Towards the end of last year, I was commissioned by the Indian arm of Penguin to create a quick Illustration for the cover of a book by renowned Indian poet Vikram Seth.

The brief was pretty strict, with a description of exactly what they wanted, but as I hadn’t collaged water before it was still a fun project to complete.

From receiving the brief to delivery of final artwork, everything completed within 24 hours, so It was also good practice in completing a high pressure job with a very tight deadline.

Below are pics of the printed cover along with the final Illustration I created (the shells were part of the original brief, but they decided to remove them from the Illustration when it went to print).

Got a little kick out of seeing my name next to the Penguin logo too

I quietly entered my ‘Grey Heron’ collage in to the BBC Wildlife Artist Of The Year 2012 competition in early February and am happy to announce that I got the email today to say that I’ve made it through to the finals for the second year running.

Last year I reached the stage of Commended Finalist with my Golden Eagle collage, so lets hope I can go one better this year and win the British Birds category.

So, it’s off to the Marwell Wildlife Park again on 24th May with my framed collage for final judging – keep your fingers crossed for me.

Here’s my entry – ‘The Grey Heron’

Trying something a bit different with my first promo mailer of 2012…

Rather than sending a single postcard, I wanted to send a number of images to each prospective client. Taking advantage of their printfinity system to have different images on the front of each card, I used moo’s business cards and selected illustrations from my portfolio that would be relevant to each prospective client (I also created a few new Illustrations where I didn’t have something relevant to use).

Once printed, I placed them in a plastic business card holder strip, trimmed the holder to size (sent 4 cards to some contacts and only 3 to others) and sent them off with a hand written note to each dream client – ensuring that my branding was consistent throughout.

The strategy behind sending multiple, smaller cards was that prospective clients would then have spare copies to pass around to other people in their department and spread the awareness of my work.

Fingers crossed…

Total cost of printing, business card holders and postage to 16 carefully chosen contacts was around £40.

Here are the finished cards showing the 10 images that I chose, along with the back of the card with all my details etc…

Here are the wallets for the cards trimmed to size…

And finally, the hand written note along with the relevant set of cards for that prospective client…