Anniversary Card 2014

To celebrate our "anniversary" (which we call Star Heart Day - how magical-sounding) last week, I made my boyfriend a tattoo-ed bum card.
My apologies if any of these pictures offend anyone...

Initial sketch of bum card:

Blue Peter's Tortoise in the Tower

Splinter Design has recently finished work on a game for Blue Peter! I had the privilege of developing a visual style for the game and illustrating all the various assets needed for it. It was a lot of fun to work on and definitely a new experience for me!

The game focusses on one of Blue Peter's favourite mascots - Shelley the Tortoise! Shelley the Tortoise is trapped in the tower and we've got to rescue her! The player matches tiles (similar to Candy Crush and games of that like) to progress through a level. An adventure bar at the top of the screen shows your progress and also what obstacles you need to defeat to complete a level.

This is the adventure bar at the top of the screen.

And here are some close-ups of the adventure bar so you can see in more detail some of the obstacles a player has to face!

There were a couple of animation frames I made for each obstacle...

It was interesting to think up of a new character style create their various walk cycles and such.

You can actually go and play the Blue Peter game over here: Blue Peter's Tortoise in the Tower

And rather excitingly, the game had a little feature on the ACTUAL Blue Peter TV Show showing all the presenters having a go on the telly! Which is pretty awesome...

So thar we go! Fun project in which I have now acquired a love for tortoises! Wa-hey!

Watercolour Ducks

I have been so busy tinkering away at making some new sets of Christmas cards that I forgot to put up these watercolours I did of some snazzy ducks:

I rather like ducks and so decided to draw some. I shall be putting these original watercolours up on to my Etsy shop in the next couple of weeks - along with a couple of new products! Exciting!

Meanwhile, heres a few more photos of those ducks...

The Coffee Table Book of Doom

Whilst meandering through a cosy little book shop during my holidays in the Lake District the other week, I came across this book:

It is called 'The Coffee Table Book of Doom', and is written by Art Lester and illustrated by Steven Appleby.

I have come across Appleby's work in the past (during my uni days), but this is the first time I've really taken a good look at his work and I decided... that I liked it!

The humour, style and busy-ness of his work is something that appeals to me rather a lot.

The general subject matter of the book makes for some interesting reading, the depressing notion of the various methods in which the extinction of the human race could come about is uplifted by the author's down-to-earth, humourous approach and Appleby's light-hearted illustrations - reminding us not to take everything too seriously, life is short... no really, it is! Read this book and you'll see!