Christmas Whale Christmas card

Will the Christmas whale be climbing down your chimney this year?
One can only hope!

Visit Pixbyrichard on Redbubble  to shop for Christmas Whale on Christmas cards, t-shirts and other fun decorated gift items

The Christmas whale is here with its friends the Christmas dolphins. Echo locating by Christmas carol they bring their cetacean joy to all the boys and girls of the ocean.

The Christmas Whale is part of an ongoing personal challenge to create the most absurd yet fun Christmas card I can. There is so much of the Christmas festival I find utterly bewildering yet enjoyable, so I feel a little nonsense actually makes a Christmas card design more relevant not less!

Combining ocean going creatures and Christmas festivities has been a bit of a theme for me this year. Nothing says absurd as much as a whale wearing a hat and fake beard, so I am pretty happy with this card. Hopefully it hits the right balance of mad, festive and cute for you too.

spruced up the website

Too often have I thought 'Must update my portfolio website' and gone on to do exactly nothing about it. Well a few days ago I broke with this long standing tradition. I reviewed and changed my portfolio images and updated the layout of my website and blog. I also gave the site a shiny new domain name www.richardmordenillustration.com.au

My aim was to make a site visually clean and simple to navigate. All the information a potential customer needs is on one page. No need for a separate landing page, folio page, contact page or about page. The website is built with blogger so folio images are easy to update and the responsive blogger layout means all should look fine on a mobile device.

You will notice inky octopuses in the side bar. These tentacled critters were painted as decorative devices to visually break up the text and give the site some added personality. I took photos of the octopuses on the drawing board. Here they are...

zoomorph animal cards and t-shirts

First there was a deer-cat, now it has friends.

These hybrid animals feature on cards and t-shirts. Click through an item to choose options and order. T-shirts in your choice of style and colour, children's or adult's sizes.

Deer cat

A cat with deer antlers

Horned dachshund

Dachshund with the horns of an oryx.

Moose mouse

A mouse with moose antlers

    

Winged rabbit

A rabbit with bird wings

   

Octopug

A pug with the body and tentacles of an octopus

   

cartoon megafauna t-shirts and kid's clothes

Hug like a Megatherium! - megafauna t-shirt

This 8 ton prehistoric American ground sloth gives very big hugs.

No little Glyptodon… don't sit on the Pudú! - megafauna t-shirt

A Glyptodon (South American giant armadillo) plonks itself down on a hapless Pudu (a tiny deer).

Thylacoleo goes rarr! - megafauna t-shirt

Thylacoleo, the Australian marsupial lion and one time terror of the outback, assails a moth.

Mammoth adventure! - megafauna t-shirt

This Mammoth has its motor started, it is out and on the highway, it is looking for adventure. Oh yeah, whatever comes its way.

Z is for Zygomaturus! - megafauna t-shirt

Zygomaturus, a prehistoric Australian marsupial swamp-cow takes ownership of the letter Z.



These t-shirts feature megafauna, a fancy name for large animals. All these particular megafauna have become extinct during the time modern humans have been around. Chances are you have ancestors who saw, ran away from or ate some of the following prehistoric beasties!

These designs are available via my Redbubble page where they can be ordered online and delivered to you. They are available as men's or women's t-shirts and hoodies and as kids sized t-shirts and clothes.

Original hand painted brush-and-ink artwork, scanned and coloured.
I designed these with kids in mind, but hey, if you are an adult and want to wear one that's okay too!

Illustration Friday - stripes

I saw a great documentary on tv called 'Cuttlefish - Kings of Camouflage'.

One of the cuttlefish featured in the documentary was a Broadclub Cuttlefish which has the remarkable ability to bamboozle its prey with a crazy strobing stripe pattern. Truly bizzare stuff.

If you want to see a real one in action here's a link I found to a clip from the documentary.

Cuttlefish are so cool.

R :)

science fiction homages and aardvarks

As a member of the Melbourne Science Fiction Club I get to use their magnificent library, listen to author talks, and meet other like minded nerdy sci fi types. In return I like to occasionally contribute art for the club magazine.

Here is a collection the cover art I have contributed.

As the club magazine is called Ethel the Aardvark you will note a recurring theme of aardvarks. I don't know why they named the magazine after a Monty Python sketch (Ethel the aardvark goes quantity surveying), but I suppose it's as good a name as any other and it gives me the opportunity to create absurd science fiction homages with aardvarks.

Old mugshots provide great character reference

A couple of weeks ago, over my morning expresso, I idly read a tweeted recommendation to check out a site featuring police mug shots from Sydney in the 1920's. Well I was utterly gobsmacked when the collection of 90 year old photos loaded. They were packed with more character, pathos and culture than you could poke a stick at.

The police photographer of the time had far exceeded the needs of photography for identification, transforming the mug shots into stunning works of portraiture and valuable cultural time pieces. They also happen to make great reference for some play with ink and a brush! A few of the painting efforts I thought I'd post here. I am happy with the results so far (I have to do more), but they are not a patch on the magnificence of the original photos.

Anyway, thought I'd share the reference resource around as it's such a beaut. Oh, and since finding the website I have also found out there has been a book printed with the mug shot photographs - City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs 1912 - 1928, by a chap called Peter Doyle. I must keep an eye out for a copy.