Snowdrop Fairies refined (the painting, not the actual fairies!)

I have refined the snowdrop fairy picture, in terms of execution and composition. The fairies themselves are still the twats they were in the original drawing. Had to get this one finished while the flowers were still out, or wait another 11 months for them to flower again. Drawing flowers from photographs is never very effective because you can’t get a feel for their structure, and obviously the fairies do not show up in photographs at all. There have been famous photographs of fairies, but as the Cottingley girls admitted sixty years later, those photographs – belief in which so…

More Spellings…

A lot of the new work has moved over to my ‘swimming art’ site, http://www.waterdrawn.com, and it’s hard to keep two websites adequately fed, but here are some new Spellings that I’ve not shown before. I’ve been updating the offerings on my Etsy shop where you can now order your name spelt in mermaids, unicorns, and pigs (though preferably not all at once…) as well as all the usual cats, dogs, witches etc… See the full range in the Spelling Animals section of my Etsy shop

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…

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…

Vobster Quay’s new swimming hats

Hot (or at least quite warm) off the press, another swimming hat that I was asked to design. Actually a collaborative effort: the concept was Richard Smith’s who runs the swimming at the awesome Vobster Quay Diving Centre, which is fabulous for swimming, I’m afraid I don’t know who did the text. I took the concept and made it into an actual picture. **Update** now available from the shop at Vobster.com – doing a search for ‘love 2 swim’ brings up all the items, but the hoodies at the moment are only available in the blue colours.

Wimbeldon Greyhound Welfare

Another t-shirt design that I was asked to do a couple of months ago. I quite like greyhounds as a subject: they are not cats, but they are bendy and skinny, which makes them still quite good for Spelling Animals. These ones did not have to spell of course, I was just asked to re-create the logo in characterful and colourful greyhounds in the manner of the Spelling Animals. My version was faithful to the original logo, also having only 15 legs …that said, having worked out whose leg is missing I can see why, for the sake of artistic…

The Rat Race (spelt in Rats, of course!)

This is almost certainly the last piece that I have had time to complete  that will get into my Ilminster exhibition next month – finished a couple of weeks ago, but since then it’s been printing, framing, admin etc. One more Spelling Animals picture I managed to sneak in – I had fun with this. Usually when people ask me for rat spelling animals I imagine they want the rats to look quite nice… these rats on the other hand, they aren’t very nice at all, especially the rats at the top of the pile…. Prints available from the Spelling…

A Cat may look at a King

With only a few weeks to go before my solo exhibition in Ilminster in July, I started working on some Spelling Animals pictures.I’ve been doing the Spelling Animals for customers for several years, and as cards for the nieces and nephews for some years before that,. but I’ve done any for myself – or at least, since they are still for sale,  for nobody in particular yet. So this was something of a treat: free-range Spelling Animals, willing to spell anything I chose to ask of them. Here is what the cats spelt. And, since this is not for a…

A Spelling Spree!

I’ve been on a total spelling spree lately. This week I have spelt names in mermaids, rats, fairies, unicorns and pigs… yes, I can now reveal that even pigs can be spelt with, though I think I was probably most pleased with the discovery that spelling in unicorns is possible. I can’t show you those last four yet as they have yet to go to their owners, but here are some from past weeks, including a spelling in witches which I was rather pleased with. I also have a fine pair of Spelling Bull Mastiffs to show you presently, but…

Sketching Cider Apple Fairies

I have been Drawing Cider Apple Fairies! The sketch is now as complete as it’s going to get, next stage is to get it onto watercolour paper and get the paints out. This was done on a tablet – not as nice to draw on as paper but what it loses in tactile pleasure it more than makes up for in the ability to move and alter different elements of the drawing until they work together. You can’t see much of this process here, but there was a lot of faffing at the start once I had a pose for…