Before, I Could Draw

I curated a group exhibition (my first time doing so) at the end of November 2013. Called Before, I Could Draw, it was based around the idea of illustrators re-interpreting their own childhood artwork. It was a great success and there are plans to continue the project in the future.

My own contribution was Space Control, based on an illustrated story I found in an exercise book at my mum's house. I always used to write and draw aliens and spaceships and killing with lasers, so this was just one of a plethora of very similar options.

Entirely created in Adobe Illustrator. The text from the original story is behind the spaceship. Apart from that, the whole thing is symmetrical. That's kind of my thing, wherever I can get away with it.

This is from when I was five years old. Get a load of my neat handwriting! I know I wrote two full exercise book-length stories before I started school, but over the years I assumed they were just nonsensical letterforms. Not so!

An animated advert for the exhibition. The plan was to saturate social media with a video, then when that proved impossible the plan switched to an animated GIF. You have NO IDEA how many compromises I made in order to get this to not be sized properly for Tumblr, and even then it was rejected for no specific reason. So it's on DeviantART. Yeah, I know.