During August I was commissioned to work on 12 bird illustrations of various species which was such a lovely job to work on and I am really happy with the final illustrations.
Anyone who knows me personally knows that I very rarely go a day without listening to Ben Howard’s music. i’m probably responsible for at least half of his spotify plays at this point. I have always felt that it is important to take inspiration from a range of people and places and not only look to people in your field to inspire your work as this can cause you to compare yourself too much to others or change your work to be more similar to theirs whether this happens consciously or not. Ben’s music has been a constant inspiration to my work for such a long time but I have never made an illustration which takes inspiration directly from one of his songs as I wanted to do it in a way which I felt worked with the rest of my illustrations.
When Ben released his newest album, Noonday Dream, back in June, 2018 and I first heard the song Nica Libres At Dusk (in particularly the line ‘and watch eagles saw in circles, perpetually’) I have had this illustration in my head and every time i listened to it since. I finally managed to set some time aside and work on these drawings and I’m really happy with the final result.
Although I drew this purely to please myself I will be releasing prints of this very soon for anyone else who loves that song or eagles in general.
Since my last picture book, Every Whale, I have been looking closer at relationships in the animal kingdom, in particular the familial bond between parent and child. more often than not the closest bonds in mature tend to be between mother and baby and males of the species often mate with numerous mothers for the good of the species.
My aim with these illustrations is to create a series of prints, each showcasing a different mother with their young. For each print I will write a blog post about their relationship to both encourage me to learn more about each species and to also encourage me to write more on my blog which i am enjoying so much more now that I have changed up my website!
The first in this series is the Malayan tapir.
Malayan tapirs are the largest of five species of tapir and they are native to Asia. They are currently endangered with less than 1,700 of them left in the wild. Fully grown, this species can reach 2.5 meters in length with a lifespan of around 30 years. Tapir calves have an incredibly close relationship with their mothers and stay by their side for up to three years until they are ready to survive on their own. The calves can get quite playful as as they get older and brave enough to explore on their own but they still rarely leave their mother’s sight.
Habitat loss is one of the main threats to this species as they rely on rich rainforests and vegetation to survive. Another challenge to the future of the species is that it is believed that they only breed once every two years and often only give birth to one calf so the close relationship between mother and baby is not only important for the survival of the individual calf, it is also hugely important to the survival of the entire species.
I have wanted to start blogging for a while now as I wanted a way of documenting my working process and a place to show current work for projects which won’t be finished for months to come.
I wanted to begin with this whale shark drawing as it is one of my favourite drawings to date as I love whale sharks and think that the range of tones on him look really striking. While I was working on a book project, I had an idea for an ongoing project, whereby I would draw various threatened/ endangered animals when I wanted a little break from my book (even though my book project involved drawing animals too!).
So far for this project, I have drawn a whale shark and a snow leopard and have been selling them as prints in my Etsy shop and I will be donating some of the profits to various animal conservation charities.
