Spooky

Oh dear, I have been slacking recently. After the long summer holidays I have never quite got back into the swing of extracting a couple of decent hours of drawing in the evening once the kids are in bed. And life is full of playgroups and playdates and fishfingers and exhausting bedtimes. I'm still helping out with all the ptfa stuff so here at least is my latest offering... fancy coming??

Your school needs you...

So this year I thought I'd volunteer to get involved more with the school ptfa which is undergoing a much-needed overhaul. This is a poster I've designed to try and get parents involved (though it's very early days and everything has yet to be approved (and, in the usual way of these things, the politics are in full force)). Anyway, whether or not it sees the light of day, I quite like it and thought I'd pop it on here!

Hipstamatic

I've been faffing around recently, what with back to school and doing some design stuff for PTFA, so there's nothing going on the drawing front. However, I have become a little obsessed by the hipstamatic app on the iphone and thought I'd share some of my recent pics.... 

St Pauls from Tate Modern

looking down from the cafe

 In our house 'Neo' is to an aeroplane what a choo choo is to a train. Neo spotting is a favourite pastime so I took this pic for Laurie, but also love the colours too

Bankside in the pouring rain

My little gap-toothed Harry Potter

Baby growing up so fast

Gilbert and the weird looking flower

They adore each other (in between the wind-ups)

My only fellow female in a male-dominated house

Published...

received my copies from Amazon of the two Peter Andre books which came out on the first of Sep. Still waiting for a copy from the publisher though! Here's Peter talking about the books on Ladybird's blog...

Illustration Friday - 'Disguise'

Very rushed and last minute... suddenly remembered a photo of my brother taken in 1980 that provided some inspiration, so here's the hurried drawing and the photo. My grandma made the costume by the way (I was wonderwoman - that'll be another post I think - did I love that costume!) xk

Scribbles

Apologies for scarcity of postings recently - summer holidays and all that.  Very few spare seconds, absolutely no illustration or design achieved but quite a few trips to the beach, legoland survival story, some post-riot fun in London,  several visits to our latest favourite cafe at the Staverton Bridge Nursery (you can see the choo choos and Sam has discovered a liking for loose-leaf tea) one barbeque on a glorious evening, and one barbeque in the pouring rain.

All that apart, I have also decided that I'm going to build myself a proper website and have been trawling through 'Dreamweaver for Dummies' attempting to work out how to go about it. A complete beginner, I now at least know what HTML and CSS stand for. There are many mind-numbing chapters ahead though... I thought I might document progress here. So far all I've done is very rough sketches of how I'd like my homepage to look. I was about to scan in these sketches when I carelessly left my sketchbook within reach of the crayola crowd and you might find it hard to see but basically I'd like my homepage to be a picture of me, sat on the sofa with a book, a cat and a cuppa with little icons that change shape as you hover over them indicating where to go for portfolio/blog/contact stuff etc...

What I'm interested in finding out is, can you add cut out images onto a webpage? So what I'd like to do is have some wallpaper as a background and, for example, put a phone on the coffee table which will sit over it and 'ring' when I hover over it. Is this beyond me? Impossible? I have no idea. I drift off every time I start reading the book.... here are some summer pics to make up for boringness...

Books we love (No.9) - Are You Awake? by Sophie Blackhall

I've just discovered Sophie Blackhall (blog here) and am totally in love with her new book, Are You Awake? It strikes a chord to any parent who, bleary eyed in the middle of the night, has been bombarded with question after question from a wide awake toddler and it reminds me so much of Sam when we first moved to New York, jet-lagged and wide awake at 3am, looking in amazement out of the window at all the lights.