I have been doing a bit of work for Fortnum and Mason this year (I have just finished the illustrations for their lovely Easter Eggs !!!) These 3 illustrations were created for press ads for the Guardian and the Times letting people know about their special xmas events, one was for cocktail making classes, xmas cooking evenings and childrens storytelling evenings - I'm hope you can work out which one is which ! Sometimes the difficult thing with doing illustrations is you have to fit things into shapes you would never normally do - but then sometimes these challenging things can be the best fun and make you stretch your imagination a bit too.
Working for Fortnums has been hard in another way, one of my favourite artists Edward Bawden did lots of work for them throughout his long career and I know that when they approached me it was because they wanted to get back some of the flavour of the playfulness of his designs, as such I have been doing my utmost to try and NOT look at any of EB's work in case I am influenced by him too directly !!! Anyway this is what I done for them !!!
I have just received proofs from Puffin of a jacket design I did for them for last year, it's a story set in what I would call the dark ages, the inspiration for me for this was the title of William Manchester's book on the dark/early middle ages, 'A World lit only by fire'. I dont really make comment on anything besides my work on this blog thing but I think it would be unnatural to not mention Obama's inauguration yesterday. As the husband to a black woman and the father of mixed race children my heart yesterday was bursting with happiness and pride yesterday that such a good thing could happen in this world. I abhor patriotism of any sort and as a UK citizen the only Queen I recognise is Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, yet the significance of yesterday meant so much more than all of the flag waving and whether it was tears of happiness or sadness or whatever I found myself crying over and over again all through the day.
I have been doing a bit of work for Fortnum and Mason this year (I have just finished the illustrations for their lovely Easter Eggs !!!) These 3 illustrations were created for press ads for the Guardian and the Times letting people know about their special xmas events, one was for cocktail making classes, xmas cooking evenings and childrens storytelling evenings - I'm hope you can work out which one is which ! Sometimes the difficult thing with doing illustrations is you have to fit things into shapes you would never normally do - but then sometimes these challenging things can be the best fun and make you stretch your imagination a bit too.
A few years ago I did a book jacket for Dara Horn's brilliant story 'The World to come' so I was really happy to recently be asked to submit a design for her forthcoming book 'All other night'.
