Herne the Hunter

okay – so, going back to the magazine commission couple of months ago …

and here we have Herne the Hunter – a kind of mystical tree/stag spirit of the woods.

For these illustrations I was trying to channel nostalgia – each of the five illustrations was of a different legendary character, so I felt it necessary to illustrate them in a suitable style.

I choose to illustrate the mythical spirit of the greenwood not as a stag-headed man, but as a man dressed in stag garb, purely in reference to the old “Robin of Sherwood” television series from the early/mid eighties.

Again, the trees are an amalgam from various John Ford woodland illustrations.

on a vaguely related note …

I Know What I’m Doing This Summer

… I’ve not posted for a little while – well, my reasons are several-fold; I find myself in the exciting position of being spewed out of mainstream 9 to 5 work in a small handful of weeks – an escape from full-time teaching (again! … “Just when I thought I’d got out! They pull me back in!”) So, I’ve got a bunch of weeks over the Summer break to put together a wider range of products -; some cards and another booklet, methinks. I know what it is that I want to do ….

.. but, it ain’t half tricky motivating oneself towards goals like this without deadlines! I’m trying to set the deadline of the end of the Summer break (for UK schools) as I’ll be dipping my toes back in the exciting world of supply teaching again!