Wishing You All A Very Happy And Prosperous 2015

And a very Happy New Year to you all.
This is a drawing i did quite a while ago as you might see, back when I was using pen and ink and when I was much influenced by great American illustrators like Rockwell and Leyendecker.

From "A Bag Of Moonshine"

Here are a few pictures from my very first book, "A Bag Of Moonshine" by Alan Garner.
It only sold a few thousand copies so not too many of my blog visitors will have seen it.

The Light Machine

Here's another early piece from my portfolio that I have always been very fond of. 
This one is called "The Light Machine".
As in the previous post the technique involved painting in watercolour over a pretty detailed ink line drawing.

The Old Man in the Library

I like posting some of my illustrations from years ago.
This was one I well remember doing as a portfolio piece in those difficult months just after I leaving college.
In terms of subject matter I can only say that it was heavily influenced by Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books.
Back in those days I was still trying to develop my own technique and I was using a very dominant black ink line over which I would apply watercolours.
I'm still very fond of this illustration.

A Wizard of Earthsea

Last weekend I had another visit to my archive which is rather a messy place to go, but I do love to hunt around and dig out some pieces I haven't seen for years.
Here's a picture I did for a project when I was at Art College in Brighton.
It illustrates a scene from A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin.
At that time I was using an ink line to delineate shapes and forms and I think I was also using coloured inks along with my watercolour  as I tried to find a technique that suited me.
This was a pretty important picture in my college career.

Some Ink Line Illustrations

I rarely get the chance to do ink line work these days.
These are a few from quite obscure books of long ago that I found when I was hunting through some old folders.

The National Library of Ireland's Prints and Drawings Collection

Someone contacted me recently about a picture that they had seen in the National Library of Ireland's Prints and Drawings Collection.
Under the directorship of the wonderful Dr Pat Donlon, the NLI acquired a large collection of my original work, which they have added to over the years. Pat was very keen to get hold of preliminary drawings and unused paintings from right at the start of my career.
The ink line drawing pictured here is from "WB Yeats: Fairy Tales of Ireland".

Mervyn Peake, 1911-1968

Saturday 9th July 2011, marked the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the great author and illustrator, Mervyn Peake.
If you are unfamiliar with Peake's work, there are some great publications and exhibitions happening now to coincide with his centenary.
And the BBC are doing a new Radio presentation of Gormenghast which you can listen to on the BBC iPlayer.
I was fascinated by Peake and Gormenghast since I was given a gift of the trilogy of books when I was a student. Years later, I was thrilled when I was selected by the Peake family to be the artist who would illustrate Boy in Darkness, a novella described as a "fragment from Gormenghast."
Below is my cover artwork for the book.

The Salmon Cariad

This was from my very first book,"A Bag of Moonshine" by Alan Garner.
I was delighted to find that I still have the original painting.
Cariad is "sweetheart" in Welsh, and after a pretty unpromising start, when she tries to drown him, these two end up living happily ever after.

Tail Feathers from Mother Goose

I was talking to some illustrator friends last night about the joy of working in black and white. Then I realised just how long it has been since I illustrated anything using ink line drawings.
Here's one I did back in the 1980s for a Walker anthology called "Tail Feathers from Mother Goose: The Opie Rhyme Book" .