Paradise

One of my all time favourite paintings.
I particularly like the birds, with their sideways human eyes ~ I have drawn birds in this way ever since.
I originally did this illustration for one of the Catholic educational books, but it was reused for the cover of the book Breaking Free, an anthology of poems, as well as a poster and pamphlets to promote the book.
Watercolour and gouache paint on watercolour paper.

Book cover for The Wine Regions of Australia

This is a book cover illustration that I did for Allen and Unwin a few years ago.

The book is called The Wine Regions of Australia by John Beeston.

As you can see, they altered the colour of the art in the hardback version of the book to give it a Chardonnay look. The soft cover version of the book has the natural green colour along with a burgundy coloured background for the band of text.

It's quite a large book, 608 pages.

When I got this assignment, I had only one week to get it done from start to finish. So, i headed off into the countryside to visited a winery, only to find that we were in the season when the vines are just dried sticks with not a leaf in sight. Luckily, I was able to dig out some photos of vine leaves at home that i had taken many years prior. So, the drawing was a composite of those old photos, and took an afternoon to sketch up. After the sketch was approved, which took a couple of days, I painted the pic up in one day. I rather like how it turned out.

Watercolour and gouache on watercolour paper.

My book won an award!

My book won an award!


The Extensive Reading Foundation
2006 Language Learner Literature Award Winners
http://www.erfoundation.org/winners2006.html
http://www.eltnews.com/home.shtml
http://www.seg.co.jp/cgi-bin/kb7.cgi?b=sss-news&c=e&id=652

Gosh!
I've only ever won one award for my illustration work before :¬)
The award isn't a super prestigious illustration award, it's just an online award made by teachers and students around the world ... still, it's an international award and it's always nice when your work gets noticed, receiving a tick of approval, especially when it's a project which I really enjoyed working on ... Oxford University Press, and the editor Sophie Swaine were great to work with. :¬)

Red Apple

And now for something completely different ... a red apple.
This watercolour sketch was done about 10 years ago whilst I was at Uni. I did it as a quick sketch during a drawing class but it turned out rather well, I think, and I've kept it as part of my portfolio ever since.
I was going through a bit of a fruit phase painting and drawing apples and pears mostly. Whole apples, cut apples, chewed apples ... apples in groups, and apples on their own. Often, I would find myself hanging around the fruit department of the supermarket looking for apples with twisty stalks and dried up leaves ... it became a bit of an obsession. Apples apples apples ... after about 6 months of appling around I found that I just couldn't look at another apple in the same way. So I stopped painting apples and have never painted another one since. My love affair with apples changed me forever.

More Thumbelina

This is my favourite pic from Thumbelina. This was the first illustration that I did for the book, I was asked to do this illo as a sample before I was selected to do the book by the publisher, Oxford University Press UK.
This scan looks a bit washed out, the colours are actually a bit darker and richer.
You can see a larger version of this pic here ...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/celeste33/211497194/

Thumbelina

This was the cover illustration of a book that I did last year for Oxford University Press (UK).
Watercolour, gouache, pen & paper.
In this scene, Thumbelina climbs onto the swallow's back and is carried high into the sky.

This book is one of 3 finalists for an award in the UK from the Extensive Reading Foundation.

Paul's "Chamber Music" CD

Pen and Ink drawing.
The guy in the cello is my ex-piano teacher Paul Stanhope, who is a composer. He wrote a piano piece for me called The Celestial Waltz which available on CD.

Now and then I do pen and ink work ... and when I do, it generally looks like this. Mostly, my black and white work is a lot more detailed than this one, but you get the general idea. I haven't had much B/W stuff published because they tend to end up framed on the walls of my friends' houses, but the B/Ws are my favourites and I'm currently working on the concept of a book in this style.

The Wild Swans

Here is a close up of a painting which was part of a set I painted for my Masters.
This pic portrays the moment in The Wild Swans story when night falls and the 11 swan brothers turn back into human form. They are flying across the ocean carrying their sister Eliza in a net, but they must spend the night on this rock until daybreak when they turn back into swans before they can complete their journey. Here they stand on the tiny rock, arms locked, in a circle with Eliza in the middle, while the storm lashes around them.

The swirling wind and wave curls were inspired by Cypriot pottery, as was the general colour pallette of yellows, greens, browns and blues. The fish at the bottom looks contemporary and cartoony, but is actually based on a 14th century drawing of a fish that I encountered on a piece of Cypriot pottery whilst work on an archaeological dig.
The pock marks in the sky are the result of the heavily textured paper ...a very beautiful effect, but it was extremely difficult to paint finely on paper like that.

Approx A4, watercolour and gouache on paper.

You can see the complete painting here ...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/celeste33/194442291/

Lily and the Puzzle Cat

This is a close up of an illustration that I did for a fairy tale book called Lily and the Puzzle Cat. The book ended up not being published, so the pic is framed in my house. It's probably the most detailed painting that I have ever done in recent years. I loved painting Lily's dress fabric, there are 17 layers of paint in it ... I've used the technique several times in other illustrations since doing this pic.

This illustration is one of my all time favourites.
I would love to do a whole book in this style, but it would probably take a complete year.

Watercolour, gouache, paper.

You can see the whole illustration here ...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/celeste33/193683582/