Quotes and Sayings Book 2013

Every year Falmouth 3rd year Illustration students get to make a book for people to see. It's really exciting and I can't wait to see everyone's pages.

I've chosen a quote from one of my favourite poems, which is Tennyson's 'Maud.' It's so lyrical with heaps of atmosphere and swings of emotion; I picked, 'Come into the garden Maud, for the black bat night has flown.' It's a line which is full of hope, but it has a strangeness to it. I wanted to try and evoke the light which creeps in through an early morning mist, with Maud in an unusual wooded scene, the flowers awake around her.

My Christmas Characters

I wanted to quickly see if my charcoal characters would benefit from being transferred into a dry-point. I love the line you can get with dry-piont etching and I enjoyed drawing this simple Christmas card. I do not want to rule out this process in my work; this more designed and colourful effect is great for different illustration contexts and different audiences. I will have to experiment with different ideas in different processes and see which are more effective!

Christmas Story for Children!

Following on from my adult narrative work on Rebecca, I wanted to see if I could use charcoal in a playful scene. This is the result... After some characterisation and playing with concepts I decided to do a speculative artwork, showing Father Christmas giving the Lock Ness Monster a book of 101 disguises! In future I will see if simpler charcoal would be more effective for children.

Du Maurier's 'Rebecca'

I have been developing my use of charcoal as part of my visual language. This was the first project where I added characters to a charcoal environment. The atmospheric, ominous tone of Rebecca suits charcoal really well. I used hints of figures in the trees to suggest the servants and housekeeper, as well as Rebecca herself looming above the new Mrs. DeWinter on the way down the path to Mandalay.