The Bean
Sketching in Millennium Park, from my trip to Chicago back in April.
drawings
Document Illustration and Readersvoice.com interview
A quick full pager to accompany an interview with Carl Shipman, one of the first British skaters to ever make it big in America. If I got to draw “RAD” stickers for every illo job, I’d be much happier. This one was a bit of a challenge to draw; the editor wanted a straight up portrait of Shipman, but didn’t have any sample shots for me to draw from. We both spent far too long trawling the internet searching for any photo portraits of him, but to no avail. In the end I had to resort to climbing up into my Dad’s attic to rummage through my extensive childhood sk8rat mags until I found a few snaps of him. Elusive.
And if you really want to know more about what it’s like to be a pencil pusher, go to the July issue of Australian based readersvoice.com for an interview with me.
Sketching An Event Part
Last week I was lucky enough to attend the inspiring “An Event Apart” conference up in Boston. If you are a web designer / coder and don’t read the invaluable A List Apart website (which created the annual multi-city conference), start today. Lots of great talk about CSS, Javascript and web design issues.
Luckily for me, this means two days of near-motionless models to draw in my sketchbook from a row in the back of the room. The models did a great job, holding their hour-long poses with a minimum of fidgeting. Thank you An Event Apart attendees, for allowing me to draw your bald heads and wrinkled shirts.
Believe it or not, the act of sketching lets me focus more on what is being said, and I do believe the ideas ‘take’ better than if I was just sitting staring at a tiny person on a stage.
Elusive Creature
This past Saturday while strolling through Central Park I stopped to draw the rocks and tree above. Later in the weekend a great idea for a children’s book dawned on me and I added the elusive creature as a nod to the inspiration.