into the woods

with a duck...

this chicken is not edible, for decorative purposes only

Although I have no idea why... all I know is ' a cake with a decorative chicken',which so makes me want to get my mitts on a copy of the text...

Also, a sunbather. I told you the content was varied!

humungous root vegetable

A giant turnip.

an ambiguous wolf

'a wolf waving from behind a tree'

Is it a friendly wave or something more sinister? I'm not sure...

they might be giants

Well yes actually, he is! That's why the tree is so teeny tiny...

I'm working through the illustrations for the dramas - 5 down, loads more to go!

It is fabulous to get away from the computer screen though, especially after all the design work I've been doing this year. Pushing coloured water around a piece of paper is so much more fun and very therapeutic. Put a little birdhouse in your soul indeed!

rats...

My rough sketch for the next illustration, the Pied Piper plus mucho rats. I found it incredibly difficult to find my own slant on something that countless other fabulous illustrators have depicted already... so I decided to take my own work as a starting point (the piper bears a passing resemblance to the evil pipe playing monkey in 'Monkey and Bear'

[Edit] Finished illustration above.

the twilight zone

The new project is a fairly big one; more than thirty illustrations for a book of children's dramas. It's a lovely job though, as the subject matter is so varied. So the elderly bods above appear alongside the fat hedgehog and the benign hen below. And still to come - mermaids, giants, wolves, monsters and turnips, to name but a few! Much fun!

[edit] And ooh, ooh, was nosying about on the fabulous Jon Davis's blog and stumbled on a link to this amazing Ukranian illustrator. The artwork is stunning, I just want to fall in and soak it up. And further foraging in blogland also turned up Lisbeth Zwerger, whose work is spellbindingly exquisite and who I hadn't come across before. So I have just ordered the book above (love those colours)...

hedgehog, hedgehog!

get a grip hen...

...that's what I imagine, in my deeply ignorant fashion, is what someone from the West of Scotland might have said to me the other day if they had witnessed my frantic multi-tasking and ensuing panic. I have a new illustration project (the benign hen above will feature) and some straggling design projects, like the fiddle festival work below, which stubbornly refuse to end despite my best efforts. All a bit manic. Which is good I guess, but also mucho stressful.