18

This is the card I made for my sister's 18th, I wanted to do an intricate interweaving Rob Ryanesque floral border & then I found a ridiculously ornate Victorian font made from vines and flowers that fitted in perfectly, so I used it as the basis for the numbers.

Acrobat

This is the piece I did for the Tinderbox Circus exhibition that was part of the SoGo festival over the May Bank Holiday weekend. I originally wanted to do a sort of Victorian Freak Show type thing like a bearded lady but decided to go with something a lot simpler and graphic with more elegant lines.

Au Revoir Claire!

My flatmate & best friend Claire moved to France with her boyfriend last week, so this is the farewell card I made for her, full of French clichés & stereotypes! (and a border of croissants!)

I wish them both beaucoup de luck on their voyages fantastiques, I'll miss her lots but at least I'll have une couch to sleep on in Paris maintenant!

Mam's card

This is the card I did for my mam's birthday recently, I added a couple of Rob Ryan birds holding the birthday banner.

More Shaun of the Dead

Here's some better shots & close ups of my Shaun of the Dead papercut. Tyler Stout and movie poster legend Drew Struzan were a big influence on the composition of this, I tried to pick out key characters at iconic moments as well as some of my own favourite moments from the film. cornetto.

Finito!

This is the finished piece. I'll put up some better, non-glary photos when the exhibition finishes next week.

More progress...

Here's a few snaps I took while I was cutting out the final piece. I always like to see the behind the scenes stuff so this shows the process I used to do this papercut.

Work in progress...

This is the layout sketch I've done for my piece for the new Tinderbox exhibition "Picture Show" opening in Filmbase next Monday. I'd originally planned on a trilogy of pieces of 3 of my favourite films - Shaun of the Dead, Amelie & Blade Runner (hence the sketch of Deckard from a while ago) but it's taken way longer than I thought to do just one so the others will have to wait for now!
The final piece is going to be cut out of black, white & red paper so I was drawing it with this in mind, trying to find a way for all the blacks to join up so they'd hold together when cut.

eye of the tiger

This is a drawing I did a couple of years ago that I just found again today, he looks kinda pissed off....I've got that Rocky song stuck in my head now!

Doro's card

A spring weather party for Doro's birthday.

I'll Eat you Up...

This has been in my sketchbook for a while, hand drawn letters coloured in Illustrator, probably need to work on the colours a bit more.

Deckard

Deckard from Blade Runner

Nonna

Here's a sketch of an old Italian Nonna I did for a storyboard at work, even though it was just a rough sketch I like the amount of character it suggests.

Douglas

Test Drive!

I got a Wacom tablet for Christmas so did a sketch of Carol from Where the Wild Things Are to try it out & see how responsive it is. It's fairly intuitive and accurate so hopefully with a bit of practice it'll become 2nd nature. Going to mess around with adding colour to it & see how it goes.

Reindeer

This is my submission to the This Is Not A Shop Christmas Art Fair, which is running until Saturday 19th. There's a great mix of stuff this year, check it out while it lasts!

Luigi Lightswitch

Claire's Card

This is the card I did for my friend Claire's birthday, a big c made up from stuff she likes.

Darkly Dreaming

Have been catching up on the show Dexter, the Miami PD forensic detective who is also a serial killer in his spare time. It can be a bit cheesy & formulaic at times but I'm still kinda hooked! Plus it has a great opening title sequence by Digital Kitchen that manages to get across all the dark violent undertones of the show by showing his daily morning routine. The way it's edited, by cutting frames here & there and changing the speed of the film really gives an uneasy feel to it and the way they manage to make cooking breakfast & getting dressed look violent is genius! I can't eat bacon & eggs anymore without thinking of this!

Some Blind Alleys

I recently won a competition to design a banner and a few other buttons for Some Blind Alleys, an online journal of contemporary Irish writing and visual art. I wanted to create something clean, impactful & colourful and I wanted to keep it typographic, as the blog is the meeting point of writing and visual art, so the type becomes the image. I added the texture of paper in the background to give it a more tactile feel as if the shapes had been overprinted, allowing the colours to overlap. Simplifying the letterforms to their basic geometric shapes has been done countless times going back as far as the Bauhaus & probably even before that, and the resurgence of '80's fashion and design has seen these sort of typefaces become popular again with designers like Hort and Non-Format, so I'd been looking for an opportunity to have a go at something like this.

Safari tee

This is a tshirt I designed while working for Just Jeans when I was living in Melbourne. Melbourne is one of the coolest cities to live in in the world (even though I haven't lived in that many of them) pity it's on the other side of it!

Thanks to Buck for modelling it...he's so dreamy!

Christmas Monster

This is a Christmas Monster that I doodled a couple of years ago! I came across it again randomly today so here it is.

91

Haven't posted in a while cos I've been working late at work pretty much every night for the last 2 weeks - boo - but here's the card I did for my Granny's 91st birthday at the weekend.

C-A-Tshirt

I wanted to do something different than a regular card for my friend Sabrina's birthday so I drew onto a tshirt with a fabric marker. The cats are based on illustrations by Gemma Correll and I added a few more of my own in her style. I like the wee guy hanging out on the back!

(ps. sorry the pic is so crappy, I only took a photo with my phone for some reason)

Easter Birthday Card

My sister Áine's birthday fell around Easter weekend this year so I did a birthday & Easter card in one featuring some springtime flora & fauna making a giant negative egg.

Today's post is brought to you by the number 4 and the number 0!

Belated Happy Birthday to Sesame Street, which turned 40 yesterday. Sesame Street & the muppets were a huge influence on me growing up from the colours & designs to their humour & trippy animations. What better way to celebrate than Feist's Sesame Street version of 1,2,3,4! (I love the way she gets excited at the end cos she got it right in one take)

Potatoface

This is the mask I made for the Tinderbox Mask party (and then also recycled for Halloween!)

D.o.G. R.i.P.

This is the sisterpiece to dogface. I got commissioned to do a portrait of a friend's dog who had died. Then they got me to do one of their new dog, maybe so he wouldn't get jealous.

Malcesine

That last post sounded a bit waffly so here's a pic to support my ramblings!

Wedding Card

This is the Congrats card I did for my aunty for her wedding.

She had it in Malcesine on Lake Garda in Italy which is gorgeous, the mountains behind the lake fade into misty nothingness so it seems like there's no horizon and nothing beyond, as if you're at the edge of the world.

Christmas cards

I know it's a bit early to be bringing up the "C" word yet but here's a couple of card designs I did for the charity Link. The first is a papercut, the second is a heavily Sanna Annukka influenced illustration.

Ciara's card 09

I found 17 a hard age to do a birthday card for, can't go too kiddy and they're still a year away from official adultdom so I decided to do something that was more grown up but still young & cool. I used different types of metallic and handmade papers and based the design on an illustration by Kirsten Ulve (who I've been meaning to post about for ages)

3D card

This is the card I did for my lil sis's 16th. I'd seen this style done a few times and thought it looked really cool so decided to give it a go. I made all the bits and then lit it and photographed it.

Screenprint

Did a screenprint weekend a while ago so decided to do a Sanna Annukka inspired owl for my mammy.

Uchoose characters

These are characters I designed for an online price comparison site Uchoose. The idea is that they are your own personal shoppers for each section on the site with their own personality suited to the area they specialise in. These were quite fun to do as I based some of them on film characters or celebrities, like the slick sales guy (3rd from left) is based on Christian Bale from American Psycho and the travelling thrill seeker (2nd last) is a mix between Matthew McConnaughey and Owen Wilson!