Before, after.

Just a quick one for today. As it frequently is, this is about one of my contributions to Unstruck, Alex's nearly-daily question and answer blog. In case you're not aware what the project is about, there's a bit more of an explanation here.

This is slightly different to the normal stressful half-hour deadline though.

Coming up later this month, Alex has been invited to take part in a small exhibition at the Brighton Jubilee Library, as part of the May Fringe Festival festivities.
As it's in the library, he's decided to choose a small selection of Unstruck pieces which specifically relate to reading, book and/or libraries.

One of them is this piece, which I illustrated.

However, annoyingly, this happens to be one of my 'bad days'. Actually I found the piece very inspiring, and had a pretty strong idea immediately of what I wanted to do, but that day I was up in London until late in the evening, so didn't have a free moment with my pens, laptop and scanner to produce an illustration in my usual way. Generally, I try and keep to the rules of the project and produce my illustration on the day I receive the piece, so on the train home, I got out my phone, and used the 'Brushes' app to produce this.

I was pleased with it considering I did it on a shaky train with dwindling battery life and poor lighting, but unfortunately, it looked substantially better on a tiny screen than it does full size.

Now that this piece is going to be going on display, and my name is going to be attached to it, I've decided to redo the piece as I originally invisaged, to the standard I'd want. It's still not my favourite thing I've done for Unstruck, but I'm a lot happier with it now.

I'll possibly post again about the exhibition... Alex will be selling prints of all the featured pieces, featuring both the illustration and his text, with 2/3 of the profit going to the illustrator, and 1/3 to him. They'll be very reasonably priced (Probably around £5), and hopefully lovely looking. I have been called upon to design the prints and make the text and images work well together. I have nice plans, and am looking forwards to getting started!