Jacqueline Ayer

I've been talking to a few illustration students this week about the beautiful work of Jacqueline Ayer and thought it would be nice to share some. This is one of my favourite books by her called Nu Dang and His Kite, and was written and illustrated in 1959. I've talked about Jacqueline's work before and have since found out that she trained as a fashion illustrator in Paris, before moving to the far east with her husband. I love her observations of daily life in Thailand, and her use of line with flat colour.

About Town

On Friday I was photographed with my work for the Cambridge University Science Festival. The illustration I did for the brochure has popped up all over town in the last few weeks as posters, and will soon be a huge banner too - how exciting! You can check out the Science Festival's events here, and see more wonderful photos (including all those above) of Cambridge University life on the Flickr stream.

Alphabetty

On my Fridays I try and do some illustration for fun. This alphabet of daily items came about after reading an article about life kerning that had caught my eye before Christmas. 

I quite like it, and enjoyed the challenge of making letters out of everyday things. What do you think? Any letters that work well, or not so well?

**************

Update:
I've swapped the F for a hairdryer and made the icing and candle on the V cake pink - excellent idea Alex! I hope it reads a bit clearer now...

Pretty stuff

I partook in ill-advised vintage fair shopping today. I scored a lovely 1960s cropped tweed jacket, it's super, but the experience has left me wanting more stuff. So I made a treasury to get it out of my system. Meee wanteeee!

Science Festival

I've been doing some work for Cambridge University's Science Festival brochure 2012. We decided fairly early on that it should nod to the Olympic games, but still needed to be fun and sciency. I went with bright colours and visual puns, and really enjoyed such a fun brief. Plus, beards and moustaches were to be encouraged. Hooray!

Lovely plants

I'm spending today mucking about with freshly painted paper to make jungle plants. It's not for anything in particular but I recently read a great book called To The last City by Colin Thubron about a group of people who travel along the Inca trails in Peru. It contained some lovely descriptions of plants and birds in the cloud forests. I'm just not sure what to do with these yet, any ideas?

Have a great weekend!

Arcades

These were some photos I've had on my computer since Bonfire Night when we went to Southend. I love arcades for the colours and lights. I thought I'd share them as it's so grey and horrid outside today.

In other news, I've been interviewed by the lovely Stephanie Levy for her site Artists Who Blog. I'm a big fan of Stephanie's colourful work and I love that she takes the time to get to know other artists. I hope you enjoy it.

Have a lovely weekend!

Matchbox labels

I bought some matchbox labels and have been having enjoying playing with them. It's fun working out what order the colours were printed. This weekend I also made almond biscotti and a robot costume. Hope you had a good one!

Giving it away

I'm getting back into the groove of doing some illustration work alongside the day jobs. I've just completed a really exciting commission (which I'll reveal once it's gone to print) and this was a little self-set piece about ignorance that I did today.

The article was about how we tend to outsource responsibility to people we feel know more about say, economics, or environmental matters than we do. Interestingly, the less we know about a subject the more likely we are to avoid finding out about it. Head in the sand stuff. I thought the idea of passing blame was interesting, hence the balloons changing hands.

Don't quote me on it.

I did a little illustration this week (between Christmas wrapping and eating) about misquotation. I'm enjoying playing with books in my work, they're such simple lovely shapes.

What good books did you get for Christmas? I got The Help by Kathryn Stockett, I bought my Dad Salt by Mark Kurlansky and my chap The Worst Journey on Earth by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. I'm now settling into Vanity Fair, which is brilliant. It does have nearly a thousand pages of bible-like paper though, so it's going to take me til next Christmas to finish, but I love it.

What are you reading this winter?

Merry Christmas

Thanks so much to all that have read my blog or bought from my Etsy shop this year. It means the world to me. Have a wonderful Christmas and an energetic start to 2012!

Lots of love,

Anna

Closure

A little self-set editorial that I worked on over the weekend about 'Closure'. You can read the article here.

Omnicrom

 

Have you ever heard of, or even used this stuff before? It's a shiny sheet of colour that you put ontop of a photocopied image then apply heat. In the 80s of course there would have been heated rollers for this, but I made do with an iron. Where there's carbon, the colour will stick. Isn't it great?

I am now the happy owner of a whole pile of it that was going to be thrown away at uni. The colours are fab, and now I just need to think of an interesting way to use it. Any ideas? I think I need to experiment with getting a really dark photocopy as these were copies of quick pencil drawings, and the colour hasn't fully stuck. I like the texture though.

Dinosaur disco

Yesterday was my birthday and I decided I wanted to do things differently this year. Cambridge is in the middle of it's brilliant Festival of Ideas, so my friends and I attended evening openings of five museums in town - each brought to life with music, light and alcohol. The Museum of Zoology is a brilliant place during the day, but lit up and with the addition of a DJ, it was like the coolest nightclub EVER. Such a good time! 

3D lettering and 60s ski slopes

So I have a new brooch design in the shop and wanted to show you a little of my thinking behind it. I was looking at a 3D full stop that I saw on a vintage business card that my grandpa was given on a trip to Europe in the 1960s. You may remember the project I did on his travels a while back, and this was the drawing I made from said business card. He filmed some of the skiing he and my granny did on the trip too and I thought it was rather wonderful. Aren't their outfits funny? 

The District 'Project Yellow'

My new job working at design agency The District has been very yellow-themed so far. We've recently set up a collection of yellow objects in the exhibition space, The Front Room, for which I am now booking new artists. 

The Front Room has been host to a wealth of interesting people setting up special exhibitions often unique to the space. You can see past events here, and the rest of Project Yellow on the flickr set here.

If you are interested in using the space please get in touch!

Fedrigoni Commission

I recently did a lovely little job for paper company Fedrigoni, to promote a lunchtime event they are holding. It was an open brief and had to include something about lunch. I'm a big fan of olives, so it started from there. Yum.

Pop of colour

The amazing sunshine we've had this week in the UK has had me ogling my vintage paper stash. And here is the result, new zingy collages for the shop.

Walk like an Egyptian

I made some camel brooches for a customer and decided to do a few extra for the shop. I like what a weird shape camels are. I drew this one whilst watching some amazing footage my grandpa took in Egypt in the 1960s. He travelled allover the place selling tobacco from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and went to over 100 countries in his life. Amazing! This snippet was from a trip in September 1965. I love it.

Hope you're having a lovely weekend.

Mailers, Vermeer and internships

Well hello! Long time no blog.

I thought you'd like to see some promo cards I've had printed up to send out to prospective art director types. I decided to do two versions, one for editorial and one for narrative/book illustration stuff and am happy with the way the colours tie together across both.

In other news, I've been working at the Fitzwilliam Museum on a catalogue of Vermeer paintings for the upcoming exhibition for the last two months. It's been really interesting. I've also been interning for the same time at The District  which has been lovely, especially as they're re-branding and I got to paint lots of thing yellow!

I hope you've had a lovely summer and that it doesn't yet feel long ago. I hope to be a more blog-active from now on, so see you soon!