Illustration Friday - atmosphere.

There was a distinctly frosty atmosphere that day...

colour experimentation in my lunch break....

Sketchbook

I've been doing a bit of sketching and doodling recently, mostly in pen and ink....













































































Sorry about the terrible photos. Until we move, we have no scanner, so these are taken with my iPhone.

I did it!

I posted a while back about a couple of different shows/exhibitions I wanted to go to. These days (with toddler in tow) it's so hard to actually get it together to go anywhere other than the park, so I am proud to say I DID IT! Or rather, we did it! My son Dylan and I went to The Deep Sea exhibition at the Natural History Museum last Friday. I think I was more excited than Dyl. It was great, we got the tube there (which is always very exciting, especially for Dylan) and before we went in we had our packed lunch in the fabulous picnic area at the museum. It was quite difficult to really see it in any serious adult way with a three year old, who just ran randomly around, making any attempt at going round in an orderly fashion pretty difficult. But it was quite liberating really, we just looked at all the fun bits! Here are some photos I took...

Also, a while back I blogged about a trip to The British Museum, where I bought a rubber stamp kit, but was waiting for inspiration. Well, it may seem a bit weird, but I have an odd fascination with deep sea creatures, especially the anglerfish - so I finally found my inspiration, hurrah! Here's a pic (taken with my iphone, sorry about the bad quality) of my first print run (!!). I'm quite please with how it's come out really. In fact, I'm rather proud! I might even put a print in a frame...

Incidentally, for my second ever job in publishing (at Marshall Editions) I did a series of photomontages for two books: Rainforest Explorer, and Ocean Explorer. One of the photomontages was of a Deep Sea scene, for which I did most of the picture research, and it was when I was doing the research I read quite a bit about deep sea creatures, including the strange mating methods of the anglerfish: 

At birth, male ceratioids are already equipped with extremely well developed olfactory organs that detect scents in the water. The male ceratoid lives solely to find and mate with a female. They are significantly smaller than a female angler fish, and may have trouble finding food in the deep sea. Furthermore, the growth of the alimentary canals of some males becomes stunted, preventing them from feeding. These features necessitate his quickly finding a female anglerfish to prevent death. The sensitive olfactory organs help the male to detect the pheromones that signal the proximity of a female anglerfish. When he finds a female, he bites into her skin, and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body, fusing the pair down to the blood-vessel level. The male then slowly atrophies, first losing his digestive organs, then his brain, heart, and eyes, and ends as nothing more than a pair of gonads, which release sperm in response to hormones in the female's bloodstream indicating egg release. This extreme sexual dimorphism ensures that, when the female is ready to spawn, she has a mate immediately available.^[4] Multiple males can be incorporated into a single female.

Strange eh! Girl Power!

Anyway, farewell for now. I will blog soon about another day out soon, this time with my "grown up" friends...