Number one best seller!

A dream project for me as a life long nature lover, Naturama and My Naturama Nature Journal were a joy to illustrate. I got to work on researching and drawing Irish wildlife throughout the seasons and I’m so happy with the result. The books were co created with the writer Michael Fewer and published by  Gill Books. Naturama came out first and is a beautiful introduction to Irish wildlife, regardless of whether you live in the countryside or in the city, there’s lots of things to learn about and get you started as a nature enthusiast. It was so cool to see it become a number one bestseller and meet loads of wonderful children who were loving the book! My Naturama Nature Journal has projects for children to do outside and field guide notes sections to write and draw in. It gets everyone outside turning rocks upside down looking for worms :) Click here for all the latest Naturama related news….

A post shared by Melissa Doran (@goradiate) on Nov 29, 2016 at 9:23am PST

If you take a walk down Benson Street in Dublin 2 you will see a very colourful little area amongst all the dust of the nearby building sites!  I was commissioned by Dublin City Council to design a  55 metre long illustration on a hoarding around the building site for a new park. The drawing moves through the four seasons and is packed full of native flora and fauna, and features some local landmarks too. Here is a timelapse of me drawing one of the foxes from it (press play in the fox image), and below is a simple animation I made to show you the full thing…plus more photos here…. For this project, I did most of the drawing by hand in my notebook, then scanned it in and worked it up in Illustrator.  I collaged hand coloured work with vectorised, digitally coloured elements. I collaborated with the printer to have everything perfect so they could make a series of panels to fit with the perimeter of the site, taking into account the corner elements and the slight slope. Once printed, the site contractors took care of the rest and installed it over a day. (Luckily I didn’t have to be out in the cold painting it!). Let me know if you go see it!  

Digital Illustration workshop in Fumbally Exchange, Dublin, book here. 

Next workshop: June 23rd/24th 2018. 

Develop your digital illustration skills over one fun weekend using Illustrator in Dublin. Learn how to draw digitally and and bring your artwork to a whole new level. 11 CPD point for Architects. I am an Adobe Certified Expert with 5 years teaching experience and my classes are just great! The two days are jam packed and very hands on but I create a very relaxed atmosphere and give lots of encouragement and one to one help. I focus on ways to incorporate hand drawn work so you can bring in your existing skills. There is a maximum of 5 participants so everyone gets lots of attention.