illustration

Lane Crawford shopping weekend

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This weekend (1/2 Dec) I'm creating personalised Christmas cards in store as part of the Lane Crawford GIFTED Shopping Weekend in Hong Kong.I'm in the homeware section at Pacific Place. Customers can choose one of my designs, or ask for something special, and I create a one-off original card. Here are some I made earlier...Hope you can pop in and say hello!

moon bear merchandise

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My charity project this year was for Animals Asia, which is devoted to the welfare of wild and urban animals in Asia, and also works towards the conservation of endangered species. Because I love bears, I specifically worked with them on their Moon Bear Rescue campaign, where they save and support bears rescued from bile farms in China. I've designed four products for the charity, and all the proceeds go towards helping the wonderful moon bears. The collection has just been launched in time for Christmas orders. My personal favourite is the ladies large scarf, featuring four lovely bears in pretty patterns,and this is my most favourite bear of them all...Moon bears have that name because of the distinctive crescent of lighter fur on their fronts. I've played with this 'moon' symbolism in my designs, placing the bears in the night sky, like constellations, for both the scarf and the foldable bag. I did a simple solitary bear on a moon for the ladies t-shirt, and a sequential drawing of a bear being let out of a cage to freedom, for the folding umbrella.You can order everything from the Animals Asia website shop, and they'll ship worldwide. Help us save the moon bears !

Sweet Anthology

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I love sweets. I've always loved sweets, and I'm fascinated by unusual and exotic confectionery everywhere. So when a friend asked me if I'd like to collaborate on a new venture for her sweet company Chorley & Baker, I jumped at the chance! Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce 'Sweet Anthology'.To suit this high-end brand, I created the illustrated label and hand-wrote the name for the identity in a classic, slightly baroque style, but kept a modern feel. The colourful sweets are packaged in high-quality designer jars, and the label needed to work with each variety of colours.We've created the brand to have collections, like a fashion house, and we're launching with an A/W collection of 42 varieties, focusing on traditional British sweets. We'll be refining these, and adding new flavours each season.The website for the brand is full of gorgeous photographs, and I created a muted leafy background to highlight the bright jewel-like sweets. I also drew some fun little illustrated characters interacting with the sweets.We're doing a soft launch on achica that starts on monday (29 October), with the prices slightly discounted (let me know if you want to buy them, I have a discount code for first time buyers). After that we'll be selling through our online shop, and in fancy stores near you soon! Give them a try, they make the perfect gift...

last chance to 'heart' my designs

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My collaborative T-shirt design project for OuterEdit has just finished, and I'm super happy with the designs I made. I took bits from everyone's artwork and created something surprising and Mariko-style out of them...My favourite themes that came up through the collaborative process were the fox, the stag, and the heart symbol. I played with these to create my designs.Only the top 5 'hearted' designs will actually be produced as T-shirts, so please take the time to go to the site, register, and vote vote vote! There are a few days left to vote before a decision is made. Thank you!

Outer Edit half-way through

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So far I've done 2 new images for this project, making use of several other artists' bits of artwork. In the first, I directly used Aude's fox mask and Kahori's flower to complement my bird branch theme:In the next round, I didn't use the others' actual artwork, but was inspired to draw my own stag (thanks Hiromi!) and fox. I made a little scenario with its own Latin motto "a true friend is a rare bird".Keep voting, and some of these t-shirts could become real!

Sketchbook Project - London

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My cutlery proverb sketchbook for the Art House Co-op is on its world tour, and will be in London next week!  All the European and Australian sketchbooks will be available to view at The Canada Water Library on these days at these times:

Oct. 12th 4pm-8pm Oct. 13th 11am-5pm Oct. 15th - 19th 4pm-8pm

Hope you can make it along!

OuterEdit starting soon!

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I blogged about this a few months ago, and now it's finally here, the collaborative project for OuterEdit is about to start... They came to London and filmed a little video of me and here it is. I'm a little bit freaked out by how I look/sound, but there you go.

OuterEdit - FC04 - Mariko Jesse from OuterEdit on Vimeo.

Our 'collab' starts on October 9th, and my collaborators on this project will be illustrators Aude Van Ryn, David Humphries, Kahori Maki, and Bob Foundation. They're all amazing and I hope you'll check out the OuterEdit website and see what we produce together!

Hugh's Three Good Things

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Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's new cookbook is here!Published by Bloomsbury in the UK, there are lovely illustrations by me, and gorgeous photographs by Simon Wheeler, all laid out by the wonderful art director Lawrence Morton.I've created illustrations of the ingredients in watercolour and pen & ink, and there are also some fun collages of Hugh interacting with illustrated elements, like this...I love that I can incorporate a slightly surreal element into the photos...and also play around with the recipe text a little.I've done some hand-written text in the cookbook for the first time too...The contents page is my favourite! Here's a corner...You can buy the book from the River Cottage amazon page or any good bookstore, and there is even a kindle/ipad version (but with less pictures, just so you know). You can also get more information on the River Cottage website, and there are some sample pages you can view in full here. Yum....

Janice's wedding

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Another pretty wedding project for a client in Hong Kong. She asked for two pheonixes, a bird symbolising longevity, that could be used in various elements of her wedding. I created several stages of the pheonix motif, in two slightly different colourways. The first illustration showed two flying birds, with the bride and groom's names interwoven into the design. This was used on the Save the Date notification and formal invitations, in the traditional Chinese wedding colours of red and gold.The next version of the illustration showed the story growing, and included a little landscape, with a tree and butterflies. This was used on the first stage backdrop used at the actual wedding, in soft pinks, with a watercolour textured backgoround.The illustration developed, with clouds and a golden moon, for the next stage backdrop in red and gold...And the final development of the illustration included musicians outside a cosy house, and a little golden nest in the tree. This was used on a specially made china teacup, given as a wedding favour to each guest.I adore this cup, it's such a lovely gift to remember the wedding...

Ling Ling app

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The childrens book I illustrated called 'Ling Ling Looked in the Mirror', about a cheeky girl who dreams of all the things she can grow up to be (and her even more sassy panda friend), is now available as an app! I'm very excited about it. You can view it on any ipad or iphone. You can have it read to you, or read it yourself. You can click on the pictures and it'll tell you what they are, you can get help reading a word if you're not sure what it is, and you can even record yourself reading the whole book.

It's aimed at kids between the ages of 4-10, but really it's fun for any age at all!

It's available as a hard-cover book on Amazon, and as an app in itunes. The app is £1.99 in the UK, $2.99 in the US. You can see a preview of it here.

LOKL cafe map

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I was commissioned to create a decorative sight-seeing map of Kuala Lumpur, for LOKL, a boutique coffee shop there. The brief was for it to be colourful, fun, a bit modern-retro, and to show all the great things to do in KL...Here are some photos of the framed map on the wall. The cafe is attached to a fantastic little modern back-packer place called BackHome.

Karen's wedding

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I created the wedding invitations, place settings and seating plan, for my friend Karen's wedding recently, up in Scotland. They had a map theme, mixing elements from both London and Glasgow, the cities where the bride and groom live.We chose pink and brown to give a lovely vintage look, to match the overall theme of the wedding.The place settings had elements of the invitation illustration on the front, with a little bonus illustration of Karen's spaniel in a neat bow-tie on the reverse. I added a delicate die-cut pop-out shape for the guests' names, which I hand-wrote in brown ink. I then also hand made name settings for the tables to match.The tables were named after roads in both Glasgow and Scotland. I designed the seating plan around this concept, making it into a street map, with each individual place marker as a geographic feature on the map: a house, a tree, a car, a statue... Us and the seating plan on the day...The wedding photos were taken by Christopher Currie.

Cotswolds afternoon tea

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We just spent the day in the Cotswolds, and had the loveliest afternoon tea ever at Juri's Tearoom in the country town of Winchcombe. The crockery was a pretty blue... ...and the view from the conservatory was delightful. But it's the cakes you need to try; honestly, the cheese cake was the best I've ever had, anywhere. So light and fluffy. The sandwiches were beautiful too. Everything is perfect, as it's traditional English, but with a slight hint of the Japanese, as Juri is from there.I absolutely recommend this place if you're anywhere near...