Alice in Modernland

Here is a piece I created for the SCBWI contest 'Undiscovered Voices'- a brilliant opportunity for undiscovered illustrators and writers to get their work out there and create their first book!

There were different titles to choose from, and the one I picked was Alice of Wonderland Road - Remarkable Tales of a Runaway. With this theme I immediately thought of a modern twist to the story where Alice runs off looking for a different country to go to.

Here is the initial sketch of my idea. This is a style I've been working with for a while now and like the idea of developing with different themes. I tried to add as many relevant objects relating to the fairy tale, for example: roses, teapot, clocks, etc.

Let the carbon copying begin!

The submitted piece had to be in black and white. I used watered down acrylic paints to achieve this.

The final piece!

Nando's Menu

I love to see the process of a sketch resulting to its masterpiece so I thought I'd talk through my process when I painted this illustration for a Nando's competition. I will try and do this for all future pieces of work.

So let's start off with the idea. I sketched out what I already had in mind doing this painting. I knew I wanted circles and symmetry with as much relevance to Nando's and their food as possible.


With the idea sketched out I created the outline using Illustrator to do the circles- any non-circle drawings were done by hand.

With the outline complete the acrylic paints came out of the box! Painting is so therapeutic and I enjoy it tremendously- until the hand cramps come in that is.

With the painting complete I scanned the final thing and opened it in Photoshop.

The background was filled in digitally, thus ending up with the final result.

Watch This Space

I can't believe it's been two years since I wrote my last blog! Where did the time go? What have I been doing with myself?

Well, in the past two years, I'd been going back and forth between working my retail job AND doing internships on my days off. Many weeks of working 7 days were done but in the end it was worth it as it landed me my dream job of working for children's publishing.

It's been five months into my career started and now I want to do more! The sun is out and my creative juices are flowing. It's time to bring some colour into this new season.


Watch this space…







(I promise  I will do more blogging from now on!)