Pop Up Dictionary Workshop

A really enjoyable project organised by House of Illustration with two Year 5 classes at Richard Cobden School in Camden. Assisted by illustrator Julie Vermeille, I worked with the pupils to create interactive ‘Dictionaries of Tricky Words’ which we recorded using stop motion films. The dictionaries were made up of words that their teachers had identified as ones that had been tricky (either because of spelling or concept) over the year. The children worked really hard and used lots of new techniques- pop ups, sliding tabs, etc and loads of collage materials to create the books. Their efforts resulted in the films below which are full of fantastic ideas and illustrations.

Early in the workshops the children also worked to produce these pop up calligrams.

Animated Phonics

This project, made with reception class children, aimed to build on the children’s phonics learning over their first year by making an animation, which they could then use as an online resource. The children in the class each worked on a drawing related to their chosen letter which they then cut out and moved in some way on a white background whilst sequential photos were taken. I then uploaded the photos and created a stop animation, over which the children recorded rhymes relating to their letter. Extra thanks to all the lovely people who helped with this project or lent me microphones, tripods and such.

A White Wedding

My vow to never attempt to make a white wedding dress was well founded. Something about the pressure of working with expensive white silk in a house full of sticky fingers, paint and occasional glasses of red wine has never really appealed.  However there’s nothing like a request from one of your favourite people to make you change your mind. And so I did. The fact that she is beautiful enough to look wonderful in a bin bag was also a positive starting point.

My friend had seen a 30′s inspired dress that she loved and we used that as the starting point for the bias cut design which we worked on together. I cut a pattern from cotton muslin first and then began the fearful task of cutting white silk crepe on my living room floor.

The result of my efforts is below which were both pleased with as she looked truly lovely.

MAN+HATCHET website machine

When the brilliant guys at Man+Hatchet asked me to help create their vision of a website that was a physical machine I couldn’t refuse the challenge. Of course it was going to be part fun, part nightmare to create a solution that would work as a website, but there was an exciting starting point to the project in the form of a kinetic sculpture that they had built which looked like this…

The first task was to choose 4 different views of the machine which could be used for the 4 main pages of the site and allow navigation buttons, logos, content, etc to be added in a way that made layout as consistent as possible. Then we chose a design concept that made the most of the moving elements and made the content as clear as possible and I began making all the additional parts to ‘dress’ the machine with.

The results can be viewed on their finished website, but I’ve included the four different page views below.

Terraced house with Cargobike

A small commission of a family home intended to capture it at that special time with a young family within (hence the cargobike in the foreground).

For my mother

As a gift for my beloved mother’s 60th birthday I wanted to paint a picture of her with her own children when they were young. Unfortunately, thanks to her long-term commitment to camera aversion I couldn’t find an appropriate photograph, so instead I settled on this image. Mum and her two grandchildren are obviously too caught up in mutual affection to object to my dad taking the picture. I tried to stay true to the original image but tried to draw out the focal point and enhance the sense of intimacy.

Happy Birthday Mum.

Autumn in Dulwich park