Stormy ocean picture book spread

Here’s my latest picture book spread for my portfolio! It came a bit out of nowhere after I little light bulb went off in my head, whilst looking at two older pieces of art… let me take you to the very beginning. Quite a few months ago now I made a pair of ocean themed collages for a top tier Patreon member. These were two separate pieces made a month apart which, were meant to be in a matching set. As with everything I make, I start with a sketch. Sometimes a sketch ends up getting quite detailed, and others its the quickest little scribble if I already have a clear vision in my mind!

Here’s the process pictures of the boat and tentacle piece which I made first. I painted enough textures to last a very long time, using a mixture of dry brushing, sponges and splattering to create the look of splashing waves.

Above is my first attempt at the collage, and goodness me its rough! I don’t really know what I’m looking at truth be told, but I remember being so frustrated with it, I started again. I often say with collage it will look bad before it looks good, but on very few occasions I do just have to admit defeat and try again!

With a fresh base, this time working landscape instead of portrait, it came together much better, as I had the space lengthways to build in the wave. I built in my main big shapes first and gradually piece by piece slotted in all the extra swirls, which really create the feeling of a stormy sea.

Here are the process pictures of the whale piece coming together a month later! I wanted this piece to clearly match the last so I used textures cut from the same paper and kept refering back to the original boat piece.

For the whale in this piece I traced my initial sketch, which I used as a template to make the final whale. What I love about using tracing paper, Is it’s transparency so I can place it on top of a texture to see if it fits the shape nicely before I cut it!

The two finished illustrations

After the two pieces were finished, I made another turtle piece to make the set into a trio and that was it… or so I thought! I was recently updating my website when I accidentally placed the two pieces really close together (similar to what you see above this text, for those reading on a laptop) and a lightbulb went off. I realised the top of the ocean on the right of the whale piece, almost perfectly lined up with the wave in the big boat piece - now that was a happy accident. Curiosity took the better of me, and I quickly pieced the two together in Photoshop. I had to do a little bit of work to get the two to seamlessly match, but I was very pleased with this experiment!

I left it at that for a while, until a few days later another idea popped in to my head… what if I made it in to a picture book spread? It wouldn’t require too much time and I had already done the hard part of making the art! So I mocked up a very rough plan and got to work scanning in extra textures and painting stormy clouds.

The piece required quite a bit of re working as I realised I needed to extend all edges of the piece to create space in the middle join for an imaginary margin. For picture books you never want to put too much of the important stuff right in the middle of the image, as if it was a real book it could get lost in the margin (of course I know this book isn’t real, but its still good practice to keep these things in mind). I ripped up a piece of textured paper which I scanned in too and used to create a bit of interest in the background and spent a while finding the best cloud layout which was a bit tricky!

And there you have it, thats how I took two separate existing pieces of art, and turned them in to one picture book spread! I’m so pleased with the outcome and it makes a lovely addition to the portfolio!

Hand making all my Christmas decorations

I spent 2 and a half weeks hand making all my Christmas decorations! Why? Because I was on TV! I was on the 2024 series of Christie’s Handmade Christmas which is a Christmas based craft competition show, for those not familiar. So how did this all come about you may be thinking? I applied back in August after I got an email from a craft market organiser I follow, saying applications are open. I didn't expect much to come from it but I filled out the form and applied. I just assumed my work was too illustration heavy and not crafty enough for the show, but It was worth a try! Anyways, good job I did because the following day I got a phone call asking me all about my ideas for the show. I was very flustered and basically came up with everything on the spot - I have no idea what I even said! I must have said something right because I got another phone call the next day saying I was through to the next stage of the casting process (there were quite a few stages!) 

Eventually I had to submit a design document with a detailed plan of what I would make for the two shows (the christmas tree decorating show and if I won that and got through to the final, a table centre piece) I put my best foot forward and spent a couple of days putting these plans together and sent them off. They said If we hadn't heard back from them in three weeks, you didn't make it through to the show, and with the three week deadline having passed I just assumed I didn't get it. At the time I thought it was probably for the best as I was busy enough running my shop and doing freelance jobs, no way could I also hand make enough decorations to fill a whole tree. 

Anyway a few days after the deadline, I got a phone call saying I was on the show which I couldn't quite believe! The next two and a half weeks are probably the hardest I've ever worked on something (maybe excluding my final year uni project). From waking up to going to sleep, I did nothing but make collaged tree decorations! Then for the last three days of the deadline I made a 3D paper collage owl to use If I made it to the final. All of this probably couldn't have come at a worse time as I was also going to be moving out of my family home in Manchester and moving to Oxford to live with my boyfriend at the end of the month! It was a very stressful time indeed.

What did I make?

To start off I began with my present filled steam train! Almost all my decorations were entirely made from recycled card (from things like cereal boxes) and hand painted printer paper using acrylic paint. I also used a lot of foraged elements to give everything a woodland feel, like acorn tops, pine cones and twigs. Here is a bunch of train process pictures!

I used my favourite wood making technique which is dry brushing paper and cutting it into thin strips. I like to rip little bits out of the strips to mimic knots in the wood, and stick the strips to a dark background with little gaps between them. It’s very effective, but very time consuming!

Adding on all the lovely foraged elements. Acorn tops as wheels and twigs to hold up the roof and railing.

The finished train (well, its missing the mice!)

I wanted my tree to be filled with as many different modes of transport as I could make, to show all the different ways the mice deliver present, with the hot air balloons being next on my list. These were made by cutting out hundreds of balloon shapes and painting each one either pink, green or red - I even added gold leaf to some! These all got folded in half and glued together to form a hot air balloon. Then I made the basket out of card covered in painted paper, and attached it to the balloon using twine. The baskets eventually got filled with mice and presents, with some having ladders hanging from them.

Making some smaller decorations

Making my mice

With the deadline very quickly approaching, I had one more day left in the schedule to finish my tree decorations, and I left the most important part till last - adding on all my mice. I drew, cut out, and painted over 50 mice using my HIMI gouache set, and one by one stuck on over 100 ears. This went on very late in to the night, but what a difference It made to the decorations. It filled them with so much charm and character!

A selection of my favourite finished decorations

I made candy canes from sticks cut at an angle and glued back together to create that signature curve. Then I painted them with lovely uneven stripes, making sure part of the stick was showing through. I wanted it to have a very organic hand crafted feel… which is basically a way of getting away with any messy bits!

After two and a half weeks of my room looking like a Christmas bomb had hit it, my decorations were complete and I just had to hope and prey I had enough to fill a tree. I then moved straight on to making a paper owl to use as a table centre piece (incase I got through to the final of the show), but more on that soon.

Finally at the start of October, and one day after moving house, I had to travel all the way to Scotland on the train with a suitcase full of paper ornaments and pinecones to start filming. The whole filming thing was kind of exactly how it is on TV except there's a lot more takes. I think we had to walk through a door about 10 times until they got the right shot! Day one went pretty smoothly and I got through to the final! I then had to spend the next two days in a hotel frantically prepping for it. Then I did the whole thing again with another set of lovely contestants, this time decorating a table and not a tree. Everyone in both rounds were so skilled at what they did, and each of our builds couldn't have been more different. From printmaking, pottery, wood carving, crochet, flower arrangements, every craft was represented. A very talented wood carver won the whole show but I'm very proud of what I achieved

First, lets look at the finished tree! I had a suspicion the tree provided would be very large, having watched previous episodes of the show, and I wasn’t wrong. I would have loved for the tree to be a lot fuller and densely packed, but there was nothing more I could have done. Luckily I had enough to just about fill the tree enough to be acceptable… although the back was very bare!

Here’s what the decorations look like on my much smaller 5ft tree. This is the original vision I had and I absolutely love how it looks! How many people can say say the have a completely hand made Christmas tree! I’m very proud of it. The only issue is, I don’t want to take it down.

Like previously mentioned, I also had to make a 3D paper owl for the final, which would be a table decorating competition. I didn’t want to spend too much time on it as there was only a 1 in 4 chance I would even get through, so I set aside three days to make it. The base of the body was made from recycled packaging foam cut down to size and the wings were made from thick card. Everything then got covered in collage.

Heres the finished table layout from the final of the competition. I also made a few of my Robins which I had already designed from a previous project (I just had to print them out an construct them). As well as the centre piece, I had to hand make my napkin holders, crackers and name placements, which was as last minute as you could get really! I came up with those the night before in the hotel.

And there you have it, thats my entire experience from applying, to making and to filming in a nut shell! If you want to hear more, and see extra behind the scenes, this is the video for you. And if you would like to watch the show heres a link: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/kirsties-handmade-christmas I’m on episode 1 and 5 of the 2024 series.

Thanks for stopping by!

Autumn collage

I got well and truly bitten by the autumn bug last month and made almost exclusively orange leaf filled art for the entirety of October, with these two pieces being my autumn magnum opus! I made these two pieces with the intention of turning them in to prints for an up and coming shop update, so the pressure was on to do a good job - the bar is high if your a piece of art with dreams of being a print in this town. So, like most of my art, I started with a mood board. Nothing gets the creative juices flowing like a mood board jam-packed with beautiful colour and textures, little did I know the paper painting challenge which lied ahead…

I quickly sketched out my favourite shapes and did two of the loosest thumbnails, before moving on to painting my paper. I have been known to fill pages with loads of thumbnails filled with different composition ideas, but with these I knew the freedom of being able to move my collaged papers around, before sticking down, would give me a lot of room to play with the composition when It came to the final illustration.

Let the paper painting being

I went in to this painting session determined to do my mood board justice. The success of a collage greatly depends on the quality of the paper you’ve painted going into it. No use trying to collage a pumpkin when your paper is off to begin with, no amount of cutting and glueing is going to fix that issue (trust me, I’ve been there), so I needed to use every trick in my book. Here’s what I did:

Tools

These are all the tools I typically use when painting paper. I do test out different tools every now and then, but these are the techniques I repeatedly go back to.

• A big brush which holds a lot of water

• An old ratty smaller brush with very splayed bristles (good for splattering and dry brushing)

• An old cut up sponge

• A card (credit card material)

• A glossy piece of paper (I use the back of a postage label, something which repels water slightly.)

Reference image

Technique

End product

This makes a very good pumpkin texture: Paint one sheet orange with red splatters and let dry, paint another sheet green with lots of paint and sandwich the two together whilst the green is still wet, then peel them apart.

Reference image

Technique

Add some paint to the glossy side of a piece of paper (plastic packaging would work as well) then stamp it on to an already painted sheet. You can run your nails along it to create patterns and peal it off. You can get very different results with this depending on the thickness of the paint and how much you pressed it down.

End product

Reference image

End products

For this texture I painted a sheet with yellow and splattered it with various colours. Once dry I added paint the the edge of a sponge and stamped it on to the paper for the first picture. In the second picture I used the credit card to stamp thin lines.

Here are a bunch of examples of the textures I painted, next to the reference image which inspired them.

Reference image

End product

Lets start cutting!

With my textures painted, I moved on to cutting out my shapes. Because I was so thorough in the painting stage, I had a lot of good paper to choose from, making the collage process much smoother. I had all the colours and textures I needed to make a lovely collage all laid out in front of me, so no need to spend ages searching through folders looking for a piece of paper which might not even exist! At this point I wasn’t thinking much about the composition of the piece, and just about the individual elements, cutting out all my shapes first, without a glue stick in sight (well, other than when I was sticking on all the veins on the leaves) This way I could play with the composition without having to commit to anything - one of collages many pro’s.

After I had my leaves all sorted, I moved on to the mushrooms and began sticking all my individual elements down.

One down one more to go

With my leaf piece out of the way, It was time for the main event - the pumpkins! I tackled this illustration in a very similar way to the first, so not much else to repot here!

After a whole week of work, both pieces were done and I couldn’t be more pleased with them. They have so much potential too! With the background being white, theres a lot of room to play around with the individual elements for different product Ideas. I can picture them being a repeat pattern for wrapping paper, or wall paper. I might even turn them In to a mock book cover for a gardening book!

This even inspired a set of smaller collages!

Seagull collage

This piece was full of highs, lows and everything in between! It started out as quite a simple idea inspired by a photo I took last year of two seagulls on a rock with houses behind. This would make for a nice collage I thought, and with a deadline looming for when this piece of art needed to be completed I jumped straight on to Pinterest to gather more pictures for a mood board and began quickly scribbling down very rough thumbnails.

I really wanted the main seagull in the piece to be the brown patterned one in the photo I had taken - that amount of texture is just begging to be collaged! I realised I would have to change the composition of the image a lot to have it work in collage as the bird could very easily get lost on top of all that rocky texture, so the plan went as follows: in the background with a few mountains and little houses, sea in the mid ground creating a blue background for the seagull to pop on top of in the foreground, oh and have the bird looking after its eggs… lovely, a little bit of story telling. Little did I know the flaw in my plan!

Unaware of the issue with this concept I chugged along with the usual routine, painting paper, trying to get really specific textures to use on the seagull, and cutting out some rough shapes.

It was at this point I was hit with the dreaded art block, or maybe I was just on the edge of art block? Either way, creating this bird felt like an impossible task. Collage at the best of times is a slow process, so collage in the middle of feeling like every creative bone in your body had shrivelled up into little raisins is miserable! Now I know, I’m being very dramatic, but with a deadline looming (with this piece being the main focus of a sponsored Youtube video) I was feeling very defeated. Then the penny dropped, I realised the bird I was collaging was in fact a juvenile seagull, and wouldn’t have eggs. My idea was flawed and not only that I hated the way it looked!

Now I am usually the type of person who pushes through the ugly stage of a piece of art with the hope it will start to look nice with a bit more time - trust the process and all that. But I really don’t think there was any saving this one and I knew it was time to give up. With a whole day wasted, I went to bed one sad and annoyed girl. I knew I needed to come up with a better concept, so the following day I made a new mood board, still seagull focused but with a lot more movement.

Still feeling extremely creatively drained I managed to pull this sketch off which felt like a huge win after the disaster from the day before. This time I took my time with the sketching process (unlike my first idea which I rushed) and popped together a quick colour mock using photoshop. Pleased with my plan I moved on to paper painting.

With around 15 sheets of various ocean based textures made, I moved on to the final piece. I spent hours trying to make this collage work traditionally, which unfortunately I don’t have any photos of. I was very deep in the ‘I hate art’ frame of mind and when I get like this, the last thing on my mind is taking a picture. But trust me your not missing out on much! So another day had passed with not much to show for it, but hey at least I did a nice sketch. I went to bed tossing and turning, trying to solve the art puzzle in my mind - how on earth can I bring what I have in my head to life. The answer was photoshop! There are some ideas which are nearly impossible to make traditionally, so having the freedom to edit textures, resize, reshape and everything else photoshop has to offer can open up so many more artistic potential. But It wasn’t going to be easy!

So, three days in and now on my third attempt at making art I was getting very desperate. As soon as I woke up I was straight in to the art room scanning the textures I had painted and cut up the day before, to piece together on photoshop.

I even ripped up paper and photographed it, so I could take advantage of that lovely ripped edge to give my edited paper a more realistic look. For the three main birds in the piece, I collaged them traditionally as trying to make something as intricate as these on photoshop would have been a nightmare!

As for the rest of the birds, I painted them in watercolour. I knew I wanted the piece to be filled with birds but if I collaged them all to the same level of detail as the ones above, it would be way to busy. Instead I opted for outlines and silhouettes of birds which I scanned in and edited to create the look of a busy overlapping bird filled sky, without taking away from the focal point of the main seagull.

I spent three days on photoshop piecing together this digital collage, and let me tell you, it was a very slow and tedious process with many, MANY layers, but I got there in the end. When I first finished this piece, I was very on the fence about it, but not sure if I even liked what I had spent the past five days trying to make. But having had some time away from it, and with some fresh eyes, I’m pretty pleased with it, and I would even go as far to say I like it! So there you go, I hope this blog post goes to show that art doesn’t always go as smoothly as it seems, but with a bit of time it always manages to get there. It’s okay to start again If something isn’t working out. Art is just one big puzzle, and we’re the people trying to solve it no matter how many attempts it takes.

Big boat collage

Ahhh here it is, the cherry on of my papery cupcake. The collage of all collages to complete my shop update and add to my collection of lovely beach themed prints. For those who have no idea what I’m waffling on about, I made this collage with quite the weight on my shoulders. This needed to turn out good so I could turn it in to a print for my fast approaching shop update, so the pressure was on with this one. As per usual my ideas start from humble beginnings, a few simple sketches. I’ve been wanting to collage a big detailed boat for a while now, having only ever collaged very small simplified ones in the past like the ones below.

After a few attempts I drew a boat I was very pleased with and I instantly knew it would make for a lovely collage. There are somethings which are really suited to being recreated in cut paper and boats are one of them! So many rusty textures and little details to sink your teeth in to.

With a successful sketching session under my belt, a mood board consisting of two pictures and a head full of ideas, I was ready to move on to the next stage - painting paper. For this I was determined to get creative with my mark making to best mimic the worn aged look of the boats. Layering up my paints and really taking my time with what I was doing. I’ve often said this stage in the process should be quick, you just turn your brain off and splatter paint around, but recently I’ve been taking a much more considered approach. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still very loose with how I work, but I’m trying to be more thoughtful with how I’m making my textures, being more specific and picky with the purpose for each piece of paper, like the sheet below which I wanted to look like the sea foaming up on the shore.

Painting a loose gradient from light to dark and layering splatters on top.

Going in with a sponge to add a foam like texture with the darker blue.

Using the lid of a glue stick to stamp white circles in to the blue, to mimic the sea hitting the beach

With my textures finished, I moved on to making the boat. I started by outlining my sketch of the boat on the tracing paper to give myself a guide to work to. The majority of the time I cut out shapes just by eye, but when I need the paper to be a really specific shape, I find this technique saves me a lot of trail and error. Because tracing paper is see through, I can place the shape on top of all my sheets to test out what textures would look best before committing to cutting them out. Quite the helpful little trick!

Adding on details and gradually building up the shape of the boat.

After many hours (6 if I remember right) the boat was complete and I was feeling very positive about the direction this collage was headed. To be honest for the first 4 hours of making this piece, I thought it was awful! But as hard as it is, you just have to trust the process and once I began to add the cute little details it starts to look a lot better very quickly. You would not believe the power of a little red ring. It took the collage from questionable to ‘this has potential’ with just one piece of paper.

After I was happy with my boat, I moved on to the beach which came quite easily - a miracle considering I was making it up entirely from my head. Every now and then with collage, the stars aline (or should I say paper alines) and everything just slots together and looks good without much trial and error which was a relief considering the boat was quite the opposite!

Adding on the finishing touches

And here it is, the finished piece in all its glory! As per usual this piece went through the usual highs and lows of every collage, but I suppose I’m very used to that at this point. It’s not an Emily collage without a bit of struggle sprinkled in there. I always get there in the end though and I couldn’t be more pleased with it - In fact I’d go as far to say its my best collage yet!

Thanks for reading,

Emily :)

A Guide to Growing book cover

Here’s the story about how two different pieces of art were accidentally perfect to turn into a book cover! I started this project with only one goal in mind - making art specifically to turn into prints for my art business. For a while I’ve been wanting to tackle the world of veg but it was something which kept getting pushed to the bottom of the to do list. That is until my lovely top tier Patreon member (who gets an original collage every month) requested I made a collage inspired by seed packets. This was it! My opportunity to pull the long lost vegetable idea from the depths of my potential future art pile. So I began by making a mood board of all things gardening and veg related, at this point not really knowing what I would end up making. I filled a page with the objects which caught me eye the most, and even started to make up my own seed packets which I instantly loved.

With the success of my sketching session under my belt, I felt confident enough to paint my textures and start winging a finished piece, confident I could come up with the composition once I had all the shapes cut out. When painting my textures, I was directly referring to my mood board of veg to really hone in on the colours and specific mark making techniques which would best represent each vegetable I was mimicking. Because the shapes of vegetables for the most part are pretty nondescript, just a bunch of round blobs and spiky blobs, I really wanted to nail the textures in order to give them clear defining features.

With my paper painted (around 20 sheets) it was time to begin collage number one. A small A6 piece inspired by a seed packet.

I found it easiest to pre cut out a few vegetable options, finding the best texture nuggets on my paper, and cutting it out into a wonky pointy circle. This way I could play around with placement and swap and change until I had something I liked. This did mean I ended up cutting out many many shapes which didn’t get used, but that’s the collage way unfortunately! Nothing goes to waste of course, I’m sure they’ll end up being used up in a piece down the line.

Happy with my little A6 collage, I packed it up and sent it off to its new home, knowing I had a much bigger piece to tackle next! I wanted to offer an A4 veg collage print in my shop, so I got working on a more detailed piece, but this time jam packed with veggies, all overlapping and bunched together. Let the hours of moving circles around commence!

I began this piece much like the last, by cutting out most of my rough shapes first. I played around with potential placements for a few hours, discarding shapes which weren’t working, cutting out new ones, then realising what I had originally was good. Trimming and tweaking again and again. It’s a simple process but it sure is slow!

Eventually my patience paid off and it started to look kind of good. Good enough that I began to finally stick some paper down. I found it looked best when I grouped together my veg in to small shapes and big shapes, adding a bit of uniform to the piece while still keeping it nice and loose. I also made sure to keep my biggest shapes along the outer edge, to frame the smaller shapes inside which made for a nice composition.

With both pieces of art made, a little gem of an idea popped in to my head. What if I turned these into a cover for a book about growing vegetables! So how did I turn two separate art prints in to one cohesive cover?

I began by painting, you guessed it, another piece of collage paper, this time knowing I would be scanning it in and working with it digitally. After a few colour tweaks and rearranging, this became the backdrop to my veggies, because nothing screams gardening quite like a whole lot of dirt! For the title I originally pictured it being embossed gold, so tried to mimic this through my pretty limited editing skills. While I still stand by the idea, I had to be realistic with I was able to make, and gold embossing is not a skill I know how to do, nor have the equipment for - time for plan B.

I traced my chosen font on to a piece of paper and painted it in water colour, being purposely wobbly with my lines to give the font a softer hand make look to better fit my style of illustration. For the back, I repurposed the veg and seed packed in the first collage I worked on, cutting out the individual elements to create a frame around the cover. Play the video below to see me piece together the finished book cover!

I also whipped up a quick end page too, by re arranging my favourite pieces of veg.

Finally, to finish my dabble into gardening books, I printed off my cover and stuck it to an existing book so I could get these lovely photos. Just don’t look any further than one page into the book or you’ll be very confused to find the inside is all about Minecraft architecture! I could pull off quite the prank with this book to an unsuspecting member of public! I’m beyond happy with the cover and I think it will make a lovely addition to my portfolio.

Thanks for reading,

Emily :)

Soar & Swoop Book cover

Making this piece of art is the most fun I’ve felt creating in a long time! Thats not to say I haven’t enjoyed my previous projects, but I have found myself getting too precious with my art lately, like if I make any mistake it’s the worst thing that has ever happened and I’m a failure… a bit of an exaggeration! I knew my process needed a little shake up so I could get out of my overthinking cycle and this piece was exactly what I needed. Before starting, I studied Ema Malayuka’s illustration’s (studied sounds fancy, but really all I did was have a good instagram stalk). I’ve been a huge fan of her work for a long time and I’m forever in awe of what she makes. If you haven’t seen Ema’s art before I highly recommend checking it out, you really won’t be disappointed! Her work is the perfect combination of playful and loose but with an expert understanding of colour and composition. Being loose is something I always try to be but can never quite reach it, so for this piece I threw all expectations out the window and thought, ‘what would Ema do?’ How could I pull from her art and give it the Emily stamp.

For a while I’ve been wanting to make an illustration featuring murmuration in some way, so I took to my sketchbook to play around with how I could layer the birds together to create a big swoosh in the sky with lots of movement. Using a mix of loose outlines with the shaded bird shapes helped to make the feeling of a super busy scene with pretty minimal effort! I also played around with the idea of roof tops to frame to bottom of the piece, and with that the concept of was in place… I just have to plan it out now right? Ahh well that’s what I usually do, fill pages with thumbnails to find the best composition, plan out the colours digitally, spending hours figuring out where my lights and darks are gonna be. But not this time I say! If I want to be loose I should just start playing around with paint and see what happens. So with nothing but a sketch and a little mood board to off I began work.

At first It looked quite rough, but I persevered and after a bit of time… it still looked rough. So I started to play around with mixed media, switching between my watercolours, pencils, crayons and acrylic gouache to build up the details, and you know what, it still looked rough, but a good kind of rough, one which was playful and dare a say loose. I did it, I achieved loose!! As I started to add in the sky and the birds, I began to really like what I was making, and the best part, I was having fun. Genuine fun without a single worry that at any moment I could ruin the art, which is how I often feel. So, although the finished result had it’s flaws, It didn’t matter to me as I knew the illustration had a lot of potential.

This is the finished piece and I loved it, but I knew I could do better. Plus It didn’t feel like me, mainly because of the lack of collage, which is a staple of my art these days. So, I wanted to try again making sure to fix these few things:

• The church towers are too wonky and wide

• The rows of houses on the right look strange and the road doesn’t flow nicely

• The sketchy coutines of buildings behind the trees aren’t clear enough - they’re getting lost

• The pink section of the sky should be more of a statement

• The trees are a little too busy and taking attention away from the birds

• The swoops around the birds should feel more intentional and not like an after thought… which they were.

Okay, so not much then… I do like it, I promise!

I painted a few sheets of paper, as well as pulling from my extensive paper folder, which was enough to build my roof tops, as well as a few of the birds. This piece could be my most mixed media illustration to date, with the buildings being a mix of collage and watercolour and the sky being very watered down acrylic gouache. I worked into the piece using my Neocolour crayons and Polychromos pencils to build colour and add details. For those interested, the paper I used was the Blockingford hot press watercolour paper (this means it’s lovely and smooth which makes drawing on top with pencils easy).

This is the finished second attempt, which is a vast improvement if you ask me! The composition feels more balanced, the collage was a lovely addition, and the swirls in the sky make the piece more playful and cohesive as they match the branches in the trees. Great, I just have to edit it now.

I should probably mention I was making this illustration to turn into a book cover for an imaginary children’s book, hence the pretty empty space at the top of the image - I was saving that spot for the title. I painted the same words again and again until they were perfect, (the ‘&’ symbol will never not confuse me) and scanned them in, picking the best versions to take into the final.

I scanned in my final illustration and as you can see, the colours are completely faded, with the pink being basically invisible. This is down to my very old scanner which struggles to capture pale shades. So I took to photoshop to work the colour back in, as well as make some slight changes in the composition making the title fit nicer in the space.

After a few hours of playing I had the piece looking even better than the original with a few extra additions, mainly then little sun and the extra which lines to enhance the swooping motion in the piece. All that was left to do was adding in the writing and a spine to make it look like an official book cover.

Here’s the final piece and I couldn’t be happier with it! I love this mixed media approach and I want to continue working in this way moving forward. It’s also helped me realise that planning out a piece isn’t always necessary and by creating in the moment you can make something really successful. This doesn’t mean I’ll never plan out a piece again (I am a bit of a planning addict) but maybe I’ll plan a little less in the future and trust in my skills a bit more.

Thanks for reading,

Emily :)

Mouse parade

You know when you spend so long looking at a piece of art, you don't even know what looks good and what looks bad anymore… well thats how I feel about this piece! This is an illustration I made back in October 2023, but I feel it deserves it’s own blog post due to the sheer amount of work I put in to it. I learnt a lot with this piece, as this was the first time I had ever tried to merge my painted characters with a collaged environment, and I didn’t make it easy of my self either! ‘Ah yes, I can paint 19 characters and a whole background for them to inhabit, it will be fine!’ To put this into a bit more context, I made this piece for my children’s illustration portfolio, as a spread for a book I’m brainstorming. It took me three weeks to make… THREE WEEKS! So lets go from the start.

Back in summer 2023 I entered my mouse obsession. What started as a pretty mindless doodle session, quickly turned into the only thing I drew for weeks. A little seed of an idea pooped into my head about a mouse parade, and with that the marching band was born. I knew I wanted to do something a little more ambitious with these guys and pop them inside a whole scene, but the pressure of making such a complicated illustration meant it was an Idea I kept pushing further and further down the to do list.

Eventually, enough was enough; I couldn’t put this piece off any longer! So three months after the initial idea, I began drawing thumbnails. I had a pretty clear vision in mind for this piece so it didn’t take long for a composition to start taking shape, then It was just a case of refining my sketch and moving on to colour. This was easier said than done, as drawing all those little mice was a big task!

To test out the colours, I take a photo of my sketch and take it into photoshop. From there I’ll lower the opacity of the drawing so I can see just a faint outline, set the layer to multiply so it becomes transparent, and I can start adding colour underneath. I love to plan out the colours this way as it takes all the pressure away. I can fiddle with to my hearts content with every colour under the sun until I find the best combination.

With every thing planned, I moved on to making the final. This was extremely daunting as really I hadn’t a clue about how to approach this it. The only time I had very combined my collage with painted characters was on the piece above, which is very simple and doesn’t have any overlap between the two mediums. I was diving in to the unknown, and many mistakes were about to be made…

To begin, I painted loads of paper, being quite specific with the textures I was trying to create. I wanted there to be a wispiness to the background, to create a feeling of lots of layered grass blades, which gently merged into the path below. At first I tried to collage the background traditionally, spending hours attempting to perfectly jigsaw my pieces of paper together. But as I went on the more I realised that firstly, I didn’t have enough of certain textures, and secondly it was too harsh! This wasn’t the smooth, delicate background I had in mind. If I tried to edit my mice on top of this, they would get lost in amongst all the business!

So, after a brief wobble, I knew I needed to try a different approach. I had some really nice textures which showed promise so I scanned them in and began playing around with them on photoshop. This way I could seamlessly merge textures into each other, and push and pull shapes to fill the space I needed - It was starting to take shape.

I printed out my base background to traditionally collage into, as I wanted to make as much of the piece away from my laptop screen as possible. This did mean when I scanned the art back in and started working digitally again, I had to edit out the printed background and cut around every little detail. A tedious task but at least it meant I could edit the flowers separately from the background which gave me a lot of freedom to play around with lighting.

Once I had a collaged environment I was pleased with, I moved on to the huge task of painting the characters. To begin, I sketched out lots of mice and and brought them all together into photoshop where I could play around with the composition and placement, to get the best marching band formation. I then spent the next few days painting mouse after mouse, a very fiddle task when each mouse is about an inch big! For the mice I painted them in watercolour and added detail with coloured pencils and crayons. Then for the flowers I used collage.

Painting the characters, although time consuming, was a pretty simple task compared to the next step… joining everything together. This felt like I was running a photoshop marathon with no end in sight. I spent days trying to wrap my head around how to make these two medias sit alongside each other in a cohesive way. Shadows and lighting helped a lot with this step, but there was still so much adjusting which needed to be done to make sure the mice weren’t clashing with anything around them. In hindsight I should have painted the characters first and built the environment around them, I recon that would have saved at least a days worth of work. I pretty much had to re do the background a second time once the characters were in place.

I’m still not 100% certain if the two medias work together. This could be down to the fact that this was my first ever attempt at working like this, or it could be down to how different the two mediums look along side each other. I tried a similar technique a few months after making this piece which I think was much more successful; this time the difference being I used acrylic to paint the girl character as opposed to watercolour. I think this much better suites the collage texture, seen as they’re also painted in acrylic!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still extremely proud of this piece. I think the outcome, although not exactly what I was hoping for, Is fun and shows a lot of potential for where I can push my collage further. This piece ran so my crocodile illustration could fly - is that how the saying goes?! Making this taught me a lot, so for that, I am grateful I spent three weeks loosing my mind over it… well at least that what I keep trying to tell myself! Ahh the joys of art.

Thank you for reading,

Emily :)

Crocodile character sheet

Creating a character sheet is something I thought would be quite simple… it’s just a few poses, I can bash that out in a few days no problem. Little did I know the huge amount of work I was about to embark on! But first lets rewind a little, why did I decide to make this illustration in the first place? Prior to this, for the past few months I had been slowly chipping away at finishing my children’s illustration portfolio, working my way through the check list of things publishers look for. I had illustrated full scenes with characters inside, I had a wide range of colour palettes and moods in my pieces, and finally it was time to tackle the character sheet. Being able to see that you can successfully recreate the same character in different poses and have it consistently look the same, is something publishers are keen to see you have in your skill set. So this was it, the final illustration to complete the portfolio check list.

Before starting this sheet, I already had a hand full of crocodile sketches to pull from. These were the first crocs I had ever drawn, so they’re a little, well… bad. However, I quickly started to improve and find a style which worked well.

These were my next attempts which I was pleasantly surprised by, and with that my obsession with crocodiles was born! I then spent the next few days filling pages with these funny little creatures.

I decided the character sheet would look a little plain with just the crocodile, so I wanted to include his little buddy as well, this little girl (I haven’t decided on a name for her yet). Luckily, I had already illustrated these guys before inside a full scene, so a little bit of the character design process had already been figured out. I just had to make sure the girl on the sheet, matched the girl I had already painted.

With pages of sketches to choose from, It was time to pick which poses to turn in to final pieces, settling on the four above. I tried to pick a nice variety of poses: some close up, some full body, and from different angles, to best show off my skills. After figuring this out, I went back in to my sketchbook to properly figure out the positions and outfits of the little girl, as she had been a bit of an after thought.

After all that planning, it was time to move on to making the finals which ended up taking a whole week to put together! Luckily I already had a lot of crocodile textures painted from my previous illustration, so I had plenty of paper to choose from. Having said this, I was getting seriously low on my favourite textures, being left with the dregs after collaging the first two crocs. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you can’t make a good collage with bad paper! So as much as I didn’t want to, more paper had to be painted.

Before collaging the crocs, I traced a very faint outline of them on the paper first to give me a guide to work from. For really specific shapes like the bottom and top jaw which needed to slot together perfectly, I found it easiest to trace and cut out the shape first using tracing paper. This way I could cut out the perfect shape straight away, taking the guess work out. At first I was trying to eyeball it… but I quickly learned that was a very good way to waste paper.

With the crocodiles finished, I moved on to the girl which I was painting in acrylic. Even though the characters are made using two different techniques, I think they go together really nicely. Because I was trying to stay loose with the girl, I painted multiple versions of each pose to take the pressure off making something perfect, as trying to do that is a sure fire way to stiffen up! By painting multiple version, I was able to refine each pose with each attempt, while keeping my brush strokes loose and quick.

Here you can see how I’ve learnt from the mistakes of the first girl (on the left) and slightly altered my approach for my second try, changing the proportions to better suit the character.

When painting these, I knew I would have the power of photoshop to fix any mistakes. For instance on this girl, I forgot to leave a spot for the hand when I was painting the body. Instead of painting the whole thing again to fix such a minor issue, I painted a few different hand options on another page, which I just edited on afterwards, saving myself a lot of time!

This is another example of how I used photoshop to fix mistakes. I loved everything about the girl I had painted on the left, other than the small issue of messing up her arms; who knew it would be so difficult to paint arms folded!? So to fix this, I painted the body again, and performed a head transplant on photoshop.

Once I had finished all the different poses, I scanned everything in and began the editing process. On the left you can see the original scan. Whenever I scan anything in, particularly if it has a lot of light colours, it ends up looking quite washed out (this is probably because I have a VERY old scanner), which means I have to do a lot of colour correcting while editing. I also take the time to tweak anything which is bothering me: slightly fixing the proportions of the face, getting rid of any marks and dust you can see from the scanner, and just doing a general tidy!

Adding on the crocodile’s tutu!

The original scan

The final version

After a few hours of colour tweaking, re-positioning eyeballs, and cleaning up hair curls, the piece was finished, and with that so is my portfolio… well for now. My portfolio is something which will be constantly evolving, but at the moment I’m very happy for this piece to be a part of it, and hopefully I’ll be revisiting these characters in the future.

Thanks for reading

Emily :)

Crocodile disco

This is a piece which spent a long time coming! I came up with the concept of this illustration lying in bed at night, months before I even started the final. But all I knew at that point was I wanted a little girl and a crocodile to be interacting in some way… so a pretty vague idea, but an idea I was excited about nevertheless! I’ve been working on my children’s illustration portfolio for the past few months, but there was something missing, a piece which had characters as the main focal point. This is something I usually shy away from as I’ve always found it difficult to draw characters any bigger than a few inches, often opting to make the characters tiny inside a big detailed environment. Not any more I say! This time I would really push my self to make characters which were interesting enough to fill the whole piece.

So, I started like I start most of my big pieces these days, with an excessive amount of planning, firstly tackling the small issue of having no idea how to draw a crocodile. After a few failed attempts I started to get some pretty good looking crocodile designs. My aim was to exaggerate their shapes and fill them with as much texture as possible to bring out there scaly bumpy skin.

With the success of my crocs, I moved on to thumbnails. I went in to this with the vision of two things: I wanted the crocodile to frame the outer edge, and there should be a huge size difference between the characters. After a lot of rough sketches I landed on this as my favourite composition, as I loved the silly position of the croc and the fun interaction between the characters. Great, I have it all figured out… except theres no real story. I wanted there to be a reason for this interaction, why is this little girl lying on a crocodiles tail? After a bit of brain storming the idea hit me. What if they’re hiding under her bed sheets, and if they’re under the covers, should there be a light source? Thats it! A disco ball - it’s a crocodile disco!

After having my epiphany I moved on to planning out the colours on photoshop. This piece went through many variations as I attempted to draw what I thought the underside of a patch work quilt would look like, and eventually I settled on this. With my colours figured out it was time to move onto painting my paper.

When painting my papers I had one main focus, texture texture texture! I splattered, scraped, stamped, sponged and stippled my way through sheet after sheet, using any technique I could think of to create scaly looking marks.

Finally, after all that preparation, it was time to start the final artwork. I began with the crocodile, blocking out the main shapes and textures. This is always the slowest part of the process, as I move piece after piece until I find the perfect formation. I often compare collaging to building a jigsaw, but if there was an endless amount of pieces and you have no idea what the finished jigsaw will look like. This part can feel really defeating at times, as the sea of paper refuses to cooperate and slot together nicely, but you just have to give in to the process and trust in your skills. Eventually, as slow as it might be, the more you move paper around, the clearer the image becomes and decisions start being made. ‘Yes I think I will stick this piece of paper down!’

Once I had started to commit to my shapes and glue them down a crocodile began to form, and momentum picked up. It was starting to come together.

With my base shapes in place, I started to go in with the details which is the fun part; gluing on squares and bumps, and the best bit, using my crayons to draw on even more texture!

Then I moved on to painting the little girl. I opted to paint her as opposed to collage as I wanted to keep her loose, making sure to be quick with my marks and purposely messy. To stay loose, I painted multiple versions of the girl to take the pressure off making something perfect.

So I have my finished characters, now I just have to edit them together. This step wasn’t as simple as it sounds. I spent many days buried under photoshop layers, as I tried to digitally piece together the background from scans of my painted textures, and merge everything together in a way which looked believable. Well, as believable as a crocodile holding a disco ball can be.

This is what my background layer looks like. Without the characters on top to cover up the gaps, this looks like a hot mess, but it gives you an idea about how it was made.

This is it once the characters have been added. It’s starting to come together, but theres no lighting and most importantly, no disco ball.

Finally, this is the finished piece, and I love it! I’ve been pushing myself outside of my comfort zone more and more these days, and while it has its fair share of challenges, the results make it all worth it. I think this is a very worthy addition to my children’s illustration portfolio and maybe you’ll be seeing more of these characters to come!

Thanks for reading

Emily :)

Winter Owls

I started this piece like I start most, by painting way too much paper! I had a clear colour pallet in mind when I started, so I made sure to paint a good selection of textures to chose from. Layering up Splattered paint worked really well to mimic the look of snow falling. The environment was made using just these papers, but for the owls I used papers from my very vast collection. I’m quite the paper hoarder!

Then It was time to start collaging… which never gets any less daunting. But first I needed some references to pull inspiration from. Usually, I try to use my own pictures as much as I can for my references, but my camera roll was definitely lacking in the snow department. So, I took to Pinterest and made this board winter pins, filled with lots of snowy goodness. I drew some rough thumbnails to map out the composition, which came to me quite quickly. With collaged landscapes I find having a really clear fore, mid and background works well to create a sense of distance in a scene.

Let the hours and hours of moving shapes around commence! For the sky, I knew I wanted it to be really simple, so I made it with just three rectangles, as I would be adding the owls on top and didn’t want things to get too busy. Now as for the rest, that wasn’t quite as fast. I slowly bit by bit worked my way along the hills, moving, rearranging and swapping out shapes as I went.

Once I had the hills in place, I added in the little details, which is always my favourite part. The church was very satisfying to make. I really struggled with adding in the bigger trees. Making them look somewhat realistic, and not like a bunch of rectangles connected to a slightly bigger rectangle is hard! I find with trees, a ripped edge does a lot to make it look real. It especially worked well to create the look of snow on top of a branch.

Once I was happy with the landscape, I drew some very rough owl templates to help me figure out where they would sit on the piece, and what size to collage them. These templates were a big help when it came to making the owls and getting the proportions correct. It was difficult to figure out the colour pallet of the birds, as I wanted to bring in more colour to the piece, but I also wanted them to look like they belonged in that environment. I got there eventually by using a mix of muted pinks and blues.

My first attempt at the back wing. The owl was looking too busy and stood out too much in the piece. So I chopped the wing off and tried again. Ahh the advantages of collage!

My second attempt at the back wing. This one is much more simplified and stylised. The blue works better with the colours of the piece, and helps to clearly show its further back than the front wing.

After three full days of collaging, the piece was finished, but one small issue… I didn’t like it. AAAAHHHH! ‘Okay not to worry, not to worry, theres potential for it to look great, it just needs a bit of photoshop wizardry,’ is what I was trying to convince myself. So, off I went in to the late hours trying fix all the things which were bugging me about this piece.

Things which were bugging me:

• The snow was too uniform.

• The moon was too big and the glow looks like and after thought… which it was!

• The owls needed moving slightly to make for a better composition.

• The pink gradient in the sky needed to be more impactful (theres only so much you can do with a coloured pencil)

• And finally there was something missing, but I still didn’t know what that was.

I spent the next few hours tweaking things on photoshop, working my way through the list of changes I wanted to make. Amongst my editing panic, I had the huge realisation to put some swooping lines into the sky and what a different it makes. The piece went from looking quite basic, to looking magical, which Is what I always strive for! After making those changes I can happily say I love this piece, and I think its one of my best. The work had paid off.

Time to tidy all my papers away. Quite a tedious task, but very satisfying to clear it off of my desk. I try to keep as much paper as I can, but I could’t bring myself to organise the mess of tiny pieces. They did get pushed into the bin! Everything else I popped back into my paper folders, ready for my next collage.

Thanks for reading

Emily :)