Illustrations

Much of my work has involved illustration, in a variety of styles, from straightforwardly representational to almost hyper-realistic, including pastiches of various artistic periods and artists’ styles. On this page are examples from the 1970s to the present day (some will have links to more complete galleries).

The Gorilla Organization

Watercolour artwork and cartoon strip for this conservation charity. (See more)

Refugee Council

  • The Story of Pierre – an appeal flyer: cover and gatefold.
  • The arrest, imprisonment, torture and arrival in the UK as an asylum seeker of an Iraqui medical student. Illustrations for an appeal flyer.

Tyneside Theatre Company

  • Forget-me-not Lane (1973) Programme (hand lettering and hand-drawn colour separations). Included caricatures of all the main members of the cast, in a style based on a 1940s comic.
  • The Baker, the Baker’s Wife & the Baker’s Boy (Sept 1972) Programme; includes monochrome gouache illustration of silent movie stars Betty Blythe (as the Queen of Sheba) and cowboy actor William S Hart.
  • Stagecoach Theatre Zoom Flyer.
  • There Was an Old Fellow Called Bede… (1973) Flyer.
  • What The Butler Saw (April 1973) Programme with illustrations of four members of the cast, cut to enable them to swap heads, bodies and legs (hand lettering and hand-drawn colour separations).

The Sunday Times

The newspaper used to run an annual competition to design a garden for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. In 1981 I was runner-up with my design for a wildlife-friendly garden (for the 1982 show) that included conservation areas for wild flowers and also some then-unfashionable and unusual cultivars of garden plants in appropriate habitats. My own illustration of the garden was used in the paper and led to some further commissions for their gardening section, including the illustration for a herb border, and one of garden furnishings, to illustrate an article by Sir Roy Strong.

The Plantsman/The Plant Review

I’ve been designing this quarterly publication of the Royal Horticultural Society since 2005 (it changed its name in 2019). In 2018 the new editor, James Armitage, asked me to produce an illustration as a frontispiece for each edition, which I have done since then (although I want to invite other illustrators to contribute). The first was a single column to face his Editorial; since then it has been a full-page illustration. Three examples and a cover photo are shown here. For more, click here.

  • The Plantsman June 2018 (half page; below left): Radermachera sinica (divided foliage and white flower), Myosotis amoena, Dendroseris littoralis (large, undivided foliage and orange flower), and a Jack-in-the-green primrose.
  • The Plantsman September 2018 (below centre): Rojasianthe superba, Hydrangea ‘Runaway Bride’, Eryngium x zabelii ‘Blue Waves’ and Tecophilaea cyanocrocus discovered in 2001, resembling the cultivar ‘Leichtlinii’.
  • The Plant Review Dec 2019 (below right): Watercolour illustration by Simon Garbutt of Eranthis hyemalis cultivars, robin and “yellow” snowdrop Galanthus ‘Primrose Warburg’ in snow.
  • The Plant Review September 2019 (bottom): Atropa belladonna (deadly nightshade) and its yellow-flowered and -fruited variant.
  • The Plant Review March 2020 Cover photo (of Galanthus ‘Spindlestone Surprise’).

The Garden

I’ve written articles, photographed and produced illustrations for the monthly magazine of the Royal Horticultural Society on many occasions since 19. One commission was to produce a cover image for the Bicentenary edition of the magazine in February 2004: I picked and selected the plant material at RHS Garden Wisley, and arranged it for a high-resolution photograph taken by Tim Sandall.

The Gardener

Before working for RHS publications I wrote articles, photographed and also produced monthly illustrations for The Gardener magazine during the early 1990s until it was taken over by a different publisher and production moved to the southwest. It ceased publication a few years later.

Illustration of The Gardener magazine’s garden for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 1992 (above), designed by Dan Pearson.
Illustrations of plant associations for magazine articles in The Gardener (below), mostly written by Nigel Colborn, from 1991 to 1994.

Practical Gardening

An illustration for an article by Jean Stowe on wildlife gardening.

Advertising illustrations

Three illustrations for ViewLogic advertisements (below), themed on circus skills and performers.

Illustration for MBM potato company, a relief map of the UK, created by laying out potatoes of various kinds.

Christmas card for Hirst Conservation, based on a photograph of a sculpted salamander from an historic property where they had been working that year.

Images & Editions

Illustrations for Images & Editions, for use in their “core product” range.

Art & Craft magazine, Scholastic Publications

Illustrations and articles commissioned from me by Scholastic Publications’ Art & Craft magazine

  • The Derby Tup Play (Oct 1983) An article about this little-known ancient Christmas ritual performance
  • The Kissing Bough (Oct 1983) An article about this ancient Christmas custom
  • Illustration for an article on dye plants
  • Illustration for an article that I wrote on edible flowers
Edible Flowers: the selection of plants includes primroses, cowslips, marrow, wild rose, violets, nasturtiums, elderflower, marigolds, rosemary, borage, bergamot and broom. The Dye Plants illustration (above right) and this one have also recently been made available to the charity A Space Between for use as colouring images.