Illustrated Penguin Book Jacket

Illustration students are nearly always set the projects to design and illustrate a Penguin book jacket, this is always difficult as you not only have to do the illuststions but decide which book you would like to illustrate. A difficult decision for anyone!
Orange covered Penguin books have always taken pride of place on my book shelves supported by the green crime thrillers (and maybe some white Picadors). So after many years of waiting and illustrating for different parts of the Penguin group I will finally have a Penguin (image) on the illustrated book jacket I am working on at the moment for Penguin in New York( thanks to Penguin Art Director, Roseanne Serra). The book called ‘If the Buddha had kids’ and is by the author Charlotte Kasl and is part of a series of books but this is the first to be published by Penguin.

Illustrated Flower Faces

I was recently designing a repeat pattern for 'The Green Wiccan Herbal" and in the process layered the same image fliped on top of each other as you do. As I moved the images over each other the shapes created endless faces mainly of frogs and rabbits but Maddie Bee and I had a good 15 mins of fun playing with the two layers in photoshop. I am not sure how many different faces we found but if you have Photoshop or similar programme let me know and i will send you the image to play with. Have fun!

Book Illustrations

I have just finished illustrating two books for the publisher Cico Books. The first book, was a series of step by step illustrations about how to make children's clothes for the fantastic author and creator Emma Hardy. I was really pleased with these 'how to illustrations' which I feel were made special by the colours and fabrics chosen by the author.
The second book was called The Green Wiccan Herbal by the author Silja this is a follow upto the 'The Green Wiccan Year' which was also publiished by Cico books in Autumn 2008.
The Herbal shows over a hundred illustrations by Michael A Hill mainly showing different herbs and food types used within the art of Green Witchcraft.
In addition to these two books I also did a few illustrations for a new book ' The art of Letter- writing' which is being edited by Liz Dean at Cico.