In the meantime and in an altogether different vein, here are some more of the small regular monthly cuts I do for Japanese airline ANA’s inflight magazine Wingspan.
The Calcio Storico festival in Florence, Italy
Every issue the magazine runs a short nugget feature covering the weird and unusual things that happen around the world. Often they’re very amusing subjects and a lot of fun to draw. However the drawings themselves are always gentle observations, not outright humour.
Hong Kong – A ship-shaped department store
Unlike my more detailed children’s books, which are created on watercolour paper, for this kind of work I draw on a coated paper which results in a strong expressive pen line, a style I first developed for posters and other graphic work in Japan.
A Hotel in France where guests can live like hamsters
The drawings are scanned in, often assembled from several elements, cleaned up and then coloured digitally, sometimes using textures. I love the flexibility that this offers.
A restaurant in an Italian prison, where inmates serve the customers
I particularly enjoy this kind of work because it allows me to play around on the computer and explore graphic simplicity, though I don’t regard myself as a “digital artist”, everything still rests on a hand-crafted pen and ink drawing.
A restaurant in China run entirely by robots
My children’s books are created almost entirely by traditional non-digital means which gives a natural resonance, but in these illustrations the stronger line and digital colouring provides a more dynamic graphic edge. This style of work appears to be unconnected to my pen and watercolour children’s books, but in fact they both come from exactly the same pen, it’s just the paper and colouring that’s different. Just varied facets of the same realm.
The latest issue talks about a Ski Festival of Witches in Switzerland