Hey everyone! I hope your year has been good so far. We’re about a quarter of the way into 2012 so I thought it was high time for an update, especially since the skies are brightening up and I’ll be an even lazier blogger when summer arrives to coax me from my hibernation-hollow.

Looking back to Christmas, I completed the 2011 Jenkins Marine Christmas card. I started working for these guys in my last year of university, when we were set a professional practice project and had to bag ourselves some real clients for the first time. Since then it’s become a weird but wonderful Christmas tradition to illustrate a tug or a barge or a dredger and produce a nautical yet festive illustration for their annual card. Thankfully I was brought up in a little fishing town and as a kid I used to draw the boats in the harbour, so I have plenty of experience when it comes to maritime doodles!

I also took some time out for personal work and designed a Christmas card of my own. Entitled The First Supper, it is a loving parody of The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. This was also featured on Illustration Rally’s Christmas Rally, which was pretty cool.

Aside from the Christmas stuff, I’ve been doing some more work for Lesa at I Heart Buttons. She wanted a sign to promote her new shop in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, where she sells many pretty things from button bouquets to vintage Betty Boop memorabilia. I thought it would be a nice idea to combine those two things on the sign with an illustration of Betty holding a button bouquet, and we were really happy with how it turned out.

It was also nice to be able to go and see a physical manifestation of my work, happily doing its’ job on Union street outside the I Heart Buttons Shop. I’m so used to only seeing my work on a screen that it comes as a surprise whenever I encounter it somewhere else!

You might also notice a new addition to the Illustration Booth; a stranger lurking in the navigation menus, an inauspicious cash register clacking away on the sidebar to herald a new arrival. You’ve guessed it, the shop is open! Don’t get too excited though, put your pocket money away – I know you’re mega keen for a spending spree but there isn’t much to buy at the moment. The main reason that I built the shop is because I’ve had quite a few people contact me asking for prints, and I want to make it easy for anyone who wants a print in future.

The shop provides a simple way to buy and pay using PayPal, which is one of the safest and most efficient ways to buy online, and I’ll occasionally add new products such as new prints and canvases, original doodles, zines, cards, badges, stickers and other fun stuff. I’m also open to requests, so if there’s a particular illustration that you would like to own in print I would be more than happy to accommodate.

Until next time, thanks for reading and have fun exploring the shop!

Hi everyone, I hope you had a nice Christmas! As we’re officially languishing in the festive anticlimax zone I thought I’d take the opportunity to conclude this series of retrospectives before the rekindled excitement and increased alcohol consumption of new years eve gets in the way. After all it would seem a shame to have to revisit this old ground in a new year, when there are so many new ideas, designs and opportunities to rattle on about.

It’s September 2011 and the new website I’ve been agonising over for months is almost complete. It took a while because up until this point I had basically been cheating, using a template-based website builder to create my online presence quickly and easily without having to write any code. Consequently, I had to teach myself the basics of  HTML, CSS, Javascript and enough PHP to integrate a WordPress blog before I could begin. Quite an effort you might think, but curiosity will do that to you. I never liked having a website that I didn’t build myself because I didn’t understand how it worked or how to fix it if something got broken, not to mention the fact that I was always constrained within a boxy template of someone else’s creation.

It may have taken months, but my curiosity is satisfied, I know my new site intimately and gained a great deal of technical knowledge that can be applied to other projects in the future. If you haven’t checked out the rest of the site yet, there’s plenty to see so feel free to amble around at your leisure. There’ll be some new work in the gallery later this week, and I’ll be adding a little gift shop in the new year, stocked with prints and other illustrated shinies™

Okay now a warning, the remainder of this blog is wedding related so if you’re the kind of bloke/sane woman whose brain shuts down the moment a female mentions anything even slightly matrimonial, you may want to click that little x in the top-right now. For those who are still with me, we’ve reached November and I’ve just finished a brochure for a certain Isle Of Wight Wedding Photographer called Chris Cowley. Chris wanted to showcase some of his work to prospective clients, so I came up with this clean and elegant design to match his existing website and branding. Click on the image to see more, or follow the link above if you’re in need of an excellent photographer for your wedding – I really can’t recommend him highly enough.

Following on from this in December, I was also approached by a nice lady named Lesa from I Heart Buttons. Lesa makes lovely vintage button bouquets for weddings and beautifully unique jewellery and decorations for all occasions, and she was in need of an advertisement for her company, again to harmonise with existing branding and showcase her work – I only hope that I did it justice! Make sure you check her site out, especially if you’re planning a wedding and looking for a creative, original bouquet that will last a lifetime.

So that brings us right back up to date in December 2011, armed with a few more unrealistic resolutions and ready to embark upon a new year. I’m not sure how 2011 was for you, but it certainly wasn’t my favourite of the 26.41 years I’ve experienced so far. I certainly learned a lot, tried new things and hit a few snakes and ladders along the way – but I can’t deny that 2011 has been a melancholy orbit. We’ve had tsunamis, natural and nuclear tragedies, protests, strikes and economical disasters, civil war, dead dictators and mad men running around with guns, not to mention Frankie Cocozza and the fact that Jedward are still breathing. Add to that a few sources of personal sadness, and the new year becomes a very attractive prospect. With so much room for improvement, this is a year for positivity.

My resolution is simply to make 2012 a happy year, and I plan on sticking to it.

It’s June 2011 and I’m re-adjusting to freelance life. If you’re wondering what the life of a freelance illustrator is like, I can give you a rough idea by describing my daily routine. The goal is to stick to normal business hours so that I’m available to answer calls or emails from anyone who works the nine to five. The reality however, is that I find myself starting work between eight and eleven and working until midnight or beyond with two short breaks for lunch and dinner that often have to be enforced by my better half. I just can’t help myself, I’m good at meeting deadlines so I don’t need to work all day but once I start something my mind won’t sleep until it’s finished. I have a stubborn and grumpy cerebral cortex, I have to keep it happy.

If I’m not working on a piece for a client I’ll work on personal projects, follow tutorials , research, learn, try new software and techniques, shamefully self-promote, read something interesting or write something uninteresting to stay busy. Weekends are the same, which is probably not healthy and the main reason why I’ll eventually need to rent some studio space and confine myself to more sociable hours. Being your own boss is a strange experience and not for everyone, but despite the work-life imbalance and occasional bout of abject poverty, I really quite like it.

Anyway I get an email from a friend of mine who makes and sells screen-printed merchandise; shirts bags and that kind of thing. He asked if I would like to contribute a design to his range and I thought it would be a nice way to get back on the wagon without having to worry about serious deadlines. I came up with this huggable, hairy character to be printed on a cushion cover – because everyone likes to cuddle a cushion right?

Next up came a request from my friend Maria of Bubble Fusion who wanted a logo and character design to encapsulate her brand. I came up a rainbow-inspired logo and this slightly sinister yet strangely alluring unicorn; cute and colourful with a twist. If you’re a fan of awesome, colourful things then check out the Bubble Fusion Facebook Fan Page and Etsy Shop where you can browse and buy Maria’s work.

This brings me nearly up to date, in early Autumn 2011 where I’ll pick up from in the fourth and final instalment. Before I go, here’s a final reminder to get those presents wrapped and the turkey out to thaw – you don’t want to spend Christmas day tangled in sellotape, defrosting the old bird with a hairdryer and sobbing into the tinsel while everyone else is happily snoozing to the sound of her majesty’s annual lullaby.

In june 2010, deciding that I needed some experience in a real business environment I went along to my first job interview since graduating almost a year before. I didn’t know much about the company I had applied to, other that the fact that they made eco friendly clothing and were offering a six month online marketing placement under the now sadly defunct Future Jobs Fund. Shortly before the interview I realised that my interviewers were to appear on an episode of The Naked Office later that same evening. Let’s be honest, I was scared.

It turned out that, behind all that environmentally friendly attire and nude frolicking, were two brothers who had built the business up from scratch and were expanding to make jobs for unemployed young people on the Isle of Wight. To cut a long story short; I moved from Online Marketing to Operations Management after a few months, stayed on for a little while beyond my initial contract and probably learned more that year than I did during three years at university – without racking up an enormous student debt!

I say this not to devalue my degree, but to emphasize the value of working at the core of a real-life, rapidly-growing business with supportive and knowledgeable mentors at the helm. I didn’t realise how little I knew until I joined Rapanui, and I will always be thankful for the experience and the knowledge I took away from it.

Aware of my interest in design, Rapanui’s creative director gave me the opportunity to collaborate on a number of creative projects alongside my marketing and operations work. I had a great time working with him on all sorts of things from packaging and product design to animation, including the examples below.

I’m happy to report that Rapanui are bigger, better and more sustainable than ever, and will be opening their first high street retail store in Sandown this year so if you’re interested in fashion or passionate about the environment I recommend paying them a visit. If you’re more of a virtual shopper, check out their website instead and stay up to date with all the latest news on Facebook or Twitter.

I didn’t have a lot of time to work on freelance projects that year, but I did help a friend with some branding for his new business, Overhaul Security. Plus, I couldn’t turn down an invite to take part in Illustration Rally’s European countries themed rally, in which the participants were randomly allocated a country and asked to create an illustration based on it. I got France, which is a galling prospect for any Englishman, but I did my best and came up with an illustration inspired by the French flag. I also wrote a short artist feature for the Rally, which can be found here if you need to read a bit more twaddle.

And with that, we arrive in early summer 2011, a freelancer again with a website to redesign. More about that in part three, thanks for reading!