CIO Connect Summer 2009 edition

Here's the latest issue of CIO Connect, on the theme of sustainability. The cover feature was shot in quite an urban setting but I wanted to convey the 'green' theme, so I created lots of little motifs of flowers and insects to run throughout the spread. They seemed too clean, and a little prissy, so I printed them out, rubbed away areas with a putty rubber before the ink-jet ink had fully dried, scrunched them up, ironed them out and then scanned the now rather wrecked scraps of paper back in. It's what gives a rather dirty, worn effect to the illustrations. I did the same with the headlines, and also the large arrow graphics on the leadership spread. I guess it's difficult to see using these low-resolution pics but I hope you get the idea.

Photoshop is great, but sometimes real-life does filters better.

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.