Make your own Angel card

 This next week or so I'll be updating my blog daily with all the work I've not shared yet!

Let's kick off with 2021's Christmas card... a make-your-own angel.

I love doing pop-up or make-your-own cards - they elevate a simple card into something between a card and a gift, and give little hands (or larger ones!) something to do over the Christmas period.

Commission backlog

Hello again!

For a while I've been doing commissions for various Children's text books. It's nice work; varied, fun and usually a bit of a challenge - as you can probably tell from the interesting mix of Christmas, Shakespeare scene and lederhosen.
I wasn't actually sure whether the publisher's would be ok with me putting stuff up here but I checked with my agency and apparently it's absolutely fine so here's a couple of pieces from the backlog!
I'll most likely put a few more up in a week or so (providing I remember lol) so...

See you soon!

H

Christmas Cards 2011!

Hello all!

Sorry I've been quiet for so long - it's been a rather hectic month I'm afraid. 

I've been working to finish my research paper (which is finally done and dusted!), make quite a lot of Christmas presents for people (which will be uploaded once they've been opened by the recipients), working on a few commissions (I'll upload what I can), working and (obviously) making Christmas cards for people. 

I was perfectly fine with this workload, but my body organised a mutiny and punished me with a rather nasty dose of Tracheitis.

I'm currently bundled up in bed with a mug of hot Ribena (throat soother of champions) and strong antibiotics. I've actually been stuck in bed since last Tuesday with the monotony only broken by two doctors appointments and my mum turning up at my house, rolling me in a duvet, and driving me to hers to be fed chicken soup and worried about at a shorter distance. I must've looked (and sounded) pretty rough on Skype.

Anyway, that's enough of that - I thought this year instead of the usual style of Christmas card I'd go a slightly different direction and do a narrative based comic-card. Undoubtedly the many new graphic novel artists at uni this year are having an influence!

It's designed to be printed on both sides of an A4 sheet, slit in the middle, and folded so it creates a little book that can then be unfolded to see the poster inside.

This little piece is done with black and grey ink pens on paper and then photocopied on to some nice laid paper (I love that stuff). There was a run of 50 in total.

You might recognise it coz it's the same process I used for the 'Le Petomane' piece in my portfolio that Jonny Hannah taught us at Kingston Uni.

See you soon! Sooner than last time in any case ;)

H

Bears and Bones

Hello there!

Just a little look at some sample pieces I did for a client's possible collaboration with Converse. They're not going to use them now, but I liked them so much I thought I'd pop them up here!

Crazy busy at the mo, just enrolled for my final year of MA so time to get stuck in! Nerve-racking, but good.

See you soon!

H

Nightmares at the Museum of Childhood

Hey hey!

So I went to the Museum of Childhood down at Bethnal Green today with fellow illustrator Shannon Taylor (Ingraham as was - ch-ch-check it - shannondtaylor.com) where they have their current "Stuff of Nightmares" exhibition on. At first you think it's kind of funny with its mismatched dolls and papier mache trees and ravens, but if you sit there for a long time with all these creepy misshapen toys staring at you while the eerie woodsy sounds play it actually makes you feel a bit weirded out.

Kudos to the V&A: they actually managed to get me to draw something vaguely tense and foreboding instead of colour-happy-joy-joy.

Hats off also to all the parents not afraid to risk the screaming of their children. Although there's a distinct possibility that all parents loose all ability to react to loud noises. The ones today certainly seemed unconcerned at the din of what felt like several hundred kids in one large, but confined, space.

Anyways, see you soon!

H

Work In Progress - Henry VIII

Hey hey lovely people!

Here's the sneaky peek I promised you into the work I'm doing for my MA project! This jaunty Henry is going to be part of M's page. Yeah, you guessed it... Matrimony! Definitely his favourite thing.

I wanted to wait until the page is done but every time I look at him I giggle a little bit so I had to share it with you.

Enjoy! And see you soon!

H

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Hey hey!

Here's the piece I entered into the Penguin Design Award this past year! I'm really pleased with the outcome - this one was a lot of fun to do! I didn't get shortlisted but I'm pretty much just planning to continue entering until I do (Take note Penguin, you're not getting rid of me that easily!).

Anyway! Been beavering away on my MA project and i'm planning to give you guys some sneaky peeks into the soon.

See you later!

H

The Jellyfly Cometh!

Hey hey!

Behold the jellyfly! Arch nemesis of the butterfish! And also one of my many aliases.
Explaining this one is pretty difficult, but suffice to say that the type of conversations that *this* came from make me very glad to be working where I am.
Also, I want this on a t-shirt a little bit.

H

Dad's Day Card

Another year, another father's day card! I love that my dad understands me enough to know that it's a good thing when I say I love him more than Midsomer Murders. I also had great fun making the envelope looks like a 6 year-old had done it.

H

Antlers

Hey hey!

Something a little different to my usual - I feel it incorporates the way I work from observation to the way I work regularly on full pieces from my imagination. I had fun doing it anyway!
This is pencil coloured and arranged on Photoshop. The only real problem I had with this piece was the sheer amount of options I ended up with colour and tone-wise. Narrowing it down was not easy, especially as I had quite a strong red in mind for the background. I think I prefer this though.
Drawing inspiration both from my visit to the Museum of London and the amazing costumes on display there and some rather fantastic comic books artists I've been looking at recently.

Let me know what you think!

H

H-Bomb and the Palindrones

This is a little piece I promised to a friend; a poster of H-Bomb and the Palindrones, a fictional band we made up after deciding a nickname suggested to me sounded like the lead singer for a rock band. Find represented Punk (in H-Bomb herself), Glam, Metal, Grunge and Pirate (yes, it's a legitimate rock sub-genre)! If you come up with names for the others then let me know!

H

My Lovely New Business Cards

Hello again!

Here are my lovely new business cards that I'm really excited about!
Basically I wanted to have two options card-wise, so I could give out ones with or without my full contact details, depending on the situation. So I've introduced these, mini-cards that have just my name and my website for general promotion purposes, and then the full business cards with everything on them.
I'm also changing my website name from itchy-fingers.co.uk to hannahradenkova.co.uk, just because of the sheer amount of time that explanation took in a conversation about my work.
The website itself is undergoing some pretty hefty changes as well, to streamline everything and make it quicker, so I'll keep you posted as to how that's going.

If you want any details about any of the artwork, let me know!

See you soon!

H

Ducky Chic

Evening All!

I'm trying to get myself to start posting on a more regular basis (particularly as I've been going drawing every week for a while now) so I'm going to attempt to match those weekly location sketches with a post of my other work. Fingers crossed!
On that note, I present my cousin, Olly, the newest, cutest little addition to our family. He's very cool; not everyone can pull off ducky chic, you know.

(I've also discovered drawing cute kids is a lot easier when you have particular parents in mind as you automatically think "Will they send me a birthday card if I suggest this is their child?" and then you can work out where you're going wrong from there.)

H

More faces!

Some more little face designs. I think the top one is some kind of private eye.

H

Cat

The cat character from the story I created around Superbaby (you may remember him - he's at the bottom of the superkids post in June 2010 - http://hannahradenkova.blogspot.com/2010/06/super-kids.html).
As you can probably imagine, this cat is completely unimpressed by SB.

Oo! And 40 followers (yay!).

H

Merry Christmas!

Here's my final Christmas post and my final Christmas card design for this year!

This one was for the lovely people at the Deli Station and was sent out to their clients earlier this december.

Merry Christmas everyone!


H

Chrimbo cards: Part Deux!

Some more of my stained glass christmas cards! Getting rather excited now! More to come soon, as well as some other work...

H

Christmas is coming!

As an avid fan of Christmas, I tend to do quite a lot of Christmas card designs. I'll be popping them up over the next few weeks ready for the big day!

H

Book Covers

A new book cover design from one of my concept pieces I had floating about and my Amelia piece as a cover design - hoorah for retro fonts!

H

Ezekiel Book Cover

Another design for my agent; had a lot of fun with neon signs and typography on this one. Enjoy!

H