Artist research John P Miller

I decided to look into some retro children's book illustrators because i love how they look, they have such a unique distinctive look that is instantly recognisable as retro. I found some of J.P Miller's Illustrations and fell in love with them so i decided to do some further research into his work. J.P Miller was born in 1913 and died in 2004 he was an illustrator that illustrated many children's books. He illustrated many books from the 'Little Golden Books' series that are still pretty popular now. I love the bright block colours that are used throughout his work. I like to use paint a lot throughout my work and looking at his images is really inspiring me to try out new painting techniques and colours. His work is so iconic of the time and i think it is adorable. Here are a few pieces of his that i love.

Creepy looking Self Portrait (messing around)

As we have to create a self portrait for a class zine i decided to draw my face with quite a loose style. I wanted to keep it kind of realistic i thought this would be a good place to start just to get to know how to draw my face before trying out any particular style. I think it worked out although the way i have done the shadows makes me look like i have whiskers (oopsy). Also my lips look strange because i was pulling a weird face in the original image that i was drawing from. I think that i like the idea of me pulling a strange face in the final image. 

 Overall i'm not crazy about this image but its only a rough starting point so i'm okay with that. Im  not sure how i am going to do my final self portrait but i will keep drawing myself in different ways then ill decide what i like best. 

Artist research Nan Lawson

I found some of this artists work and fell in love with how cute and quirky it is. Nan Lawson is a self taught illustrator living and working in Los Angeles. She is well known for creating stylised portraits of  popular people and characters but she also works free lance. I think that her simplistic drawings will help out a lot with the simple characters within my story. I was drawn to her images because of the line work and colours that are used. I love how fun all of her characters are. I also think its really unique how most of her drawings have closed eyes but i think it works really well with her style, I might experiment with this idea in some of my sketchbook work. here are a few of my favourite pieces that she has created. 

Artist research Katie Smail

I decided to create new sketchbooks for the gallery exhibition. I also think that i want to work on my line work for these pieces. I decided to look at some artists that have line work that i like, this will also help with my main project because that all uses bold black lines. I came across an illustrator called Katie Smail whilst looking through pintrest. Katie Smail is a Scottish artist that lives in New York, she works as an Illustrator, designer and exhibiting artist.  I love her line work and use of colour, i also love how simplistic and pretty her drawings of people are. here are a few of her pieces that i really like. 

"Eww! I hate strawberry"

I started drawing the girl character from my story. In the story the girl throws an ice cream into the bin. I decided to use a pink and white colour scheme to make her different from the unicorn. I decided to make the ice cream yellow and pink so when it is on the ponies head it will look like a unicorn horn. 

I then had to work out how to make the ice cream look like it was been thrown away. I wanted to have the girl throwing the ice cream behind her. To get an idea of how to draw it I asked someone to pose as if they were throwing the ice cream. This helped me to draw the correct position. I then made a speech bubble that says 'eww! I hate strawberry' I will hang this in the background of the image using clear wire. I also made an image of the ice cream flying through the air that I will also hang behind the girl to make it look like it is being thrown into the bin. 

Pony falling into the bin :(

I was going through the different scenes in my story and thinking about how i could create them using drawings and photography. There is a part in my story where the pony finds a bin to hide in. I was thinking about how i could improve this part of the story to make it more interesting. I decided to create a little bit of comedy and have the pony struggling to climb into the bin and then it would fall in. I found a little metal bucket that i thought would work perfectly as a prop for a bin. To make it clear that the bucket was a bin i cut out the word bin and stuck it to the front and i think it worked really well because it makes it a bit more fun. I then started drawing the pony in a position that made it look like it was climbing up the side of the bin. It was hard to imagine what a pony would  look like doing this because horses or ponies don't (to my knowledge) regularly scale the side of things. I think it turned out looking exactly how i wanted it to though. 

The next image is the pony falling head first into the bin. This was even harder for me to imagine so i wanted some reference to draw from. I didn't want to spend a long time looking through pictures online so i asked my friend Arron to fall into the bin so i could get more of an idea of how to position the body and legs. this helped a lot i took some photos and did a few sketches before drawing the final image. I think it turned out really well and shows clearly what is happening. 

This scene has worked out really well so far all i have to to now for this section is decide what is going to be in the background of the image. I am really pleased with how the images are turning out so far and i think the simplicity of the characters makes them stand out really well against the other props and backgrounds that i am using. 

The Outsiders Gallery Newcastle

On monday i was finding it hard to get back into the swing of things after getting back from London and felt really un motivated so on Thursday i went on a trip to Newcastle with Glenn and Zade. We went to see some art at the Outsiders Gallery. The gallery was showing art work by a lot of different artists that are very current and popular. The gallrey was Featuring artists such as: Jonathan Yeo, Invader, Ian Francis, Todd James, Billy Norrby, Mode 2, Mark Jenkins, Interesni Kazki, Brett Amory, Emma Richardson, Shepard Fairey, Know Hope, Sage Vaughn, Charlie Isoe, HUSH, and Oliver Jeffers. 

It was a really lovely little gallery and i'd say it was definitely worth the trip. The selection of work on show was great because it was all modern and unique compared to the usual gallery that sells paintings. i really liked all of the art that was shown there, and its really interesting to see how much things sell for. I have also found out that going to see art in real life as opposed to on a computer is a lot more interesting and inspiring because you can see all of the brush strokes and textures that the work has. Here are a few photos of the gallery and my favourite pieces that were on show.   

Front of Gallery 

Gallery basement

Oliver Jeffers | Experience Youth

Shepard Fairy | Sedation Pill 

Invader | Magic Potion

Brett Amory | Anonymous #18 & 19

Oliver Jeffers | Surrounded

Charlie Isoe | Study 5

 Billy Norrby | High Line 

 The trip was great and i saw lots of inspiring artists work this work helped me to get inspired and it also helped out a lot with my professional studies work as all of the art work that was shown was current and on trend. As i am writing about trends in my report it should be helpful. 

I think i will keep an eye out for up coming exhibitions at this gallery because its a lovely little place. 

London trip

Last weekend we all (my class) went on a trip to London for 2 days. It was great The weather was lovely and we did lots of quirky unique things that i probably wouldn't have done if id went to London alone. We stayed in Shoreditch and explored artsy streets and book shops (there was so much art everywhere). The first day we visited a little art gallery/shop called the illustration cupboard, i really enjoyed it there because i had heard about it before and wanted to visit it, plus love looking at different original illustrations. We then went to the London transport museum and originally i wasn't looking forward to this much but I really enjoyed it and for a museum it wasn't boring at all, although it's pretty small so for the money you pay to get in there wasn't much :/. We then went to Foyles book shop a HUGE book shop, i loved it and could have quite happily have bought all of the books but i restrained myself. The last stop of the day was a comic book sighing in an amazing comic book shop with lots of books and comics. It was really cool going to a signing because i had never done anything like this before, and there was a really good atmosphere to the place.


The next day we got invited to tour the Nobrow shop and office, It was amazing to see where it all started. It was so inspiring and all of their books are wonderful and such high quality. I bought a lovely space book! We then explored Columbia road and a few other streets around the Shoreditch area. There was a lot of street art around it was so different and refreshing to see really nice art on all of the street walls. It was great i really loved the second day as it was so chilled and fun, plus the gorgeous weather helped a lot and made the whole day feel like i was inside an Instagram photo :') .


I think i will do some more detailed posts about Nobrow books and maybe a post about the street art?



Here are some photos from the weekend.

Illustration test shots

For my current narrative project as i am creating my illustrations in real life and then photographing the drawings in different compositions i couldn't decide weather i wanted my images to be in real backgrounds or drawn backgrounds. One day i was just sat thinking about it when Amy suggested that i try a few of the different options out to help me decide. She lent me her camera so me and a few class mates helped to create some little scenes to do some test shots in. Here are some of the photographs that we took. 

I absolutely love how these photos have turned out and i have decided that i am definitely going to have my drawings in real background sets that i have made out of found objects. The next step that i am going to take is to sit down and decide on what objects that i can use to create the different scenes from my story. I will then get all of the things together and create the sets. 

I won the Great British Bake off!! (sort of)

I decided to do a little post about last week as it was a little but different to most weeks So yeah as the week was just going on as 'normal' (if you can ever have normal on our course) and it got to Wednesday and because my teachers are a little bit crazy they had set up something called the 'Great Illustration Bake off.' This was where my class went and baked cakes and decorated them to match the illustrations that we are currently working on, It was so fun!! Our team made vanilla cup cakes and it was very messy to say the least. There was cake mix and icing sugar EVERYWHERE!! so yeah we all got on with decorating our cakes. I decided to make an ice cream cone unicorn horn because there is one in the story that i am illustrating! i was basing it off the little sketch that i had previously done as part of character development below :) 

I used pink icing that i had made for the ice cream, and put an ice cream cone on top of it. Okay so it wasn't the most complicated of designs but I WON!!!  I think it was because i had thought a but more outside of the box instead of just drawing a design onto the top of the cake. Everyones designs were really good and it was a lovely fun little afternoon. So yeah i didn't win anything physically but it was nice anyway. Here are some pictures of the finished cake and some other photos from the day.

The winning cake!! MMM

Me with my cake!

The lovely class with all of our cup cake creations 

Overall it was a really good afternoon and it was great to do something that was creative in a different way for a but of a change.