (who took this picture!) for coming along to keep me company!

Happiness, symbolised

Same old same old, that bit where I say 'sorry for not doing a blog' 'I've honestly been really busy!' etc etc.
Enough of that. Although I am sorry. And I have been really busy.

Anyway, today at work I was tasked with designing some small icons for a brochure. The icons needed to symbolise things like 'food and drink', 'excursions', and, most difficult: 'fun'.

Well as me and my senior designer agreed, fun means different things to different people. So I decided to ask the Twitter hivemind that is my 400-odd (very odd, sometimes...) followers...

I got various responses...
"those party tooter things that unroll when you blow them"
"a smiley face? a party hat? a small man jumping for joy?"
"kids laughing?"

And then Tom Robinson suggested "A GLOWING MULTICOLOURED ORB"

I liked this. Abstract. And most definitely fun.
However, my icons were to be limited to one colour, which I pointed out.

"Bah. How about a saxophone with cakes pouring out of it?"

Now I'll be honest... That's not something easily iconable. But it's definitely something that needed drawing. Because I genuinely have nothing better to do with my evenings this week.

And in case you were interested... This is my final icon representation of 'fun'. He is having SO much fun. I really hope we actually use him.

Maison Bertaux, tomorrow night...

Well I probably haven't really mentioned this nearly as much as I should have done. Regular readers (ha! difficult to be a regular reader when I only post once in a blue moon!) may remember my semi recent Haiku illustrations. Non regular readers can see them here and here.

To summarise the project again, my friend Danny decided he'd ask some of his artistic friends to produce illustrations for some of his poems. He liked the results to much that, in collaboration with two of the other artists, he decided to put on a small exhibition in London.

I'm delighted to say that my works (four in total) will feature at that show, and that the private view is tomorrow night at the Maison Bertaux in Soho. I'll be honest and admit that I've taken something of a back seat in the organisation of the show - other than sending my works up to London in a very securely packaged 'do not bend' envelope, I've not contributed to anything else in terms of organisation.

Framing, choice of gallery, private view drinks and music... well, they'll be as much of a surprise to me as they will to you! (if you decide to go and take a look). It's quite exciting, and I'm very much looking forwards to seeing all the works gathered together tomorrow night.

However, I'm a realist, and I know most of you probably won't make it over there...
So I figured I'd share my other two illustrations with you here.

The first is for this...

Nature eludes me
In this city. My nature
Runs from this city.

I hope this makes some sense. This cityscape is not far from my home in Brighton.

The second is for this:

I see you hiding,
Amongst the flowery shade
Black, raggedy cat.

Took a bit of an abstract approach to this one. I created these flowers. They're taken from an image of a flower I took a long time ago, out of that image, I cropped cat sillouhettes, and then rotated these to reform into flower like forms again.
I doubt anyone would work that out from just looking at them though, so hopefully they're just pleasing abstract forms.

In the actual show, they've been hung in one frame as one single piece. You can see a sneaky preview of that here, in this image of the show being hung. (I hope you don't mind me using this, Chrissy!)

I'm sure I will take some pictures at the private view and post them here afterwards. Mainly of me mingling about the place with a glass of red wine in my hand. Even though I don't drink wine... that's just what you do at private views, right?