I’ve been looking a lot at birds recently. A few months ago i bought a massive book full of Audubon illustrations who drew hundreds of birds in his lifetime so that could have something todo with it.
I’m really happy with how this drawing turned out and the splash of colour is a refreshing addition for me and I might be introducing some more into my work, especially now that it’s summer!
Every now and then, I get the urge to draw something a little outside my comfort zone (whales and polar bears). I think that this is necessary when it comes to illustration as it allows your work to progress and remain exciting to you.. plus it never hurts to expand your portfolio.
Why cocktails? I love sitting down at a bar and looking through the drinks menu and seeing that every aspect has been carefully designed, down to the illustrations in the menu. Therefore, it has been a dream brief of mine for as long as I’ve been drinking to design a cocktail menu.
So far, I have drawn a gin & tonic and a cosmopolitan and am pretty happy with how these have turned out as I haven’t drawn an inanimate object for at least 3 years! The colouring isn’t perfect and my ice cubes definitely leave a lot to be desired but I really enjoyed drawing them and will hopefully get more confident the more I draw.
Once I have a sample of 5-10 drawings that I am really happy with, I will send these off to bars and hopefully have a chance to work on my own menu.
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.
Over summer, I visited Cornwall with my family and found it to be such a beautiful part of the world and would love to go back.
I’d always wanted to visit the Eden Project so while we were in Cornwall, I decided to drag my family along (the dog included). I found it really inspiring to be around so many species of plants that I’d never seen or heard of before and I was drawing plats for weeks afterwards!
