AMMO

A couple of months back, I was invited to do an illustration for a British magazine called AMMO. The brief was pretty open: create an illo to fit in with the theme of 'play.' Well, since I love music it was pretty obvious to me to do something relating to playing an instrument. So that's where the idea of the girl and her broken guitar comes from. Usually, my illustration style is to do all the linework and colour in a vector program, but this time I wanted to try something a bit different so I drew all the lines in pencil, scanned it, then coloured it digitally. Last week AMMO magazine was delivered to my mailbox, and I was so pleased to see how it turned out. No matter how long I spend looking/agonising over an illo when I'm drawing it, I never get tired of the feeling of seeing something in print!

Xpress

A few months ago I designed an ad for a competition held by Keep Australia Beautiful. The brief was to design a print ad which would encourage people to dispose of their trash thoughtfully. I created the message with actual pieces of trash that I picked up. The amazing thing I found out was, so much trash is littered NEAR a bin, when it would be just as easy to put it inside. Anyways, the ad was chosen as the winner, so last week it was published in Xpress. I read Xpress every week, so it was really cool to see my ad there - it made picking up all those yucky cigarette butts worthwhile!

Issues

I love finding out about new designers and illustrators, and while online blogs and websites are great for that, I still love buying magazines and checking out the work in 'real life.' Anyways, two cool mags I've seen recently are Sasquatch and Ferocious Quarterly.

(image http://sasquatchmag.com)

Sasquatch is a new Aussie mag about design/lifestyle/culture. Looks like so much effort has been put into every page! I think the only way to get your hands on it at the moment is through the website.

 (image http://fe.rocious.com/)

Ferocious Quarterly is another cool one that I stumbled across on the web the other day. It's an American mag, and what I like most is the type treatment - texture-y!

Patterns!

I've been looking at patterns for a while now, and it's something that I would like to have a go at, but sometimes it's so tricky getting your head around how to repeat the design. My friend Sarah does some amazing vector patterns, its the type of stuff I can imagine seeing on sneakers and notebook covers. Looking at it makes me want to try creating some! You can check out the rest of her stuff here.

Live wire

The Wire music liftout in last week's West Australian newspaper published my recent illustration of Paramore, plus a small blurb and a link to my website.

Look book

Brian Ewing is one of my fav designers, I first found out about him back in 2005 through the Art of Modern Rock book. He has done so many awesome gig posters, so I was very happy when he recently released a book of his work called Don't Hold Your Breath. It's so interesting to read his comments about each poster, and his work is just amazing. Definitely worth checking out!