LIFE HACKS – the essential collection

A clutch of illustrated poems, each telling a silly little story – about which it was said
“Hey this book is really, really good.”

go buy my book

some things from this site, some from instagram, and some you have never seen before
– all fantastic.

just updated!
simple gallery

classified Portfolio

You can click on any of the panels below to see more.  Sometimes they take a bit of time to load because there are tons of images here.  If you just want a quick overview of what I do then you can  try the simple gallery instead

poems

poems

stories

stories

odds & sods

odds & sods

contact

where I am

I spend much of my time travelling, but I have homes in both the UK and Poland.  I love meeting people both professionally and socially so get in touch for a zoom or a coffee.

hire me

I write verse and I draw.
I meet deadlines and I deliver.
Always happy to discuss collaborations and opportunities to illustrate books and projects  visually and/or verbally.
If any of this is of interest drop me a line or a call.

contact

By email
at nickjamesillustrator@gmail.com
by Whatsapp on +48 508 857 109
through my alter ego at the Trajectory

About

nick james

I live and travel with my wife Ania and our twin daughters.

I practice as a lifecoach and I build websites of which this one was my first, inspired by my lifetime love of illustrated stories. I list my interests beyond illustration and storytelling, as family, food, travel, music, film and also recreational maths, science and philosophy. I occasionally write essays and poems.

I love all kinds of beautiful things, both abstract and physical, natural and manufactured.

illustration & stories

My father passed on a deep love of illustrated books even before infant Nick could follow a story. As a child, I would pore over the work of Edmund Dulac, Arthur Rackham, William Heath Robinson and EH Shepard, admiring the apparent simplicity of line drawings most of all.

My love of storytelling in rhyme came much later. I discovered Dr Seuss and Julia Donaldson, and rediscovered the rhymes of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll when I became a father myself. My very favourite illustrated book is Skottie Young’s version of Neil Gaiman’s Fortunately the Milk, followed closely by almost everything by Quentin Blake and Dr Seuss.

Almost all of the work on this site is done in Procreate on an iPad Pro.  Some of the life and open air sketches are done on paper, I used to use expensive soft pencils, and grainy paper; more recently dirt cheap printer stock and mechanical pencils from Wilco!

website

As with all my creative work, the trajectory of this  project was a spiral zigzag sawtooth rollercoaster kind of trip, and an enormous learning curve.

After several dead-end attempts, I re-built the site from scratch in WordPress using Elementor Pro on the Hello theme.

It is typeset in Port Lligat Sans and Mountains of Christmas, both from Google Fonts.

copyright © nick james 2017 - 2024