Amelia's Magazine Anthology of Illustration

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This is a great chance to be in an anthology, which is guaranteed to be very good. It's a really nice brief too. Check out the details here.

Winsor McCay = Genius

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I've been doing a bit of research on Mr. McCay and I might as well post some of the stuff. McCay was a pioneering cartoonist and animator and it's safe to say he was one of the greats. Gertie The Dinosaur is from 1914 and was performed as a vaudeville act. McCay would stand on stage and talk to Gertie, telling her to perform tricks for the audience. I would love to have seen it live but unfortunately that ship has sailed. So here's a video clip:

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It's so charming!

And here are pages from McCay's comic strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland. I love the endlessly inventive layouts and beautiful colours. You can tell that both Moebius and Chris Ware are into it too.

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Everything Connected

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I made this illustration a while ago, for Amelia's Magazine. The brief was to make an image on the theme 'Everything is Connected', with an environmental angle.

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Because I love fractal patterns, they usually just grow on their own once I start drawing. They were especially suitable for this picture. I had done a similar mural in the past, with foetuses and animals enclosed in cocoons within a large pattern, so I just took that idea and refined it a little and shrunk it down. I only recently started doing colour illustrations, so here I was quite careful with the colours; a little too careful, perhaps. The piece didn't make it into the magazine on account of not being colourful enough.

As always, you can click on the image to have a closer look at it.

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I cannot recommend Amelia's Magazine enough. Apart from being a good read and a showcase of wonderful illustration, it's also a good place to submit work to, for illustrators and graphic designers. They have open submissions regularly and the briefs are really interesting.