Tower Bridge Panorama, originally uploaded by Ben Grubb.

I went out with Phil again last night to take some photos. It’s been a while since we went out last. That trend almost looked like it was going to continue as well as what had been a rather pleasant day slowly deteriorated into horrible, drizzly rain! We were strong and stuck it out though in the name of art. And of course, by that I mean we sat in the pub for a while drinking free samples of Pear Cider that were being given out by a girl called Charlie.

Anyway, the rain finally eased up and we managed to make to our destination for the evening: Tower Bridge. We didn’t really have too long there by the time we finally arrived, but I did manage to shoot this nice panorama. You can’t beat long exposure shots down by the river!

Here’s another piece of recent(ish) artwork. This was (and possible still will be) part of a set of posters advertising PrAna. I really love PrAna clothes, as well as their design and branding. Marvelous stuff! I wanted to design something which could still fit in with the same sort of feel of what they have already, i.e. the organic, natural looking style, but with my own style too it as well. The poster(s) were going to feature a different PrAna sponsored climber on each one – the obvious first choice being Mr. Sharma. So, I started doing some sketches of the man himself, and worked one of them into the poster. Like so…

I was working on this around the same time as I discovered the Poladroid software, so I decided to use Poladroid some shots of Sharma on the posters as well. I think they’re a nice addition and something a bit different. I also went back to basics, and put the leaves which clog up our front door to good use! There’s lots of nice (I would say “shiny” but well, y’know…) leaf textures in my library now! I dare say they’ll be cropping up more in the future – I really like them. The rest of the background of the poster came together pretty quickly really. It was another one of those pieces where all the elements just seemed to fit together without too much effort. It’s times like that when the whole thing is a real joy! I added some text and the logo (which I had to recreate with Adobe Illustrator as I could only find low res versions of it online) in InDesign and then it was all sorted. Another piece for the portfolio. Hurrah!

Recently on Twitter, a friend of mine called Tracey (aka MissOceania) retweeted a message creative website/bloggy type thing called Creative Boom. They were putting a call out to designers to produce a banner for their site. There was no real brief other than that. They sent me their logo which needed to be included, and I spent one night last weekend sat in front of highlights from the Reading festival, putting together a banner. It went well, and it’s now live on the site: www.creativeboom.co.uk!

…and here’s the banner in all it’s glory:

It’s nice to have turned something around so quickly and to see it up live is even better! They’ve also featured me in their LookBook feature which is great as well! There’s nothing like some free advertising, eh? Katy who runs the site seemed to really like it, and has asked me to have more design input to the site which is pretty exciting (and equally nerve wracking) for me. I’ll keep you posted. Until then, check out Creative Boom – There’s some really interesting articles and work on there!