Illustration Friday - 'Secret'

Illustration Friday - 'Secret'

I've been meaning to do Illustration Friday for quite a while now, and have finally got round to it. Hopefully I can keep it up!

This week's word was 'Secret'

I played on the definition: 'something that is or is kept secret, hidden, or concealed' 

It's a bit of a quick black and white silhouette experiment in Illustrator, I may continue playing with the image, using this as a starting point. 

Birthday papercut

I made a papercut card for dads birthday.

Papercuts seem to be my medium of choice at the moment... they're really quite fun. So expect to see more soon!

A Fine City - Papercut

I've been working on a little personal project lately - a papercut. I used to do a lot of pop ups while at college, and really missed playing about with paper and scalpels. So I decided to have a little bash at a papercut to get back into it. 

It's based it on two iconic parts of Norwich - the market roofs and the castle. I took a lot of inspiration from old transport posters.

I also had a go at a time lapse too - it's amazing what you can do on your phone these days! It was my fist attempt and I missed the start of me cutting bits out, but I learned a lot, and i'm pretty pleased with the results. 

Exciting times....

I'm having a bit of a rebrand, new logo, new website, new work online...

New beginnings really... i'm on the brink of going freelance, and am really looking forward to it. I've been  testing the water a little lately, and have really enjoyed the work I've been getting, so it's now time to bite the bullet, jump in the deep end and go for it!

My new logo is a little bit of a re-styling of a doodle I did a while ago. It features an owl. Although I think the owl is slightly over-used at the moment; for me he symbolises knowledge and learning and seeing as I  want to continue to work doing information based design (amongst other things), either for publishers, or museums, the owl is a symbol of wisdom. I also stay up too late, and have a soft spot for birds.

Here he is:

He's sitting on a pencil too, I use a lot of pencils while sketching out ideas, so it seemed like the obvious replacement for a branch.

He occasionally appears in orange as well:

I'd love to hear any thoughts on him!

So, while waiting for Indesign to take an age to to make me a PDF of my book so far (it's a 96 page boys sticker book, with an Uber-short deadline), I thought i'd take the time to post some pics of my adventures in crochet so far:

So, I've made 9 squares so far, so i've got a way to go before I get a blanket out of them! But I've been doing a little bit every now and then, and their numbers keep growing, so I have faith that one day, there will be a blanket!

I've got Pip at meetmeatMikes to thank for helping me get to grips with the squares. There are some fab tutorials here:
http://meetmeatmikes.blogspot.co.uk/p/granny-squares-101.html

Mine are nowhere near as nice as hers yet, but I reckon i'll try to master some fancier ones sometime soon... Watch this space!

I'm excited about the crochet, once i've mastered the granny squares, i'm going to have a bash at something else, maybe some amigurami...

Though i'm now quite tempted to try needle felting...