Thursday 16 July 2009

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.




Wednesday 1 July 2009

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.