We Love Miyazaki

Unemployed = more cartoons!

A former colleague of mine asked me to draw some ‘engineering superheroes’ for a TEDx talk that he is giving next month. The idea is to get kids excited about engineering by showing them all the great things that engineers do. This link provides some context for the talk www.whatengineersdo.info. I’ve put a few examples of things which I consider to be great example of engineering in the background like the A380, the Burj Al Arab, the Millau Viaduct and the Falkirk Wheel.

This was a leaving gift to my ex-supervisor James, who’s a big fan of cartoons, especially the Beano. We often joked that he should have a PA system so that he could call me into his office in a nasal voice.

I drew this cartoon as Secret Santa present for a friend of mine who works at the Natural History Museum (although it was pretty obvious who it was from). If I wasn’t a designers or cartoonist I would love to be a palaeontologist, so I’m extremely jealous of her job. Anyway, I found out that she was researching the evolution of four-leggedness in bird-hipped dinosaurs (they started out on two legs interestingly), and I tried to think of a silly and mundane reason why this might have happened. I also experimented with using a limited palette of colours which worked out really well.

Call off the search

I’m still alive! I’ve really let the blog slip in recent months because I’ve had lots of distractions – mainly putting on an exhibition at the London Design Festival and then coping with the aftermath (lots of press interest). Anyway – back onto cartoons.

I have two things to share with you for now. The first is a cartoon I did for my housemate’s birthday. She works in a gallery and has a client who she often refers to as “my American”. This conjures up certain images in my head (quite offensive images it turns out), which I’m told are totally inaccurate. This was my first attempt at using a new thinner nib and Aquarelle Arches paper, which is figgin’ expensive but great quality.

The second is my only contribution to TCS this term – the cover of the Christmas edition of The Bridge magazine. It didn’t turn out quite how I wanted as I made the mistake of doing a wash over paint that hadn’t dried properly, which caused some of the colours to bleed. Also, I don’t think the finished drawing looks particularly Christmassy. Perhaps I should have put in some snow?

Wedding Season

This is a series of cartoons I did for another friend at work to give to her brother for his wedding. It depicts the unusual story of how he proposed. Drawing mini caricatures of the whole family was hard enough, let alone doing it three times! I was glad the power cut meant I only had to draw little eyes in the forth panel.