I drew a lady

I got completely enchanted by this girl as soon as I saw her on The Model Scouts (Irelands much, MUCH, better version of America's Next Top Model (yes, I watch all that crud)). Her name's Tabea and she actually won it in the end, proving that I have impeccable taste, of course. *cough*

There is some angsty 'OMG IM SO UNINSPIRED' whining to the sound of a tiny violin behind the jump :D give me your wisdom (or a good shake of the shoulders)!!!

Introducing Clarence

I think it's about time I gave some blog-lovin' to my most recent forray into sculpture, affectionately named Clarence, who I spent hours and hours of my life painstakingly creating, and whom I love like a child. Unfortunately, he gets looks of horror and disgust from Normal People, perhaps it is because he looks like this:

I feel sad for him because noone else thinks he is adorable. :(

Anyway, his purpose was to support the project I developed in response to the final (and scariest) part of my Illustration degree: the exam brief. Inspired by P. T. Barnum, I made a hoax blog where I pretended (using illustrations, embarrassingly bad video diaries and doctored photos) to discover a colony of strangely humanoid pixie-rodent-things. Whatever Clarence is, that's what I 'discovered'.

I had enough foresight to take a bunch of photos as I progressed, so continue reading to find out how I got from sketch to thing-in-a-jar.

I recommend clicking on this to see it beeeg because it was done in the days when I had bizarre amounts of patience for minute detailing.. (AS level..)

This next one was done more recently.. and is much less.. accomplished. But more compelling, perhaps..?

Harriet book jackets

So! That thing I promised would be uploaded the next day a shameful amount of time ago is finally photographed and ready to go. It's my final project for the University of Brighton: book jackets for my children's story 'Harriet and the Hair Fairy'.

I wanted to step away from my standard fare of spidery drawings, I felt like I'd got a bit trapped in this one discipline and it was stifling my creativity. So I decided to delve again into the primary-school world of Making Things With My Hands and got very messy, did lots of things wrong, changed my plans a few times, and ended up with something I actually quite liked! (SHOCK AND HORROR)

I wanted to explore the relationship between the planes of the 3D puppets and the 2D cover.. I guess I was trying to do something a bit meta, that whole 'look at the photographic image becoming a flat drawing' type thing.

The story is about a bald girl (Harriet), who is visited by the 'hair fairy', a little old lady who flits around with a purse full of hair 'seeds', ready to plant into the heads of newborn babies. Since Harriet appears to have been forgotten, the Hair Fairy decides to enthrone her head with all kinds of fantastic hairy solutions which all, of course, somehow manage to go disasterously wrong.
I chose to depict three of these on the covers; golden hair that's so fine it gets into an impossible tangle, hair so long it becomes unmanageable and a head of beautiful beautiful flowers that bees find irresistable.
It's a bit of weird story, I know. I'm not expecting it to get published or anything. >_>

I'll post the digital versions, so you can see the covers in more detail.

Made a fwend

I'm going to Brighton tomorrow to pick up my final university project and photograph it properly. Stay tuned tomorrow (or maybe Saturday) for the Finished Thing! In the meantime, here's a creepy little taster of what was involved:

Fairy-folk

The last one was done about half a year before the others, but I still think of it as being in the same series or at least a kind of inspiration for them.

Shiny new blog says 'hello'

Right. So. Post Number One.

I did have another blog, it was much fleshier and tastier, full of succulent art, but THEN -alas- Blogger went and changed the log in bits and pieces so that you need to have a gmail account (which I didn't), and I found myself locked out of MY OWN DARN BLOG. Tragic.

So, instead of emailing blogger and going through that whole rigmorale 'oh, hey, I can't get into my blog and I managed to screw up the password trying to break in, is there a spare key under the flowerpot' etc, I just got a new blog. With a more professional name. The other one was 'tambourine-dream', nice and poetic, but not what anyone picking up my business cards with 'LUCY MCGRATH' stamped all over them is going to intuitively search for.

I will gradually replenish the stuff from the old blog (if it's any good), here's a little something to start off. I will also talk less in future posts.