I used to sell cat paintings on ebay

Okay, so I'm aware that if you have a blog you need to keep it updated with regular news. Trouble is that at the moment I'm in the middle of a few projects and won't have anything to report for a while, so I thought I'd upload a few of the paintings I used to do when I was starting out as a freelancer. Money was tight so I created a few stylised cat designs and painted variations on themes. I'd put them up for auction on ebay, usually a few at a time. They were pretty popular, selling all over the world - I had a fan in Japan who bought ten - and one painting went for around £300 I think.

I'd pretty much forgotten about them until earlier when I was searching through some old files and there they were. I guess I don't have much to say about them other than I love their simplicity and how they have some essence of cat about them.

Hugging trees

I love trees. I have one in my back garden: she grows apples and her name is Freya. And from now on I'll be loving lots of trees at once (in an entirely polyamorous, consensual way) because I'm going to give 5% of my profits to The Woodland Trust. My prices will stay exactly the same. It's a small way of giving back - although my opinion on carbon offset schemes is that they offset guilt rather than greenhouse gases, preserving our woodlands is vital, and I'm delighted to be a (tiny) part of this process. I'll also be looking to spend one day a month doing volunteer work for local environmental projects once the pollen count has dipped below defcon 1... watch this space!

Giant ants the size of foals

Okay, so I'm not going to say too much about this one - just that I'm massively happy with it and the pic doesn't do it justice. Yes, those are giant ants, on an island, and the further up the island you go the more the ants become part of everything else. It's an illustration for a forthcoming book and there will be 32 more.

I've never painted an illustration before - it's a real luxury and I'm loving it. I've also been commissioned to create a painting for a massage-therapist friend - one he can put in his therapy room. I love my work!

Savonnerie

Last week the luxury toiletries company Savonnerie commissioned me to help them rebrand their company. I'll be looking at every aspect of their marketing, from logos to packaging to illustrations to website to advertising.

It's a fantastic job and I'm very excited about it. Projects like this are rare gems - the owners want a highly creative, original, decadent style, they want to apply that style across a wide range of materials, and they have strong ethical principles that are in step with my own. I've turned down work in the past because I didn't agree with business practices, so it's great to be working on something that I can get really passionate about.

Plus (and for the record, I'm not the sort of person that normally gets excited about toiletries) - their products are AWESOME.

Gone surfing

One of the many good things about being freelance is the hours. Sometimes I'll have a week with very little on; sometimes I'll be working all hours. It's not constant, which is great, as those three little words 'nine' 'to' and 'five' fill me with a visceral dread only equalled by the prospect of being made to watch back-to-back soap operas at my parents' house. I have more time to do more of the things I like, and when I'm doing the things I like I tend to be thinking about stuff I'm working on and how I can make it better.

So in a sense, when people find out I work from home and ask me how I manage to switch off at the end of the day, the answer is that I never really do. This isn't a bad thing - if you love what you do, you don't view it as a 'job' but as something that challenges, pushes, inspires you - it's part of who you are. I went to see David Carson talk in London last year and he said that the perfect occupation is something you would choose to do even if you didn't need the money. I'm not saying that I want to spend even more of my time sat in front of my Mac, but the thing is, my best ideas are the ones that come to me when I'm not sat in front of my Mac.

The things I like to do to get ideas include gardening, painting, doodling, yoga and, most of all, surfing. The thing I don't like about doing the things I like is that when I get caught out doing them by clients, I feel a bit guilty. Which is stupid, because if I'm doing these things while I'm supposed to be sat in front of my Mac doing work for them, chances are I'm actually processing the problems and challenges raised by their brief, and coming up with creative ways around them.

I guess the guilt stems from when I worked in a design agency in Cambridge. We had this enormous fish tank, and when I was stuck for ideas I would sit in front of it and watch the clown loaches snuffle the gravel around or the plecostomus moodily swish the smaller fish out of his way. My boss (who was generally a Nice Person) would get a bit irritated by this. He seemed to think that I was skiving on his time. If we had a lot of work on and I went for a long walk and lay under an oak tree in my lunch hour instead dropping sandwich crumbs on my keyboard and cursing at Quark (for lo and behold children, back in those days of yore we did indeed use Quark), upon my return I'd get this Look, a Look that accused me of Not Taking The Work Seriously. In fact, I just needed to shift into a different gear - the gear that lets the ideas in.

It's a difficult process to put into words but it goes a little like this. You stop thinking with your head. Your focus shifts down, you breathe slowly and deeply: you think with your heart. Your brain sinks into the back of your head and your vision becomes peripheral: you do not focus on one thing but instead you see all. You forget yourself in the grander scheme of things: the goldfinch picks seeds from the bird-feeder hanging from the apple tree or the sunlight dances on the glassy sea as you paddle for a wave or the random melding of colours on the paint palette become something more... 

You can't think up ideas. They just come.

Captain America!

In the midst of winter I received a call from a potential client who had a new product that he wanted a complete look for. This thing was some sort of craft invention that was aimed at children and schools but that adults could enjoy, too. He'd had interest from big toy sellers including Hamleys and John Lewis, so the product needed to look absolutely stunning. I was to create a cartoon character - a superhero - and to design all the packaging in the style of a classic comic book, create a comic strip and a website.

An amazing brief, and as with all things that seem too good to be true, it was. Alarm bells sounded when the client kept adding more work to the brief without wanting to address the financial implications, and he became very sheepish when I sent him a quote with a full breakdown of costs even though I'd explained them to him from the start. So I held back on the project until I had full confirmation from him, and only did a few sketches. After a meeting with his bank, he realised he didn't have the money. The job was cancelled only a week after it started.

It is irksome; although some people appreciate how much care and consideration you put into each job, others seem to think you can churn out work like some sort of McProduction Line.

Hey ho: every cloud has a silver lining, etc. I got to spend a few days curled up beside my log fire learning how to draw superheroes while the song of the silent snow played softly outside. It's something they don't teach you in art college - you do a lot of life drawing and anatomy, so you know the lie of the human muscoloskelature, but superheroes are something else entirely. They're massively exaggerated, with dramatic perspective and little drawing tricks that emphasise movement and distance, and subtle crosshatching blending the blackest indian ink with the white of the page. Lucky for me, one of my best friends is a comic book geek and lent me a great how-to book by John Buscema of Marvel comics, so I set to work learning from one of the greatest artists of the genre.

Flipping through my sketchbook earlier, I saw the above inking. When the job was cancelled I was annoyed at having wasted my time, but looking back I appreciate having had the opportunity to diversify my skills. Such is life, I guess.

Charitylog logo

A couple of months ago I was approached by a client with whom I've worked occasionally, pretty much since I started freelancing almost six years ago. I'd done a couple of logos for him and this time he wanted me to look at the logo of one of his clients, Charitylog.

It's a company that has designed software for charities working in the public sector. It provides a log where employees and volunteers can record dealings with clients - for example elderly and disabled people and their carers - so that everything is organised and clear, in one place and most of all, secure.

What's important (to me) is to work out not just what the client wants but what their customers need. So you've got this brand-new cutting-edge software and that's all fine and dandy, but hey, computers and software can be frightening to your perhaps technophobic customers - software can be full of holes, computers can crash and lose data - and if you're a charity paid by the local council to look after vulnerable people you certainly don't want those people's personal details hacked or leaked or lost or whatever. The thing to emphasise, then, is that this particular software is clean, clear and secure. So that's what I did.

I worked on logos that were strong, reassuring, simple and gave the feeling of security. I used motifs like keys, cogs and locks. I used a lot of blue and green - calming colours - and everyday typefaces. This one, the final approved logo, uses Helvetica Black - very common, which is useful because it's recognisable and not new and scary. By putting the type in a black box the logo is contained and feels secure. The round corners soften it a little and the drop shadow (used with caution - these things can look terrible) lifts it. And then there's the little touch of colour with the padlock 'a'.

That's pretty much the thing about being a graphic designer. You can be the most creative person on the planet and produce the most astoundingly beautiful, edgy work, but if it doesn't work for the client and their customers, you're dead in the water.