Sirène: Chloe McCardel

A digital drawing I did of a lady who must be at least part-mermaid. This is a fanciful portrait of Australian long distance swimmer extraordinaire, Chloë McCardel. This week, she swam the English Channel for the 21st time, Her 20th swim broke the Australian record, and she now holds the record for the number of solo crossings in one year with 8 done in 2016! She also coached 5 successful Australian solo swimmers and three successful relay teams in 2016. One of those relay swimmers was Dory Johns, who I had the pleasure of meeting a few weeks ago, and…

‘Swimflakes’ swimming hats

I do love it when a piece of work turns out to be multi-purpose! And I also love it when ideas come together that never would have, had it not been for a complex journey of other ideas. Devils drinking tea in Hell is one of those examples, and another one is my new ‘Swimflakes’ swimming hats. Sprung from ponderings on what sort of wrapping paper would appeal to swimmers at Christmas because, frankly, I know a lot of swimmers and that in itself comes from my love of swimming outside, even when it is freezing. The hats, when I…

The Longest Road in the Universe

By C. S. MacCath, a collection of Fantastical Tales Some years back I was asked to illustrate C. S. MacCath’s beautiful short story, ‘The Longest Road in the Universe’, when it appeared in Murky Depths magazine (2008). I loved this story, and perhaps this came through in the illustrations, because I am delighted to be able to say that one of these illustrations now adorns the forthcoming ebook collection of stories. So if your curiosity is piqued, I’d love to point you in the direction of links to purchase this collection… For Kindle: https://goo.gl/lY6Qld For iBook: https://goo.gl/dlQCXH For Kobo: https://goo.gl/hgpR5L…

Silver or Gold…?

I am nearly at a the point of asking a printing company to print the wrapping paper I’ve been working on for  while, but before I do it, I thought a bit of customer research might be in order. The choice is between silver and gold, and also between white swimflakes against a metallic background or the other way around. I may be able to print two options – I can almost certainly afford to print either both gold or both silver options, or I can go with what I wanted originally – white on gold, and silver on white,…

Synchro Snowflakes

Welcome to this year’s edition of “Quick & Simple Christmas Product Ideas Which Actually Take At Least 10 Times Longer Than I Anticipated” I am not complaining, I am having fun, and I am also finding Adobe Illustrator indispensable for this project (and getting to grips with limited parts of it), and that makes me happy, because some weeks ago I paid for the annual licence for the whole of the Adobe creative suite, which, while it doesn’t actually require you to sign away your soul and your firstborn child baby cats, it does at least come closer to that…