watching children play

Apart from illustrating I also lead creative workshops for children. One of the places I work in is the North Edinburgh Arts centre where together with a lovely team we organise creative sessions for under 5's and their families. No matter what the session is about (making the sea creature from recycled plastic bottles, building a huge cardboard tram...) it is always lots of fun. And a lot of mess!
It is also very inspirating for my illustration practice. I love watching the children play and engage with the activities I'd prepared for them.
The sketch above is inspired by one of these sessions. The theme was the age of discovery and we were making boats from recyced materials. And these two decided to develop the activity further and attach a string to each of their boats and then they were wandering through the room, dragging the boats and engaging in the most exciting conversation (at least this is what it looked like from the outside as they didn't really pay attention to anything around them; just walking with their boats and talking). There was so much in there - the beauty, friendship,  love, magic, imagination, adventure...
Moments like that are one of the many reasons I so much love my job!

Oh...and check out my newly updeted website!

updates

Last few months have been rather busy with all the projects I am working on. Basically having four jobs and doing some additional stuff is quite much. It is tiring sometimes but on the other hand I love what I am doing I wouldn't give it up for anything else.

The residency at Edinburgh College of Art is going very well, I am developing some new illustrations and working towards our final show in June. The students have been busy hanging and finalising their degree show and our job was mostly to provide the moral support (and a little bit of tailoring, decorating and cleaning services here and there) as they were extremely well organised this year. The show looks amazing and it is now open to public so if you are around you should definately come!

Work at the community art centre is going well too. The creative workshops we run are always fun no matter if we make little creatures from recycled plastic bottles or simply splash the paint against the wall.  I am very lucky to be working with such a lovely team and the families and children are awesome too. I am going to make a separate post about our workshops.
 
After two months of fundraising for our project in Ghana we almost achieved our goal! And this is all thanks to you all. You are awesome! Thank you!

And finally some illustration updates. I have been collaboration with an amazing Edinburgh-based author Anna Claybourne. I illustrated her beautiful poem and now we are in the process of submiting the dummy book to various agents and publishers.

Here is one of the double spreads from the book:

I really like these guys and I decided to develop the characters further and play around with other story ideas for them. Here is a few character development sketches:

Phew.... now time to go to work:)

School Meals Project

I took part in an amazing project organised in cooperation with Edinburgh College of Art, Scottish Book Trust and Dalmeny Primary School. We have been working with children's book writer Vivian French, illustrator Cate James, stage 2 illustration students and the school pupils, and writing recipes that would describe ourselves. And then we created plates that illustrated the recipes.
Here is a plate that illustrates my recipe - lots of cute animals, a train and a map of my favourite place in Transilvania in Romania.

I worked with Kyle and here the plate that illustrates him. This a a pop up plate...

...and I would think twice before putting any food on it!

The jaws open and there is a lot of beautiful drawings made by Kyle inside.

We had an opening event with all the students and pupils presenting their plates. They were all amazing!

And we made commemorative badges!
 
It was great fun working with the school pupils (I usually work with younger children). There have been coming up with the best ideas and also asking the best questons. One morning I worked with two lovely P3 girls and the first question they asked me was: "What is your favourite animal?". Just amazing! Why adults don't ask that instead of asking boring questions like: Where do you work? Where do you come from? etc.