Valentine's Cards

Now, I'm actually in a bit of a personal grump when it comes to Valentine's Day, but I'm sure there will be some of you out there who have a use for these. ;-)

• My Eyes Light Up When You're Around - available in pink cat/turquoise background and coral cat/blue background
• Truly Madly Deeply Love You - available in mustard and purple
• You Make My Heart Go BOOM BOOM BOOM - available in pink multi and teal multi

Appearing in my Folksy shop later today, after I've had a bit of a sort out/delisted Christmas stuff and took some better photographs - my camera's being a buggeroonie today!

The Dancing Tea Party

A stop-motion animation I did a few years ago - please excuse the wobbles (and poor camera quality), I was just learning!

(Music is a song called Polite Dance Song by the bird and the bee)

Version 2

Or there's this one:


Bit too much with the grass maybe?

More Lovey Stuff

Still playing with colour, but thought this was quite fun. Again, anyone have a colour preference? I'm going to be printing some up as cards this weekend. :-)

Boom Boom Boom

I'll take an interest in illustration, it should be a laugh...

One of my favourite songs by one of my favourite bands:



And here's some sketches from an old sketchbook, back when I'd first taken said interest in illustration. They're from Leicester, where I did my degree, around and about the market and town centre.

Take Two

Some modifications:







Does anyone have a colour preference? :-)

My Eyes...

... Light up when you're around.

Latest Illustration

Good evening!

For the past couple of days I've been working on another spread for my Zooblie Story. It's not quite finished yet, but I've had enough for today, so here it is so far!

© Lou Peajeux/Louise Pigott

Definitely got eyestrain, so off to rest in a darkened room...

Another Day, Another Zooblie Doo

'Ello folks.

Here's what I've been working on so far today. The same illustration as in yesterday's blog, just adding a few more layers and experimenting with colour and textures. Feeling happier with this, but still plan to add some more hand-drawn elements to balance out the digital and give the illustration a real mixed-media feel.


Oh yes, and there's also been the addition of teeth and nails. Pink nails. This is a Zooblie-Doo that likes to crochet after all.

The Zooblie Doos

Yo!

Today I've been working on Zooblie Doo characterisation for my new story:

"Zooblie Doos are enchanting creatures;
Small and round and not too tall.
Their skin is like an old alligator's
And they're roughly the size of a rugby ball.

Yes the Zooblie Doo are sociable critters -
They like to chatter and chirp all day,
And when they're not engrossed in a fine conversation
They'll sit on a Zooblie leaf and crochet."

© Lou Peajeux/Louise Pigott

I started with some sketches:



And then I've began work on a concept illustration in colour (not finished yet!):


Tomorrow - the Zooblie Dees!

My New Venture...

I received a Wacom Bamboo for Christmas, as recommended by the lovely Lil, after years of wishing I had one. And boy is it gooood. No more glitchy-mouse moments, as my cursor decides to unexpectedly spring from one corner of the screen to the other, usually in a moment of carefully-executed detail whilst working in Photoshop. Surprisingly, I adjusted to my graphics tablet quite quickly (thankfully a lot quicker than I adjusted to knitting needles over the Christmas holidays, but the less said about that the better!) and over the weekend decided to give it a proper run... like an adopted greyhound, only without all the legs and raincoat.

I've been writing a few rhyming children's stories lately, so thought I'd do a bit of concept art for my latest called... well, actually, it hasn't got a title yet, but it goes a little like this:

"The Zooblie-Doos and the Zooblie-Dees
Lived at the top of the Zooblie Tree,
In Zooblie Wood
On Zooblie Hill
Zooblie ever after until,
One stormy night
When everything changed
And the Zooblie's home was all rearranged.
But before I recount
The whens and the whos
You must first learn the difference
Between a Dee and a Doo..."

© Louise Pigott/Lou Peajeux

And in my head I saw something a little like this:

A little bit of work to do yet - not sure if I like it completely (a bit too Avatar-ish?!) but it's quite nice to experiment and paint digitally! Also, if it's going to be in a book, I will need to change the central placement of the Zooblie Tree, else it'll get lost in the page fold. Usually I do my night-time scenes with coloured pencil, and I end up getting pencil dust alllll up my arm, pencil sharpenings alllll over the carpet and big fat calluses on my fingers, so this has been rather nice to do. Feedback and constructive criticism welcome!

My first repeating pattern!

Okay, so I'm a little excited by this. Upon receiving my lovely Print & Pattern book from Amazon yesterday, it dawned on me that I should really try my hand at some repeat pattern making, since a lot of the illustrations and doodles that I've used throughout my work are quite bold and would transfer well as vector shapes. Actually, it's been something I've thought about doing yonks ago, so yesterday was more of a microwave-reminder moment. *PING*

A little google later, and I found a very good tutorial to guide me through the process. The thought of working in Illustrator always fills me with a little dread, but this time I knew I'd just have to give it a go. I'd got numbered steps - what could really go wrong?! (Lots, usually!) I decided I'd use my Vintage Floral motif to have a go at my first pattern:

Well, first up, I did encounter some problems taking my hand-drawn flower illustration from Photoshop, a raster image that had no background, and plonking it into Illustrator. For some reason, even though no background was there, Illustrator insisted on putting a white square behind my flower. I have a little bit of an idea what the reason was now, and eventually, with some fiddling and handy twitter friends' assistance, I managed to fix it. Hurrah! So I was ready to make my pattern, now my flower was a vector and I had my square and my grid etc etc. This is how my tile looked after I'd done with copying and pasting and rotating selected bits of that one flower (oh, and a colour change too):

It took a while to get my head around making sure what overlapped the seam on one side, had to match up to the corresponding side. (In fact, I still have a bit of shuffling to get it just right...)

A few more steps followed on the tutorial later, and I'd got my repeating pattern!


Colour and scale change for a bit of variety:


And I've discovered the lovely "Recolour Artwork" option on Illustrator now, which means I can try out lotsssss of colour variations!

That's about it really - my first repeating pattern - and I can't wait to get started on some more! :-D

Another Threadless Design

I've finally come up with another design for Threadless. A night to sleep on it, and then I'll see how it looks in the morning before submitting. Any feedback would be welcome! I also need to come up with a cunning title...

A New Project: Illustweeting!

I came up with an idea last night, as I was drifting off to sleep, to do a little illustration every day and post it up here on my blog. Not that original, you might say. My brain said that too. So I carried on thinking "What could I draw? What theme could I have?" and "tweets" popped into my head. Well, it wasn't the first thing, but I shan't bore you with the precise cognitive process of a sleep-deprived illustrator who'd eaten cheese before bed.

So, thus is born my new project - Illustweeting! I can't promise it'll be every day (the proposal has already been met with raised eyebrows), but I'll try my best to come up with a quick sketch that illustrates one tweet per rising and setting of the sun. It's really just a bid to draw more, and the good thing about a tweet is that with 140 characters, you've got a ready-made caption!

Here's the first, from a tweet yesterday:

And the tweet: "I marvel at how my dad leaps into action when faced with taking down the xmas decorations. Putting them up is quite the opposite! Humbug."

Comments welcome! You can follow me on Twitter here if you aren't already: www.twitter.com/loupeajeux

Happy New Year! Now Back To Work...

Happy 2011 everyone! I hope you've all had a wonderful Christmas and are filled with renewed vigour for the year ahead.

After a little interlude of baby boots and bonnets, it's time I put this blog to some good use, and reintroduce it to its purpose - documenting my illustration work.

I learnt a lot during 2010. Some of those lessons, in fact most of them, were hard. I learnt, unfortunately, that energy and productivity have a proportionate relationship, and without much of the first (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome paid me an extended visit) the latter was somewhat affected. My patience, willpower and fervour for life were tested immeasurably, in ways perhaps that only fellow CFS sufferers can understand, however over-the-top that probably sounds. While I tried to retain a sunny disposition, both for friends and my own sanity(!), periods of last year were very bleak indeed, and I'm hoping more than anything that 2011 is going to bring with it some sunshine to break through those clouds!

To aid, or perhaps create, said sunshine, I have compiled a comprehensive "Lou's List" (uh oh) to get things off to a good start. Some things are continuations of last year's work (illness aside) and some are new ventures that I'm quite excited about. This all sounds rather mystic, doesn't it? It basically boils down to me putting what energy I do have into pursuits that will repay me with more smiles and more pennies.

First stop, greetings card designs. I'll leave you with my first few with the promise of more to come - I've entered these into a Tigerprint competition, so fingers crossed!

© Lou Peajeux 2011

© Lou Peajeux 2011

© Lou Peajeux 2011

© Lou Peajeux 2011

© Lou Peajeux 2011