Album

Today I was featured on Illustration Rally's Album Cover Rally. Before I entered I had a browse at some of the things that were already up and there's some beautiful pieces on there, go have a look! Illustration Rally always have great open submissions going on so keep an eye out on their blog - you can also follow them on twitter at @Illustration_R.

When I saw the rally I had a couple of album ideas in mind but I decided to settle on Katy Perry's Teenage Dream as the sweet sugary theme of the album lends itself quite well to my work, and I wanted to experiment with some new kinds of type. I also wanted to make a feature of the famous blue hair that Katy was sporting at various events when the album came out. The type on my new banner above is an extension of the type I designed for this piece. The the above image is the variation I settled on for the rally, which is featured here.

I decided to include a few of the other variations in this post as I was quite pleased with all of them!

bakery

It's been a bit of a large break in between blogs at the moment as I have been working on lots of different things. Today though, I can reveal something I have been cooking up 'Willy Wonka' style for my friend Amber's 18th birthday. A few months ago, she found an image of a rainbow cake and asked me if I thought it was possible to make - so I decided to make one for her birthday. I settled on a brilliant recipe from a blog called The Whisk Kid, whose recipe was not only fantastically written and easy to follow, but the photographs were to die for! So much so that it made me want to be a food photographer for a long time after I read this recipe...

 Anyway, I managed to get some Sugarflair gel food colouring from a brilliant local shop called Angel Cake (which you can also get online at places like this) and after two days of mixing with six separate wooden spoons and icing with a massive spatula, I arrived at the cake. Here's a few pictures of my progress (sorry for the quality, ridiculously bright cake batter and camera lenses don't mix!)

Part of the mixing process - it's a good job our kitchen is heavily overstocked when it comes to bowls and wooden spoons!

The finished cake - I opted for a lilac buttercream over a white crumb coating to hide the cake's gloriously colourful centre.

The offcuts of the trimming process demonstrate how bright the final product was!

 I presented the cake to her this morning in a custom cakebox, with a logo on the lid that I designed myself (above) so that she has something of the epic cake to keep once she has eaten it all. I even managed to sneak a piece of cake for myself and managed to get a couple of better quality photos for you.

Happy 18th Birthday Amber!

home

On Monday, I journeyed the five hours it takes to get back to the Midlands for our Easter break. I packed my sketchbook (though I'm yet to open it) ready for an easter full of illustrating and hopefully a good set of images to get into my portfolio. Another job while I'm here was to get hold of some of my life drawings to put onto my website sketchbook page. I'm still deciding which ones to go on there, but here's a few examples of the ones I was considering. I had to take photos of them with my compact camera which is why some of them aren't great quality. (Just to warn you some of the drawings are female nudes so if you are not comfortable with this don't scroll down!)