Autumn Round-up

I’ve been super busy the last few months, so here’s an autumn round-up of some of the stuff I’ve been up to recently!

Folktale Week

I’ll start with the thing I’m most excited about! I’ve decided to take part in folktale week this year. Each day from Nov 13th – 19th I will post instalments of a story called The Boy and The Swan. It is mostly written and I now have just under three weeks to storyboard and illustrate the whole thing! A lot of work but I’m excited to share it. I’ll do a post here with the full story and all the illustrations after the event, but if you’d like to follow along live then I’ll be posting each day to Instagram, BlueSky, and probably Mastodon too.

SCBWI Open Sketchbooks

It was lovely to have some of my work featured in the SCBWI Open Sketchbooks Feature. I’ve entered a few other exhibitions and competitions recently, but I’m not expecting to hear back from most of those until November.

Alphabet Superset

If you’ve seen the recent illustrations of my time as an angel, the bat that lived on my street growing up, or my experience with charity shops, then perhaps you noticed that those topics begin with A, B, then C. That’s not a coincidence. I’ve been taking part in a project called Alphabet Superset where you create something each week on a topic beginning with each letter of the alphabet.

The idea is to set some parameters up front, the category and format of your output (in my case, A4 picture book spread style colour illustration based on my childhood memories. But it could be anything in any media) and then each week you create something around a topic that begins with the current letter of the alphabet. At the end of the alphabet you should have a solid and coherent body of work. I’m always meaning to update my portfolio and wanted to document some childhood memories so this seemed a nice way to combine them.

E is for Escalator. Alphabet Superset illustration based on a childhood memory — E is for Escalator

I’m up to E and so far this is my favourite. We would do our weekly shop in Keighley Morrisons, which had an escalator down to the basement. Hardly anyone actually shopped down there. I think it had some bits of Tupperware and maybe a year round Christmas section. So my brother and I would play on them while our mum went shopping. They were the type without stairs that you can take trolleys on and I mostly remember running up the down escalator pretending we were on Gladiators.

Prints

After a request, I had some prints made of my Aughost illustrations. I also had cards printed at the same time. I have loads… should probably finally get around to adding a shop to my website. Until then feel free to get in touch if you want to buy any.

Dolls House Miniatures

I took a couple of weeks off illustration and instead poured my creative energy into making some 1:12 scale dolls house miniatures from everyday things. It was lots of fun and I’ll carry on until the dolls house shelf thing we have is fully kitted out.