collage

Eric Carle

The wonderful illustrator Eric Carle passed away this week, and I’ve been thinking about all the ways he inspired me. Reading the Very Hungry Caterpillar is one of my earliest memories - I loved the colours, the holes in the paper, and the surprise ending. Along with Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, it was the book that made me want to become an illustrator…

There’s an animated version you can watch here.

There’s an animated version you can watch here.

When I was looking for a way to use collage as a technique for an illustration project, I watched a video of Eric explaining how he worked. I love his rough textures and bright colours and how he used simple cutting and super advanced glueing in his pictures, and he added colour pencil details.

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I experimented with his style, and moved away from the fragile tissue paper he preferred and used thick paper for my collage illustrations for the River Cottage much more veg cookbook. I wanted shadows on my images, to show depth, and so that you could see the physical layers of the paper. I chose an opaque look, over Eric’s transparent layering, but tried to capture some of his movement and texture in the paint and pencil marks.

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I will forever be grateful for how Eric Carle changed children’s books, and for how he inspired me personally.

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Thank you Mr Carle, for making the world a more beautiful place. RIP.

River Cottage much more veg

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Hugh-Fearnley-Whittingstall's new River Cottage cookbook has just been published, illustrated by yours truly. I debuted a brand new illustration style, to keep the flavour of the illustrations I've done before for River Cottage, but adding a new dimension.I created a painted collage style, a bit reminiscent of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, but with thicker paper, so there's a very definate shadow on the pages, to give the impression of depth.I worked with the art directer Lawrence Morton to come up with the theme for this book's illustrations, which is 'the preparation' for cooking. So I focused on the tools and equipment in the kitchen...and also the preparation of the ingredients themselves. For example, how to cut them...and how to select them...This wonderful book is available from Amazon US here and Amazon UK here. It would make an excellent Christmas gift!

mi-lab

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I'm in Kawaguchiko, Japan, for the next few weeks, on a mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock) printmaking artists residency with mi-lab. It's in a beautiful location in a small town on the edge of the lake at the foot of Mt Fuji. I'm working on a series of prints, but in the meantime, here are some little sketches of the famous mountain.The views all around are beautiful, surrounded by mountains, wildflower meadows, and small farm plots, but it's Mt Fuji that dominates the landscape, whenever it appears from behind the clouds...