hot town, summer in the city

The summer finally made an appearance!To mark this momentous occasion here's a lady sunbathing by Naomi Wilkinson. Do go and check out her Tumblr for tonnes more terrific images.

joe todd stanton

I can't remember where I came across Joe Todd Stanton for the first time but I saved a link to his website and had a proper look for the first time today. A large number of the illustrations in his portfolio are characters and I love a characterful character! His have a lot of personality, along with quirky details that make them stand out. Here are three I particularly enjoyed, all with a maritime theme:

rca show 2013

I went to see the Visual Communication and Animation work at the RCA show last week. I was pleased to see they had put all of the animation screens in one room at desks with seats. Last year the format wasn't very user friendly with screens set into walls and spread throughout the exhibition. My favourite animation this year was Montenegro by Luiz Stockler. A simple but engaging tale of a man coming to terms with his impending baldness. You can view the teaser here on vimeo. And here is a cool matador from his website:

Another stand out was illustrator Yeni Kim whose stunning pop up book was one of the best things I saw. I enjoyed the minimal colour palate of black, white and red alongside the complex and imaginative paper structures that sprang from the page:

And last but certainly not least, I must mention Minho Kwon. His impressively rendered, and wall-sized, Neo Tower of Babel combines architectural features from the Classical, Medieval, Industrial and Modern periods. It is a breathtaking piece with such minute and precise detail it was impossible to take it all in in one go. Sadly there are no detailed images on his website. Instead, here are some illustration that won him a runner-up accolade in the V&A Illustration Award:

brighton degree show 2013

Degree show season seems to have come around so quickly. It also marks a year of blogging for me! I started last year with an entry on the University of Brighton's degree show so it seems fitting to mark the occasion with an entry on this year's show.

I've picked two favourites. I thought this photograph by Tom Calvert was stunning. There's a fantastic sense of scale and depth that almost makes you feel that you are standing there on the mountainside. I visited his website and picked a couple more from the series 'Finding Tom Calvert'. The photographs were taken in the Lake District - one of my favourite places in England.

From the graphic design and illustration room Hoi Shan was the one that caught my attention.  Her black and white animals are paired with simple, off-beat statements that made me curious to know more while also making me smile. I also loved her 3D models. See them and some more of her work on her blog.

  

gangsters a-z

My Gangsters A-Z poster is for sale in my etsy shop. It features gangsters from history and from film & TV. There's one completely made-up one as well ... it was impossible to find one starting with 'X'!

illustration friday: sweet

peter rhodes

While I was at Pick Me Up back in April I made a note of the illustrators I wanted to check out online when I got home. I was disappointed to find that I hadn't noted the name of an illustrator whose work I had particularly admired and I couldn't seem to find out who it was via the Pick Me Up website either. Then, earlier this week, while sitting in my local cafe writing a blog post, my husband suggested I might want to have a look at the list of names he had made at the show. To my delight the first name on the list happened to be the one I had been searching for before. It was Peter Rhodes, and it was his image 'Day Job' which had so caught my attention. In black and white, with just a very minimal touch of red, he has illustrated his day job as a biscuit-icer! I love it! On his blog he says it's less glamorous than it sounds, but it certainly makes for a more exciting illustration than my day job would! Feast your eyes on the tasty delights that surround him as he works and check out some of his other stuff here.

creative action network: recovering the classics

We all know the adage: don't judge a book by it's cover. But, I always reach for the most interesting designs on the shelf before any others. Who doesn't? Creative Action Network has just launched it's latest campaign Recovering the Classics, which aims to capture the excitement and vibrancy of classic works of fiction that often suffer from poorly designed covers. I was fortunate to have been contacted by one of the founders and asked to participate. From their list of 50 classics I chose to illustrate Gulliver's Travels and had a lot of fun doing it. The e-book and paperback can be ordered via the Recovering the Classics website. There are some great covers to browse - here is mine (click to enlarge)...

new fashion photography

Now for a bit of shameless publicity for my husband's recently published book on fashion photography. He spent two years working on the content, gathering the images and designing the pages as well as managing the printing. The result is a visionary (and stunningly designed) book full of bold and beautiful photographs that captures the zeitgeist of fashion photography. Covering diverse styles and techniques, some of my favourite images are theatrical and cinematic such as those by Aram Bedrossian, Kourtney Roy and Ruven Afanador. New Fashion Photography by Paul Sloman is published by Prestel and is out now. My opinion might be biased but why not find out for yourselves! Buy it here! Meanwhile, feast your eyes on these photos:

From the top:
Aram Bedrossian, Kourtney Roy, Ruven Afanador

argentina

I finally got round to doing some scanning so here are some of the illustrations I did while I was in Argentina. I played around with watercolours. I love using them but hadn't for a long while. I stopped because I found it hard to get a nice reproduction from the scanner. Now I have a better scanner so the images come out a little bit better. I’m going to try using watercolour a little bit more often. I recently bought some gouache too, so we'll see what happens with that.