Flamingo Magazine

Yesterday I received a copy of Issue #3 of the beautiful Flamingo magazine. If you haven't heard about Flamingo (which if you haven't, why not?!), it is a London-based culture and illustration magazine that celebrates doing-it-yourself.


Issue 3 focuses on homes and habitats, and includes features on the likes of Mark Corrigan's favourite podcaster Alain de Botton, global traveller Steven Newman and Nick Weston, a man who lived in a tree house for 6 months.
It features throughout it's pages a wonderful array of talented illustrators and photographers, including Oona Brown, James Boast, Holly Stoves and Ruby Taylor and boasts a lovely cover created by Robert Hanson.

I was asked to create this illustration for the article about Nick Weston, the 'Wild Man of Ashdown Forest'. The images above shows my pincer-like crab hands holding up a copy of the magazine in typical internet magazine-preview fashion and below a closer look at the illustration itself with a neat white border.

Flamingo is available online here and costs only £7. Or you can buy it at one of the many stockists up and down the country including Magma books, Tate Modern and multiple other newsagents around London and specialist art stores across the UK.

A few editorials

Here are two pieces of recent work, the first commissioned by Wired UK and the second by CSMA Club magazine.
The Wired illustration (above) was to accompany an Ideas Bank essay to do with the idea of rewards. It explains that a study was carried out where two people were asked to complete tasks and rewarded when completed, both subjects were given a reward, but one was bigger than the other. They were both winners, but the person who received the smaller reward felt that more aggrieved at the size of the reward in comparison to the other subject than he did pleased to have been given one himself.

Or something.

The other illustration is a map of Belfast created for motoring and leisure magazine CSMA Club (below).

Secret London

Over the past few days, I have been working on a piece for the Serco Prize for Illustration. The theme this year was 'Secret London' and my entry focusses on the little known fact that Buckingham Palace was built upon the site of a notorious 17th Century brothel.

I wanted to play with ideas of class, adultery and sexuality, but have kept the imagery suggestive so as not to be too lewd. After all, the queen wouldn't like that would she?!

You still have time to enter the competition and can do so by following this link.