Gratuitous cat sketch

Winter!

Here's my winter painting for the set of illustrations I'm working on.  We don't get snow here, only wind and rain. The colours are sort of ugly, not sure if they are good ugly or bad ugly though. My favourites from this one are the stressed mum and downcast granny. Also I wish I had that orange and black jacket in the top right hand corner.

Here it is in progress, I've been keeping cling film over my wet gouache, it dries out so quickly in this heat.

Autumn in Aukland (geddit?)

Here's my autumn scene,  it's going to have text on it because it's the cover of a publication but this is the final image done (although not properly scanned - damn blurry edges). Click on it to see it proper sized.
I'm having a love affair with gouache.

Sneak peek

Here's a quick look at a commission I'm in the middle of, it's hard to paint wintry scenes in the midst of a glorious summer drought. It's so hot I have to sit on a towel to stop from sticking to my chair!

- Actually this is now the autumn scene, winter is still to come...

Wedding beer!

Here's the beer labels in the flesh, on the rambunctious yet delicious wedding homebrew. I feel like I should have made them slightly wider to account for the curve in the bottle, but oh well. They were very well received anyway. Photo courtesy of the lovely Alyson Eberle

Variations on a theme

Har har. I thought this was pretty funny last night. Fucking bananas!

Chromacon!

I will be having a stall at Chromacon, a new expo for illustrators and comic artists, looks exciting! The event is on Sunday the 12th of May, I'll be there with printed tote bags, more prints and other odds and sods. Come for a visit, it's free for the public!

I spy something beginning with p

A simple little repeating pattern I made based on some sketchbook doodles. Potted plants, pineapples, pears and a couple of stray leaves. I like the combination of smooth and spiky shapes.

Favours for friends

This week I've been working on some favours for friends, the princess painting is for my cousin's daughter's 5th birthday party, I think the last time I painted a princess was about 20 years ago.

And these beer labels are for a friend's wedding beer, he's part of the infamous 'Pervs' home brewery. The wedding is in a hall next to a library and is sort of library themed so I designed the beer labels to look like old Penguin book covers, and in doing so discovered the secret to making an accurate looking early Penguin rip-off: Gill Sans. I also found this template for later, 60s era Penguins which I didn't end up using but seems useful to know about.

Sketchbook + red paint + blue black ink

Homies

I thought as an exercise I might painting my houseplants, I have quite a collection now. This one is a Calethea Zebrina, it lives in the bathroom next to the mirror. It's velvety stripy leaves are now sprinkled with tiny white spots from vigorous tooth-brushing.

Hi Hydrangeas

It's summer and these granny hats are blooming on roadsides everywhere. This one is for an absent friend.

Duel weilding

So I'm in the unusual position of  having work in shows on both sides of the Tasman. My Wooly Bully show is up til the 23rd or the 24th if yr lucky, and my Evidence painting is making another appearance in a Christmas exhibition, this time as part of Seed's 12 Days of Christmas. Apologies for the shitty photo, it's actually much bigger and better looking, and so Christmassy!

lil' aliens

These little paintings grew out of my uncanny plant works from the middle of the year. I'm really into cacti and succulents at the moment and am having fun working with gouache in restricted palettes.  These will be for sale as part of my Wooly Bully exhibition, most likely cash n' carry so you'll have to be in quick!

Getting promoted!

The nice folks at Three Thousand were kind enough to add my exhibition to their calendar of events in Melbourne. Yay! Now y'all Melbournites will have to come. 

Inklings

A couple of little ink drawings, might take them to Melbourne with me. More fun with dip pens!

Melbourne exhibition!!

My first international exhibition is at Wooly Bully, which is the best shop in Australia, a comics shop/record store/cafe which also sells hot sauce!! Everybody wins!! I'll be selling some screen prints, tote bags and other art bits, come by if you're in Melbourne!

Screen printed booklplate

I've managed to produce a few of these, even though I'm not so hot at registration and at least half of them were too crooked to use, but at least the colours came out well. It's hard to see in the photo but the black is more of a dark bluish green. The print is modified from the bookplate stamp I made my sister last year, she's a total bibliophile and stamps all her books before lending them out.
I'm thinking of selling these in sets of two or three, but I'm not too sure how much to charge for them, any suggestions?

Toting totes

Finally printed some tote bags! At the moment I have my Kathmandu Cat-man in black on cream  and my Castle print in white on black. The bags are made of 100% cotton canvas. I currently have them for sale at the Audio Foundation shop in Auckland for $15 each and will be bringing some to Melbourne for my mini-exhibition at the best shop in Australia, Wooly Bully (more on that soon). Currently looking for more stockists too.

Thee Oh Sees - again!

Well The High Seas (our deceased shop/gallery) is still sort of around, only now we just help to bring bands to our far-flung shores. This is the second time we've helped to bring them over, and the second poster I've done for them, was on a bit of a 50s sci-fi buzz for this one, painting it really made me want to read more sci-fi. It's gouache but this time on beautiful, heavy, 550gsm, only-comes-in-large-expensive-sheets paper. Sooo dreamy!

I forgot to take a pic of it in progress, but here it is with some side scribbles.