Lemons, Strawberries, Poppies

I turned the poppies into a book cover on my tumblr.

Kehinde

One of the characters from the book I'm reading, Akata Witch. I'm hoping to get around to doing several of the characters but, to be honest, I'm a little disappointed at how this one turned... Still, I thought it best to just let it go and move on rather than try to tweak it fixed.

Patty Mayonnaise

Do you remember Patty Mayonnaise from Doug?

Things have gotten pretty busy for me very suddenly and I'm preparing to move house and stuff. It seems like ages since I've drawn something fun for myself. I was beginning to think I'd forgotten how! hah

I'm a little stressed out right now, but I guess everything will fall into place soon enough.

The Double Happiness Twins

I read Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen in January and it became one of my favourite books. I’ve been meaning to do some illustrations inspired by it but never really got around to it until now.

Hopefully I’ll do a few more at some point.

The Chinese is probably wrong so if someone wants to correct me on that, please do!

edit [8 April 2014]:
I turned it into a book cover. Closeups on my website.

I found those mooncakes here!

Patterns: bones

Patterns: shapes and scribbles

I've been busy drawing a lot of stuff recently and I am eager to show you but I can't just yet. So, instead, enjoy these two patterns I made today! (The first one is also a peak at what I've been working on...)

:)

UCQ page 1

I'm trying to finally buckle down and tackle some of this comic I've been wanting to work on since last year!

I need to replace the text with a nice font at some point. There will (I hope) be more of Meredith and her older sister soon(ish...).

Conservatory

I haven't decided yet if I'm going to bother colouring this or not, but I'll post it here in case I never get around to it.

It recently dawned on me that I actually enjoy making busy scenes and I quite like plants though I wouldn't say I am exactly blessed with a green thumb... (I keep plants that are used to being neglected.)

Lettering & Patterns

Added “PATTERNS” & “LETTERING” sections to my website in the hopes that will encourage me to do more of those things!

:)

Lettering

Decided to practice my hand-lettering today by working on this piece (intended for my grandparents).

Obviously I'm still very new to lettering, but I do find it fun and I'm going to work at it some more :)

Arranging My Home Studio

OK so I set up my home studio at the beginning of this month (after having moved all my stuff from my city centre studio between Friday and Sunday, boo!) and, as it so happens, "hourly comics day" was on the Saturday. Well, I've never done the hourlies challenge before and I didn't do too well this time (only jotted a few sketches really), but I decided to carry one of the sketches to final.

I quite like the finished piece. I enjoy attempting these little challenges. I might try "witchsona" next...

((And, in case you were wondering, that cropped knit pullover is from Urban Outfitters and it's in the sale right now.))

I've been planning things and doing a lot of  personal drawing/design exercises recently. I'm hoping to have more visuals to show more regularly as it's been a little quieter than I'd like on the blog of late. One thing I'd like to do more of is patterns and lettering (though the latter to a lesser extent perhaps) so I'll try to post some of the process/experiments along the way.

Here are some photos of the home studio...

Seamlessly Repeating Bees...Or Fireflies?

I decided to do a little pattern exercise today, but it's become a little puzzle. For some reason I keep losing the lines when I try to make it into a swatch (at the bounding box >> crop part). If anyone knows why that's happening, I'd be most appreciative if you could help me out.

They're meant to be outlined like this:

But when I crop they end up looking like this (and they do repeat perfectly so at least that's fine):

So they look more like fireflies than bees (which is cute but I want to know why it's happening!)

edit: OK! I managed to get around the problem (sort of) my transporting the image from Illustrator to Photoshop (de-vectoring it in the process I guess) and making it a Photoshop pattern. Voila!

HEY! Hi! Hello.

So I know I've been seemingly pretty quiet lately (I'm actually not at all quiet), but it's mostly due to things I can't show you yet (SOON I will be able to... But not yet). However I have been working on some personal design exercises here and there, and those I can show you. And so I will! Right now.

OKAY! I signed up for skillshare a while back and it has been so totally worth it! I love it! I'm enrolled in about five classes and the latest assignment I did was Edward Boatman's "Illustrate Your Day: An Intro to Symbol Design" class. Here was what I came up with (I'll include my class summary notes too).

"My average day is pretty monotonous so I decided to cut down the icon count by four [so I did 16 instead of 20].

I'm a little unhappy that I didn't end up doing ANY narrative icons (in fact I had planned out loads of them, but they didn't work for one reason or another). Next time I'll concentrate on fitting some of those in so hopefully things won't be too boring as a whole..

I'm new to Illustrator, though, so I primarily used this as a chance to get to know the program better and I actually learned a lot! I also learned a lot about how different people perceive the same visual symbol and how tiny changes can make something readable or confusing (for instance, adding meatballs and swapping out the bowl for a plate transformed my dinner from 'noodles' to 'spaghetti'! Or having my stylus pen in motion on my graphics tablet turned it from "maybe a cell phone thing?" into my graphics tablet.)

I guess the biggest thing about icons is "readability" when simplifying things to their core and this was a good mental exercise in doing that too.

Anyway, I am very pleased with the outcome overall (though I might redo the last one) and I think I'll do more practice with icons (and Illustrator) in future."

I also redid my CV and made this silly Valentine's Day card (get in touch if you want one for £1.50) to give to the big, lovely man in your life (hah).

Excuse the poor photo quality...

Other than that, January isn't even over yet and I can proudly say I've already made great progress on my New Year's Resolutions.

HAPPY NEW YEAR, FOLKS!

NYC, Bahamas, Pink sketchbook

The past three weeks have been SO great! I got to visit some super lovely friends in New York and go to the American Illustration 32 party. It was a blast. Plus I got to go back home to The Bahamas for the first time in two years! Well overdue. Wish I'd taken photos of everything, though!

I don't have any finished work I'm allowed to show right now, but I have a few pics* of my current sketchbook. It's a bound sketchbook which I usually sort of hate, but actually I like this one. More on my tumblr.

*pics from my (new! yay!)phone because I still need to install my scanner/printer on my new laptop

Neighbours Zine

Clips from a zine I was working on about my neighbours.

Just a silly little thing.

Kids' Game

I did this a while ago and only getting around to posting it now.

Office Chit Chat

This was fun and rather cathartic :)

Freckles

Here is a piece of a thing that is going much better than the previous piece of a thing I posted last week.

I'm trying to get used filling in backgrounds a bit more and I'm playing with all sorts of new(for me) stuff so this was a really fun learning exercise. I've still been a little sloppy/lazy in places, but overall I'm pretty happy with it. I'll post the whole thing tomorrow once I've finished it.
And now I'm off to see a man about a building. Ta ra!

Just something quick for the weekend

Avocado Patterns

Yesterday I designed a funky avocado pattern in Illustrator! Today I made two colourful versions of it :)

I might go buy an avocado today.