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Posts Tagged ‘art’

Zebra hoofprints trotting across the globe

10 November 2011

I was delighted recently to be given a brief to doodle zebras and maps in a doodly style. How perfect. The doodliness was Wallop’s contribution to the redesign, with Dusted Design, of a very important website for the NET patient foundation. The results are now launched for all to see and looking great.

Today is NET cancer day – did you know? Hopefully if you didn’t, you will now and will help spread the word.

Dusted were briefed on the redevelopment of the Worldwide NET Cancer Day website following the successful redesign of the NET Patient Foundation website (which represents patients and carers in the UK). In its first year, more than 5,000 signatures were added to their online proclamation and this year the target is for site visitors to show their support via a global map featuring the zebra mascot and a virtual journey around the world. Sharing this message via Facebook, Twitter and email is naturally a key part of support strategy.

Continuing with the global community theme (and social media aspect), another map element of the site aims to join people together from across the world in a global video event brought ‘live’ on the day itself – November 10. As the day moves west, video clips (pulled from YouTube) will become available to watch – from Singapore to Sweden, from the UK to the USA – visitors will see how the World NET Community is working together to raise awareness of NET cancers around the globe.

The zebra mascot  stems from the fact, medical students in some countries are taught, “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras” to encourage them to think about the most likely and common cause of symptoms.  However, this approach risks that rarer diseases like NET cancers (“zebras”) will be overlooked.

Ghost Birds

04 October 2011

Ghosts of Gone Birds is a series of multimedia exhibitions that breathe artistic life back into extinct bird species, celebrating their diversity through paintings & sculpture, talks & poetry, installations & live music.
The exhibitions will raise money and awareness for BirdLife International’s Preventing Extinctions programme.

The project presents a unique collection of originally commissioned artworks, from some of the UK’s leading contemporary artists, writers and performers including – Ralph Steadman, Sir Peter Blake, Rob Ryan, Billy Childish, Desmond Morris, Pete Fowler, Charming Baker, Jamie Hewlett, Kai and Sunny, Rebecca Jewell, and many more – each one of them has adopted an extinct species and breathed life back into it through their creative talents.

All Tropical, has partnered with Ghosts of Gone Birds to challenge designers to create a Tshirt for the exhibition, to be sold at the exhibition being organised from 2-23 November at the:
Rochelle School; Arnold Circus, Shoreditch, London. E2 7ES

I like a good cause, and I like to doodle birds… so here’s my entry.

The Gallery of all entries is now open and online. There are some beautiful illustrations so do go and check it out over at All Tropical. (and hopefully feel the urge to give me a vote while you’re there?  ;-)

Tshirt design. ©Wallop Commercial Art & Design Ltd.

Egg n’ Chips

16 September 2011

In celebration of it being Friday – A little doodle I did as a submission for Wrap magazine

More Smart Art

08 September 2011

Following on from the recent Smart Art Drive through gallery on Londons South Bank, I was delighted to hear today that my illustration ‘Wishing on a Star’ which was created for The Outsmart Project last year, is now to also be featured in the main exhibition hall of Mercedez Benz world this weekend at the Smart Fest 2011

So if you like Smart Cars and you like Art, why not pop along and feast your eyes :-)

Illustrating an adventure story with a twist

18 August 2011

It’s a particularly busy summer this year, ferrying my 3 young apprentice’s about the place on their various ‘off school’ activities and teaching my youngest to swim and ride a bike without stabilizers by day… whilst indulging myself in a particularly worthwhile and rewarding illustration project by night.

Wallop is working with Sarah Boland’s ‘Healing’ Campaign to create a book, hopefully one of a series, for children undertaking daunting Cancer treatments and therapies. The ‘cancer is rubbish’ idea behind the books came from a discussion with Sarah,  whom I first met whilst I was a designer and she was a producer and writer at the BBC. We discussed how my ‘Rubbish Pictures’ could be adapted to work alongside her stories, and this book is the result of those early conversations.

This book, about a boys journey through radiotherapy treatment, takes a sidestep from my usual ‘Rubbish characters style such as the more traditional ‘Fox’ and ‘Rooster’ It creates entire scenes more akin to ‘Rubbish Racing’ where the character and background are collaged out of appropriate material for the part of the story they are telling. I wanted to use content, or ‘rubbish’, familiar to the children reading the book and re use imagery from the hospital environment they are likely to be in. The character Jack, for example, whilst having already been through chemotherapy treatment and lost his hair, stays a very normal little boy throughout, full of beans and mischief. His clothes therefore are made up of recognizable beans food packaging and children’s paintings among other ‘rubbish’ textures.

We have been helped along the way by staff at the Royal Marsden Hospital whose advise has been invaluable and we are hoping to get this project complete over the next few weeks and into the hands of the children entering units such as those at The Marsden.

I’ll be blogging with the projects progress again soon :-)

In the meantime if you would like more information about how you can help The Royal Marsden, through donations, charitable events or even just giving your time and volunteering, click here.

Smart idea. A drive through gallery.

12 May 2011


A while back I submitted a mixed media illustration for a project called OUTSMART and I was delighted this week to see it featuring in a whole new form at a pop up exhibition for Smart.

Outsmart was launched by illustrator and Smart admirer Gemma Randall last year. Within a matter of months, the collection of work became  huge and is now a beautiful way of showcasing new and original work by some of today’s top illustrators and designers. The aim is for the collection to become many more things such a coffee table style book, printed merchandise, even custom Smart Car wraps.

Its current incarnation however is an appearance of some of the pieces in the Smart Car Drive Through Art Gallery. A test drive centre with a difference! The Drive Through Art Gallery is part of the Smart Urban exhibition currently on at the Southbank in London.

The smart urban stage is a pop-up event, with two weeks of different activities. It features the Future Minds Exhibition, which showcases ideas and innovations that will shape the lives of Londoners in the future, curated by a team of celebrity experts

Most importantly you can take the Smart Car test drive with a difference. The route takes in famous London landmarks, the drive-through art gallery, a hall of mirrors and all sorts of other surprises.

The exhibition finishes on the 16th May so if you’re in London over the weekend, why not pop over and see it for yourself?

Rubbish Cockerels

26 April 2011

Today I have been working on a series of cockerels. (I hasten to use the full term as using the shorter version earlier in a tweet earned me a small rush of rather inappropriate followers ;-) These are the latest in a selection of Rubbish Pictures I am currently putting together as a collection to be delivered to a York Gallery, The Gift Gallery, early next month.

Cockerels follow on after foxes and owls to form the core characters from a series of woodland creatures made mostly out of Jordans cereal packets and postage stamps, continuing the theme of eco art whilst attempting to maintain my own distinctive children’s illustration style.

Rubbish Fox

31 March 2011

Today I mostly made a rubbish fox. He’s made out of Jordans cereal packets, a Boden catalogue, a lovely selection of old stamps and a page out of an old car manual. He’s the second in a series of new woodland characters Rubbish Pictures I’m trying out. Watch this space for more…

Racing Cars is just Rubbish…

10 February 2011

Following on from creating a ‘rubbish’ scene from Peter Pan, I’d barely peeled the PVA glue from my finger tips before I was back to sorting through rubbish for a new commission – another piece of Nursery Art, this time a McLaren Race Car for a little Formula 1 fan.

This piece is another larger format picture measuring a metre across and as with all Rubbish Pictures, is created entirely out of recycled domestic materials.

This is my first attempt at a ‘real life’ mechanical and comparable object. Anyone familiar with this blog will know that I usually create animals and characters that are pretty much made up as I go along so I approached this piece with trepidation at trying to replicate a recognizable car was quite a challenge, whilst also trying to maintain my own style, and the obvious restriction of only using ‘rubbish’!

To commission your own picture, do check out ‘Rubbish Pictures’ and get in touch :-)

A ‘rubbish’ scene from Peter Pan

25 January 2011

Standing at a metre across, this week I have completed one of the larger scaled Rubbish Pictures I’ve attempted in a while. This piece was commissioned as a piece of Nursery Art for a child who loves the story of Peter Pan. There were various scenes from the book that I considered, the crocodile swallowing the clock was an alternative option, which I may still yet explore. It was however, the magic of flying that prevailed to be the classic image remembered from the story by everybody I asked, so I stuck with this traditional view of the characters flying over the London skyline.

As with all Rubbish Pictures, the scene is created entirely out of recycled domestic ‘rubbish’. Peter Pan’s clothes for examples are made out of 56 individually cut ‘leaves’ from old postage stamps, garden peas wrappings, cereal cartons and gardening articles from the Sundays supplements. His bag and shoes are fashioned from a frozen Oven Chips bag and his hair is a page from the original Peter Pan story book.


The moon too, makes use of a very old battered copy of the original book, re purposed along with bubble wrap, potato food packaging, crisps wrappers and old shirt buttons.

With the inevitable sprinkle of glitter (fairy dust) to finish things off. I hope this piece will make it’s new little owner very happy…

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