posted: December 24, 2008

Just a quick message to wish you all a very merry christmas! I've been a bit rubbish this year, missed all the international postage dates, and only just made the domestic ones... I managed to knock up some festive-y gocco christmas cards last minute though

I'm up in Scotland for a few days with the family.  sadly no snowy photos this year- just drizzly rain up here. Wishing you all a lovely time and all the best for 2009!

posted: December 3, 2008

I'll be taking part in the One Ton Show being organised by the East End Arts Club this weekend.
100 Artists have been invited to create a piece of art inspired by or featuring lyrics from songs about London.  Theres quite a broad mix of styles and expect lots of cool Clash related work!

Here's my contribution from The London Bridge Song by Joni Mitchell

Unfortunately I won't be around much for the show as my illustrator pal Kumiko and I will be popping over to France to take part in a 24 hour recycled art marathon.  We must be mental.
http://www.labraderiedelart.com/

posted: November 9, 2008

The Hot Rods and Hairy Beasts exhibition wrapped quite a while ago now, but things have been a bit busy post show and so this is the first chance I've had to post a few photos from the preview.  Thanks to fellow illustrators Allan Sanders, Rod Hunt and Nishant Choksi for making it such a great experience.
 
 

posted: April 12, 2008

I've been clearing out my book cases and found 7 empty and/or out-of-date address books and diaries.

I feel really bad throwing them away, especially as they we mostly given to me as gifts... but really, how many address books do you need?

Got to find a use for them all...

brush and marker pen fun

>>  Address Book Sketch Book Gallery

posted: April 9, 2008

One of the great things about the internet is being able to communicate and collaborate with other illustrators and artists in other continents.

I recently worked (albeit remotely) with Yuko Uemura ,a designer and printer originally from Tokyo but now living in Chicago.

Regular Etsy shoppers are probably already familiar with her range of lovely hand printed textiles - www.patapri.com

Anyways, with her top stichin'  and printin' skiills,  we turned the image above into these nifty household essentials...

Available in 3 different colour choices they are limited to just 50 and are available from Patapri online store from next week.

Fairly priced at $14 each.  Get 'em while they are... ummm... dry?

posted: December 4, 2007

Laura L. recently blogged about her lovely Birds of the Rockies print available through Jen Beckman's 20x200  and I was delighted to be asked to contribute to the project too.

My limited edition print of Enter the world of Boundless Sensual Enjoyments*  and Say Goodbye to Love Failures and Loneliness are both on sale from today with small prints priced at the highly afford $20.



Small - Edition of 200
Medium - Edition of 20
Large - Edition of 2

All editions come with a certificate of authenticity.


*Gents - Why not hang this on your door and really impress the ladies?

posted: December 1, 2007

A wee while ago I posted some experiments with lettering based on spam subject lines. Since then I have received lots of nice feedback and email requests for postcards or prints. 

A couple of weeks ago I was also contacted by Rob Walker  ( who writes for the NYT Magazine) asking if he could interview me for his Consumed column.  The article is in print this weekend, but for those (like myself) on the wrong side of the pond, the article is online here.

I'm also happy to announce that just in time for Christmas some of the series are now available to buy as prints via Thumbtack Press with two limited edition prints also available soon via www.20x200.com

Thanks very much to all the nice people who have blogged about my work, including Boing Boing, Wired, Craft, Core 77, Netdiver and Drawn!

posted: September 13, 2007

I recently picked up a whole bunch of very cool 50/60s matchbook labels from East Europe.

Even though it was painstakingly boring, I've uploaded the best of them (about 90 in total) to flickr.  I've posted a few select images below and for anyone who is interested, here's the link to the rest of the gallery: 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/linzie/sets/72157601961559416/

Anyways, I was feeling pretty inspired by the simplicity and limited colours on these and had a bash at doing some 2 colour photocopying with an old analog copier I picked up for all of £1.70 on ebay  ( I outbid the other bidder by a whole 20p)

It's a very basic and pretty tempromental machine, but you can get  different colour cartridges which you can swap the black one for.

I hear you can go to fancy copy shops to do this, but I've only seen full colour copiers...

The nice thing about working with photocopiers is that allows you not to be too precious and enjoy the "rough and ready" way your work comes out... which is a good exercise for me.

While I'd like to say it was a breeze, the prep time is massive due to the large element of trial and error involved... particulary when it comes to working in half tone and trying to work out the registration...

and my copier wins no prizes for speed.

Looking at it now, theres lots of things I'd do differently... but over I'm quite pleased... and I'm managed to recycle a whole lot of old manilla folders.

posted: August 24, 2007

A while back I  was contacted by Earmint (a cool chicago hip hop musician type person) to contribute to a CD cover art project he was planning.

A whole bunch of artists and illustrators were asked to essentially 'colour in' in any way they liked a line drawing of the man himself

The results are now online at www.earmint-gallery.com and are available to download along side his new album.

It's cool to see how each person had made the image their own. 

Heres just a small selection from the site:

Top row: Allan Sanders, Catherine LePage, Nick Deakin
2nd row: Jordy Van Den Nieuwendijk, Sarajo Frieden, Natty Kocsis
3rd row:  Eyeport, Tommy Kane, Me
Bottom row: Bubi Au Yeung, Logan Bay, Andreas Karaoulanis

posted: June 19, 2007

I've just contributed to a pretty cool project which is being organised by paper collager Dawbis.

The concept goes like this:

"Over the course of a year, artists from around the world will be invited to create 12 individual paper quilts. Each month 12 new artists will create a collage interpreting the project's theme, "A Day in my Life," and share their story. Each story will then be sewn together to create a paper quilt. At the end of the year, each paper quilt will either be auctioned off or donated to a charitable cause. The goal is to bring together artists from different countries to allow them to share their lives, their culture, and their art with one another."

Each artist is sent a small collect of different patterned papers and printed ephemera and the only real rule is that you only use the paper that you have been given.

There's been plenty of great contributions so far and heres a few of my favourites so far

I have to admit that my personal traditional collage skills haven't progressed much past the macaroni, glitter and milk-bottle-top pre-school stage but thought I'd give it my best shot. 

Heres my attempt.  I tried to avoid using the pretty flowery papers and played it save with a topic close to my heart!

It's notable that the majority of the contributions are from females, so it would be nice to see more of the boys get involved.  I believe that Dawbis is still looking for contributors for later in the year.

LINKS:

The PAPER QUILT PROJECT website
Paper Quilt Blog
Paper Quilt Group on Flickr

posted: April 28, 2007

I hope one day to do a proper American road trip.  When I was a foolhardy student, I set off on my own mini version ( Boston >  NYC > Phily > D.C > Atlanta > Memphis > Miami > St Louis > Chicago ) but lack of time and mostly money, meant that I never made it to the WEST  coast.   I recently found the travel journal from this trip which made some pretty interesting reading.. its a bewildering insight into 19 year old Linzie.  I don't remember a lot of what I'd written about and it felt strangely like reading someone else's diary.
 
Anyways, I guess quirky and kitschy tourist attractions have also held my interest.  Heres a little map project I set myself...  I've probably employed a fair bit of artistic license and taken the odd liberty or two.  I still feel the urge to teak, change and correct a few things  but I've put it  to one side as yesterday all the text and pixel-pushing gave me a cracking migraine...

larger version: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/174/475568285_06e250aac1_o.jpg

posted: April 23, 2007

A couple of months ago I did this sketch for a kids publisher which never got past the roughs stage due to contractual issues (e.g. I wasn't prepared to part with copyright for the fee offered)

To be fair, they did honour the rejection/cancellation fee clause and I was happy to walk away with my drawing. 

A 'tuck shop' for those not familiar with the phrase is basically a hole-in-the-wall affair where schools (or youth clubs) sell snacks and unhealthy crap to their pupils.  I remember my own schools 'tucky'  very well .... and the excitement every year at Christmas when kids would scan their purchase with Willy Wonka style enthusiasm for a lucky sticker meaning that you'd won an even larger box of chocolate. 

I'm sure since the healthy eating reforms in schools here, this sort of things is probably very much a thing of the past.

I'd quite enjoyed doing it so rather than resigning it to my "things to file away one day" folder on my desktop, I decided to play around with it a bit.  The original brief called for a mixture of healthy and unhealthy snacks, so being my own AD now I was able to leave the healthy stuff out!

I'm still very much a novice when it comes to screen printing and still find my sessions at the print studio a slightly stressful affair... but thought I'd give it a pop...

  

posted: November 8, 2006

Congratulations to fellow drawgerite Edel for gaining the prestigious title of 100th contributor at my studio space blog: On My Desk.

You can check out more photos of Edel's modest little studio here

Illustrator Allan Sanders has also contributed a very nice banner illustration to help mark the occasion.

Thanks all round to the other 99 artists listed below who have already shared their workspace and the many other nice people who continue to do so:

Heather Castles
Tommy Kane
Geninne D. Zlatkis
David Evans
Matthew Porterfield
Jac Currie
Steven G. Amey
Bob Staake
Sven Gerhardt
Brandon Steen
Charity Romero/Ezra Li Eismont
Jannie Ho
Jean-Francois Kelahear
Jeremiah Ketner
Adante Salvagado
Tamsin Ainslie
Lauren Braun
JoJo Yeung
Colin Johnson
Kim Carney
Sandra Monat
Andi Butler
Danny Mansmith
Tim Harries
Jason Bronkhorst
Andy J. Smith
J. Michael Stovall
Maxwell Loren Holyoke-Hirsch
Caio Nery Filho
Anndrea Boe
Morandini
Charlene Chua
Mark Anderson
Kelly Murphy
Doug Savage
Jeff Szuc
Joseph Scarano
Chris Braun
Sean Kane
Blair Kelly
Leo Hillier
Marina Caruso
Meghan Murphy
James Yang
Piepke
David Carillo
Rob Dunlavey
Mark Porter
Ian Stevenson
Annie Bissett  
Edel Rodriguez
David Sones
Nubby Twiglet
Ximena Maier
Brett Hess
Collin David
Rick Lovell
Eric Bostrom
Rik Catlow
Jeff Matz
Ben the Illustrator
Joan M. Mas
Junichi Tsuneoka
Guylaine Couture
Eric Sturdevant
Claudine Hellmuth
Matt Hinrichs
Petra Stefankova
Paul Antonson
Maximo Tuja
Holly DeWolf
Alex Noriega
Jon Keegan
Von Glitschka
Craig Atkinson
Alan (Fred) Pipes
Jim Stafford
Ben Schlitter
Ryan Snook
Dan Thompson
Jared Chapman
Corianton Hale
Christiane Engel
Andy Smith
Pietari Posti
Cat Morley
What What
Sean Macfarlane
David Dean
Ben Schlitter
Anette V. Heiberg
theApe
Fhiona Galloway
Bob Staake
Mark Begley
Allan Sanders
Elwood H Smith
Jeff Andrews
Ryan Myers
Maxwell Paternoster

posted: October 18, 2006

I did a little interview thing ages ago for paper tiger media, a publisher down under.

It's the sort of hard hitting, tough talking  Q&A I so much enjoy.

If you thought that my sense of humour was overly laced with sarcasm, you should not be disappointed:  Anything I Like interview

posted: October 6, 2006

Following the monkey madness thats going on round here... I have quite a few money related illustrations (who doesn't love drawing monkeys??) but when looking through my folders I found an 'early' illustration of mine.

One of the first steps I took when I decided to make the career change from theatre to illustration was to enroll in a part-time course at Chelsea School of Art. Early on we made a class trip to one of my favourite museums in London: The V&A  .  We were asked to sketch an object on display and then create a piece of artwork influenced by it...

I sketched some monkey carvings and this pagoda from the China Collection and cobbled together the illustration shown here This was one of the first things I did at on the course and it was also the first illustration I created in Photoshop.

I ended up making a sort of 3-D sculture-ish thing out of it (See shoddy prototype photo). It was then selected for the Museum's 'Inspired By' exhibition later that year. Even though I didn't win any prizes or anything, I still got a bit of a kick about seeing my work in a display case at the V&A. It's funny to see how much my digital work has changed as I've got more comfortable working on the computer!

posted: August 20, 2006

Following on the theme of musical bugs playing instruments, I've posted this image I did for the current issue of Revista Colectiva (Theme:Insects). So OK, its not playing an instrument, but it was elvis inspired, so it sort of counts!

It's a nicely produced publication from Costa Rica and I'm working on a collaborative image with another illustrator (well, we will be when we both find the time!) for the next issue. The theme is circus, and for a little inspiration I've added a new gallery with some nice circus-related illustrations from the 50s/60s... Vintage Illustration: Circus

posted: July 29, 2006

This year I've been trying my best to make more time for collaborations and personal work.  I've stuck a few recent images from recent projects into a gallery. One collaborative project on the go at the moment, has the dubious title of 'Latex for fun'.  Despite what you might think this a completely above-board Spanish project  where artists are asked to create their own DIY designer latex toy using a balloon and marker pen.  Artists then were asked to create an illustration to go with their balloon for the forthcoming show/book in Barcelona.

I pretty much went through a bag of 15 balloons trying to create my cowboy.  Many of my prototypes didn't quite cut it really.  Balloon Version 1 burst before I even got anywhere near it with a pen.  Version 1.2 was a sorry effort not fit for anyone to see.  Things were looking good by version 1.4 until I realised that I had completed my design with a white board marker.  I did end up with a lovely cowboy imprint on my carpet though.  Later,  1.7 ended in disaster when I tried to reposition the cardboard hat that I have sello-taped so securely in place.   I now feel a bit shamed by my own effort.  In my defense however, I must say that drawing on balloon requires a whole lot more technical ability than you might think.  It's a bit like face painting a child, well, if your child has a balloon for a head, that is. So should you require the services of a Balloon-drawer,  probably best that you check out some of the more inventive creations at the 'Latex for fun' website: http://www.thecurrentlyoff.org/latex