New for The Guardian

This is a sneak preview of an illo about the "Sandwich Generation" that will be published in tomorrow's Guardian (Work section cover, no less)
I got the roughs in on Wednesday evening (after a particularly unpleasant episode of dealing with my non functioning scanner) and the lovely art director, Sarah Habershon said she liked my sofa idea to depict the "Sandwich Generation" where both ageing parents and children have to be cared for - despite the fact the carer also holds down a full time job.
Sarah doesn't like to have an obvious work theme on the Work cover so I made this as domesticated and family-orientated as possible, yet trying to show the pressure that the carer is under to look after family properly yet still get work done.
I like the hamster metaphor, myself (based on Chewbacca who is my nephew's spritely rodent). The bird in the cage is, of course, a MASSIVE homage to Charles Keeping, whose work I love.

And I don't understand why I keep drawing cats when it is dogs that I love.

National Museum of Scotland

Finally! I am able to write a bit about this absolute PEACH of a job!
The last couple of months have seen me to-ing and fro-ing to the wonderful, award winning National Museum of Scotland to meet with their very cheerful design team to discuss doing some work for their big summer exhibition, entitled Garden Detectives, which is part of the Darwin200 series of events celebrating all things Charles Darwin.

It was Stuart Kerr who contacted me - he is a D&AD award winning 3D designer and mad keen cyclist by the way - and asked if I had ever done work for interactive, large scale exhibits. Nope...but I'd like to.

Basically the exhibition is aimed at children and will encourage them to discover what lurks, lives and burrows in their own backyard, through the medium of large, custom built interactive garden sheds, flowerbeds and hedgerows...oh and a garden pond too.
There will be plenty of specimens and things to poke at too.

Where does my work fit in? Well,I get to draw and paint lovely, loose garden scenes and hedge rows with bird's nests,curled up cats and pond-dwellers, which will be supersized and applied to walls and to the interactive exhibits aswell. I am also doing a hefty amount of quite technical illustration of the creatures who inhabit our gardens too too. Now, for those of you who know my work, you would be forgiven for thinking "Jill? technical? Neat and tidy?" I did think the same thing myself. However, after doing some drawings of Dragonfly larvae and ladybirds for the Museum's resident entymologist, my style got the stamp of approval!
The brief was to draw accurately, but still be inky - these illustrations are to be educational afterall.

Needless to say, I am very excited about this job - which does mean scanning everything at 1200dpi, as it is going to be BIG!
There will be plenty more updates about this, so watch this space for any more snippets.

Above illustration is a garden cat and also another of part of a dragonfly life cycle. You knew that though, didn't you?

East Neuk Open Studios-Day 2

Well, the rain came down hard this morning and I wondered how many brave souls would venture out - but...yes! The sun did put his hat on and the streets of Cellardyke were bathed in steamy sunshine and full of folk glad to get out their house/caravan/car.
I am delighted have sold a complete framed set of my ELLE horoscope trio, so that was nice.
Otherwise, this little image has been very popular - a kind of digital collage called "Bird Puddles"

Meanwhile, more tea for the artist, please...and maybe a slice of cake?

PS this post is a day late because I could not upload the image for some reason - probably because I was using Safari at the time.