Keep your electric eye on me...

Here's something hot off the drawing board...I literally finished this about half an hour ago. I was asked to draw an Osprey and was sent a picture to work from the day after I'd started...oops. So instead of a raptor catching it's prey in a hail of ocean spray, we have this little baby chick. I think you can see the hunter she's going to grow into looking out from that beady eye. 

When it comes to the natural world, I don't like to draw anything that I haven't actually seen with my own eyeballs. Luckily, I did once see an Osprey battling the elements flying inland across the salt marshes at Arnside. They aren't the prettiest of the birds of prey, they always look startled to me but I think I like them more for that. But if good looking birds are your thing, here's another one on the house...(A Merlin falcon I saw on the same walk I found the waders skull.)

Hit the bottom and escape...

"A mermaid has no tears, and so she suffers so much more..." 

This drawing makes me feel sad. I almost wish I hadn't done it. A captured, lonely thing. I drew the jar ages ago when I was into illustrating glass in a big way...er, yeah. Anyway, the jar sat empty in a sketchbook for a bit and the other day, while I was on the subject of skeletons, this idea of mermaid bones came to me. Are you picking up the vibe that I leave a lot of things with a "to be continued" tagline? 

It's not really turned out how I expected but I quite like it when that happens (which is pretty much every time) it's like these things draw me rather than the other way round. Strange creatures swimming around inside my head waiting to get out... 

Oh heaven knows we'll soon be dust....

I don't want to give too much away about this because it's not really my thing to share, I'm just the illustrator. So in the spirit of science and rational thinking, I'll just stick to the facts: This little skeleton ballerina is part of the dotty Moon drawing I did a few weeks ago. I had to put a bit of distance between me and that Moon, this happens quite a lot but it helps me to think about how to proceed. The end product is absolutely nothing like the original request. The idea was very specific and put me in mind of the art of Roger Dean, whose style is very surreal and sci-fi and one I would only be able to emulate poorly I think (plus, I don't paint, too much cleaning up). 

As I'm still at the stage of putting things out there quickly before I have chance to censor myself, I'm showing this bit off (because I like it) and I promise the full drawing will be coming soon to a screen near you... 

Drawing crazy patterns on your sheets...

Remember when I said I thought about illustrating The Owl and the Pussycat? Well it turns out I made a start on it (must have been a slow day). I came across this in a half finished state last week and having not much to do that day either, I thought I might as well finish it off. I won't be continuing with this as a project, I'm not a massive cat lover and all those swirly patterns in the sea...I tried to keep the same sort of idea going as the original little illustration and, well, they just don't work do they? My favourite part of this is the owls little brother waving goodbye, he looks so excited. I don't think he really gets it (psst...they aren't coming back!)

If I could have it back, I'd only waste it again...

I've spent a disproportionate amount of Earth hours doodling away at this and it still doesn't quite feel done...It's really hard to know when to stop. I miss a drawing when it's finished, it's a tiny bit of me gone forever. Then I forget it exists and start the next one. The circle of creative life.

This is my interpretation of the far side of the Moon, first seen by human eyeballs in 1968 by Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders. My name is not amongst those who've seen the dark side so I had to make do with the Apollo photo archives. But since I'm an energy conservationist (lazy), most of the cratering is from imagination. A bit of creative license goes a long way..all the way to the Moon in my case. 

PS - apologies for the weird text alignment, formatting is having none of it today. 

Like drinking poison, like eating glass...

A bit ago I went through a phase of drawing glass jars and bottles. No, I'm not strange, weird, off, nor crazy, my reality is just different from yours (thanks Lewis Carroll). This one was a request for an Alice in Wonderland inspired drawing and because that's another done to death theme, I really wanted to put my own stamp on it. So it got the Holly treatment and became Alice's "Drink Me" bottle, in biro as standard. If I was to go back and add to this I'd make the bottle look more like it had liquid in it but at the time, in my head, it was more of a whirlwind thing going on. I think I must have got my wires crossed between Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Also, because I didn't have a great deal of time, I had to keep it quite small so drawing the tiny objects and animals inside was pretty delicate work. For a bull in a china shop, that isn't easy. For me, it's even worse. 

Why have paper when you can have skin?

Now available on your flesh...Here's something I'm quite excited about today. One of my drawings, etched onto skin forever as a tattoo. Not my own I hasten to add! 

I'm genuinely honoured, such skill has gone into recreating it and I think it works quite nicely (even if I do say so myself). I'm told it was a tattooist called Marcos Ribeiro at Black Garden Tattoo, Covent Garden. So thank you Marcos, you've really done a fabulous job. I feel immortal (well I've gained at least a decade). 

The request was a Nightingale and I decided that because they're quite a plain looking bird, I'd give it a bit of a steampunk vibe. So it became a clockwork toy version with the significant initials "EPN" added to the key to wind it. 

That last picture is a bit dodgy but shows the general size and positioning of the tattoo. I guess it sort of wraps around the arm a bit. I haven't actually seen it in the flesh (yet).

Below is the original drawing, or something like it. I really think this Marcos guy has improved on what I started. A strange collaborative project in which the participants have never crossed paths... 

Spinning a yarn...

Some of the people that I know and love put the odd request in here and there (by odd I mean both infrequently and peculiar). This is one that kept me busy for a short time the other day. Since I quite like creating lettering, and in absence of the mental clarity required to upload anything else, I thought I'd share it. This swirly writing is starting to become my signature text, I'll have to keep an eye on that...
If you're struggling to guess what it might be, it's a gift tag for a "hand knitted emergency allotment hat" (hopefully the potential emergency is just unexpectedly inclement weather). And no, of course I didn't knit the hat, I've never even seen the hat! Biros are my weapon of choice, the pen is mightier than the knitting needle.

The shadow is cast...

Last night I saw an incredible video of the surface features of the Sun called Thermonuclear Art. I love the idea of that but since hydrogen fusion is a process that requires a fair bit of effort, I decided to get the pens out instead and leave the nuclear reactions to the hearts of stars. So here's a little drawing of the Sun's atmosphere (also known as the Solar Corona) visible to us during a total eclipse, a celestial event that I've been known to get a little bit animated over. To witness the shadow of the Moon covering the Sun from the perspective of the Earth is breathtaking. There's no denying we are on a spinning ball of rock when you experience that happening and we are in just the right place at just the right time. What a startling coincidence!
As a little extra (unintentional) feature, if you look at this image and blink your eyes really quickly it creates quite an interesting visual effect.

Experimentation is an active science...

More dots...I told you it was habit forming! Along with a rarer thing for me, colour.

These little ladies are something I began with good intentions and then promptly misplaced. Having found them again, I decided they either had to go or be finished, so here they are. Ladybirds given a revamp in new, far out costumes. I was going for a sort of experimental ladybird test card using the CMYK colour model that printers use; cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black). Don't think I'm all techy, I just looked that up. It was an excuse to try out my newly acquired acrylic inks, that's all. They're not very symmetrical or evenly spaced (I just went for it freehand in pen...on wallpaper, which seemed like a good idea at the time) and the colours have bled outside the edges but I quite like them because of that rather than despite it. I don't usually wear rose tinted spectacles to look at my own work but they've made me show these off when I really wasn't going to. I'd better take them off again before anything else weird happens!