Big Pit National Coal Museum commissioned me to do the design & illustration of a trail booklet that families could follow as they made their way around the site. It’s now gone to press – I can’t wait to see it in the flesh!
Happy new year! I have lots to share with you so this will be one of many blogs in the next few days, January having been full to the brim with work and February having been half full with a kidney infection (I don’t recommend them) from which I am nearly 100% recovered.
Anyway first up is this cheerful leaflet what I designed and illustrated in English and Welsh for Gareth Bonello at National Museum Cardiff. They’re having an exhibition about the origins of domestic animals called The Wolf Inside and Gareth had mocked something up in Publisher which he wanted me to design. I came up with this:
Family trail – design and illustration – for National Museum Cardiff.
Ac yn Gymraeg:
And here are some close-ups of the illustrations I did for the piece. As usual they were drawn in pencil, painted in Indian ink and then scanned in. I cleaned them up, converted to Bitmap Tiffs and then drew simplified coloured boxes in InDesign behind them to give them their colours: grey for the wolf, orange for the chicken, a pale gold for the sheep and white for the skulls.
Gareth said, “mae e’n edrych yn wych!” (it looks great!)
(If you’re wondering how long I spent trying to think of a pun title for this post based on Wolfie Smith, the answer is about two minutes.)
In France she would be called La Renarde and would be hunted with only her cunning to protect her
A little quicky to show you this fox illustration I’ve done for the Learning Department at National Museum Cardiff. They’ve designed a winter wildlife trail for kids and wanted a little mascot to go on signposting and stickers for the kids. After a few goes at drawing foxes I sketched out this critter, inked her up with Indian ink and a brush (a Proarte Prolene Plus size 3 is my favourite inking brush – it keeps a lovely point), and then scanned the inked design. I photoshopped out any smudges and dust speckles, and then took this image into Illustrator and live-traced it, which is a good way of turning a basic drawing into a vector file (a vector file is a file made up of mathematical equations and data rather than pixels, so it can be enlarged as big as you like without degrading). You can choose the colour range and detail level in the live tracing; I chose greyscale and a fairly high amount of detail so as to retain the organic nature of the brushstrokes. I then simply drew a red shape for the fur and yellow for the eyes on a layer behind the traced drawing, and added a little white highlight for the eyes. Done!