Thames Poster

I did this for that London Transport Museum/ AOI competition- a poster for the Thames. This is based on the under-appreciated stretch of the river beyond the Thames Barrier. The image is based on my sketchbook scrawls from a morning visit. Going to give it a couple more hours' loving soon I think.

Watching Ice Age 2 this afternoon.

Loy Krathong

At the weekend I went with Pat to the Loy Krathong festival at the Buddhapadipa temple in Wimbledon. The centrepoint of the festival (which falls on a full moon in november) is the launching of small hand-made rafts equipped with candles and incense. The rafts (krathongs) are traditionally made from banana tree trunk, though ours were made from styrofoam adorned with thin paper leaves. Releasing the rafts is a way of letting go of anger and bad things, and of giving thanks to the river.

Masterchef

This is the big food critic chap from Masterchef Australia (which is far superior to UK Masterchef).

A digi-coloured version.

Wateroos. Little ideas doodles for something I'm working on.

A pic for a friend's birthday card.

Boxhead 'roo

Rose

I did this for a book cover design competition run by Venus Febriculosa. My design is inspired by gothic architecture and scholasticist philosophy, which lies at the heart of Eco's novel. I think I could've done something nice with the concept with a bit of time to fiddle and try things out, but it was a major rush-job again really.

But I guess it was useful to use Illustrator a bit for once, and I hadn't done anything design-related for ages. And one of the things I really love about this whole 'Illustration' idea is getting to learn about new things: I learnt a lot about medieval architecture, churches, 1300's philosophy and Italian Gothic while researching this.

Bluesky

On the subject of windmills... This is also really old. I seemed to go through a little phase a while back where I'd paint skies ridiculous colours. In this case, it was bright yellow. I don't know what that was about. I just dug this out and photoshopped the blue in and it looks 100 times better. I never liked this painting (apart from 2 sheep), and it probably won't be on the new version of my website, but I thought I'd put it up here anyway.

I am working on some new stuff, honest.

The videos I posted yesterday don't seem to be working. I'm not sure why?

Phil Life with Skulls

My girlfriend (who needs to get her website sorted) keeps nagging me to do some work that's more colourful and cheerful. So here we are. A lil doodle from my sketchbook . Although I guess technically it does still feature skulls...

One more...

The final of my Christmas cards for this year, this is a painting for my girlfriend of a Doraemon cuddly toy she bought me a while back. Doraemon is a Japanese cartoon character. Although pretty much unheard of over here, in Thailand his image is everywhere- on bumper stickers, posters, toys, DVDs- to the extent that I came to view him as some kind of adopted national mascot.

So here are the painting itself and then the image I used for the card, Christmassing him up a bit by placing him in a vast snowfield of photoshop snowmen, being observed by a solitary child. I like to think that the child has just finished singlehandedly building this great gathering of snowmen, only to be a bit puzzled and cheesed off that a gargantuan, magical blue cat-creature has just landed amongst them.

Pat liked it, so I'm happy.