IMAGES 32: Launch exhibition in London

Hello hello hello! I am just back from London where I was at the Images 32: The Best of British Contemporary Illustration launch exhibition and awards night.
Woohoo - I have photos of the event (taken the day after, as I forgot my camera on the big night) including a sneak preview of my very own "Tulips" on the Images 32 cover and throughout the exhibition! Lovely. Take note designers, my figure drawings look great blown up to epic scale and applied to a big plate glass window. I had no idea the AOI were going to do that, but I was really pleased with it.
It was a great night with some excellent work on the smooth white walls. Quentin Blake was there in dear little white shoes and he handed out the awards - Hurray, Adrian Johnston won the advertising section!!
I met up with fellow Scot and printmaker extraordinaire Jonny Hannah and said a quick howdy to a bearded Geoff Grandfield too. Me old chum Paul Bommer was there looking very dashing in his fedora cap. Inkymole popped down for the event and we had a proper natter about all things inky and pen-like.We do love a good nib, do Inkymole and I!
The London College of Communication is an excellent venue, with loads of space. The AOI have done us illustrators proud this year...and the book looks fab too. It will be winging its way to all designers and art directors this week!
More detail and possibly blurry phone photos later - I have a deadline for The Guardian again but I wanted to get this up here ASAP.

First Animation with Eskymo

YES! Finally I am doing some animation(last time I was still at college). So many people have said to me that my work is crying out to be animated and so after a bit of a hunt around to find an animator to work with, I found Evie Milo at Eskymo...just down the road in Kinghorn.
We had never met spoken or known each other's work before, yet I popped down to her studio, set up my laptop and Wacom tablet and she fired up Flash and we just spent a day fiddling about with a load of inky files I had prepared for potential animation.
We decided that my illustration "Balloon Dog" featuring a shocked looking little girl would be fun to experiment with. Neither of us expected to end up with a complete wee film at the end of the day, considering we had just met for the first time - but we did.
I wanted to keep the inkiness of my original drawings and not have to vectorize everything in Illustrator - Flash did the job beautifully as you could import fully layered files from Photoshop and just start animating and adding sound.
8 hours,a few home made biccies and a bagel lunch later we came up with this cheeky little number. I have a feeling the Quicktime movie uploaded here might be a bit jumpy for some reason - if so, please go HERE to see a better version of it!

Both of us felt that Little Girl should also wet her pants...but that will be in another version, I am sure.
It was great fun to work together and we are planning on producing more films later this summer which will certainly be added to a new Motion section on my website.

Carry on Caring /Leith Agency

Blimey, that's a blog title that trips off the tongue!
Anyway, have had a bit of fun with some illustrations for part of Leith's National Care Standards campaign for the Scottish Government.
This is a big Scottish TV, print, web etc campaign...and get this - my part is to illustrate the poster, CD and booklet for a specially commissioned play, called "Carry On Caring",which will tour around Scotland, promoting this important initiative for carers and the people they care for.
The play is in the true British, cheeky chappy comedy style of Sid James et al's Carry On classic films. OOOOOOooh I DO say....
here are a few spots from the booklet: