Mappy Halloween!

Nope, that's not a typo in the title! Halloween and the week before have been devoted to sketching out a rough draft of the illustrated map of the Thames which I've been commissioned to create.

I did have the night off last night though for a Halloween party with friends which involved eating of a lot of sweets, 'spider' pizzas and this ghostly cake!

I made the little ghosts out of grapes draped in icing, but the following morning one had a hole in its head where the grape had 'leaked' and dissolved the icing. Luckily it just made it a little creepier!

Anyway, back to the map which I've been working on all afternoon. This week has been all about deciding on the style of symbols to represent supermarkets, golf courses, shopping centres etc.

We've decided to go with illustrations for the shopping centres and anything that can be represented as a picture to limit the amount of symbols and make it more visually appealing.

I quite like this scroll but it's not really suitable for attractions such as theme parks, so I've come up with a slightly less historic looking sign instead. Below is a very geographically incorrect sample of a map with the symbols on, although a few ideas have changed since I did this.

I loved using my new Winsor & Newton watercolours and am so glad I chose the pans rather than tubes. They're lovely to paint with and the colour applies really smoothly.

Here are a few snippets from the scale draft of the map. Below is London, obviously I hope!

And Legoland!

If you'd like to keep up to date with the progress of my map, pop over to my Facebook page where I'll be sharing (hopefully) regular updates!

I'm sharing today's post over at Handmade Harbour.

Ballpoint pen drawings - Mum's sewing box

Deep in Christmas shopping, card writing and festive baking here so I only have a couple of drawings to share with you today and I'm cheating a little as the second one is only half finished!

They're both drawn with ballpoint pen. This one's A5 sized.

It's not really obvious here but this one is on cream A4 paper. It's drawn from a photo of an interesting fashion pin board which I found on Flickr. I still have the other half to do :)

Here are the mince pies that have also been keeping me busy!

Today I'm linking up to the following blogs: Lorik Art and Manon Popje's Illustrations