EAGLE-EYES

The year 2009 will see a new age of military might. The new and genetically improved, Eagle Eyes!

(this, of course is entirely untrue. Although I may pitch the idea to Hasbro or whoever makes action man)

BEAR VS SALMON

I have tried a few new things with this image, I approached the colour in a similar way to cell rendering in animation and the way that I applied the shadow gives it a slight manga look I feel. I recently watched 'spirited away' again which may have had an impact here.

DOWN WIND?

you think I got to smell them coming?

SANDWICHES

mustard, ketchup, mayo.. Kudos to anyone who can identify where the line 'here come the sandwiches' originates from!

WILL YOU BUY?

I have made some designs available for sale on redbubble. They are quite reasonably priced and the tshirts come on American Apparel stock so you know what you're gonna get.

go get go getter

DON'T PANIC

I have received printed copies of my pack design from don't panic so you can expect to see them on the streets in the next week or so. Keep em peeled!

DAPS

Creativity is a fickle beast. Sometimes the juices refuse to flow, other times you see something that commands you to draw it. In this instance it was my shoe.

PIMP

gradients are happening. I'm seeing them all over and though they generally have a bad rep, when applied effectively no one can deny how slick they look. A prime example is in the Justice DVNO video by SoMe which is full of super gloss logos with a retro spacetastic disco flex. I can spend hours creating these effects just for the fun of it. I even have an airbrush which, I have discovered, you are required to sell a portion of your soul to get good with. Its really messy with seemingly invisible overspray tinting everything it touches (my mac speakers are now forever tinted pink) and although you get a lovely texture with it, photoshop is a lot more forgiving. I still find many uses for it, I recently customised a plain white pair of daps into a hot pink to fluro green affair! sex.

DS FANBOY AHOY!

Some like minded individuals over at www.dsfanboy.com have featured the glow stars drawing. checkit

RAYBANMAN

this is a character inspired by the old 80s Kia-Ora advert "its too orangy for crows" At one point of the advert the sun which has become a basketball, lands on a female crow's head and becomes laundry which in turn springs to life and has a little dance. It had a bra for eyes. This is what you would see dancing along singing 'kia ora' if my laundry came to life. Not that I wash my RayBans. I did wash my mobile once..

GLOW STARS

As mentioned in an earlier post, I have always had a fascination for glow in the dark things. As a kid my walls were covered in glow in the dark posters, stickers and glow stars, I had glow in the dark PJs and even glow in the dark braces! This is where the inspiration for this drawing came, It depicts all the things I wanted for christmases in my youth and would lay awake at night gazing at their glow in the dark incarnations blue tacked to the wall

TROPICAL KEN

True story.

JUICY

I started this drawing some time ago for a supermagic track named flash flood. The idea was to invoke hokusai's wave but suggest more of a surge than a crash. I only recently discovered the half finished drawing and it became part of the inspiration for the don't panic pack design, I therefore decided to polish it off and give it the power colours I had originally envisioned..

MY NAME IS SUE

This has just been accepted into an exhibition! Its due to skip around London and Brighton in December I think. I'll update when I get more info.

WORMS

SICK

just been going through some portfolio bits. I drew this originally for a don't panic design brief but prefer it without all the type required for the poster. sick slick

DOGS

POSTERWALL

I've been working on some character sketches and playing with some different rendering techniques on photoshop. The character on the left is DeathWatch Bastard and the guy on the right is Johnny Omens. The posters on the wall are partly random and partly advertise some friends and bands that i know, rob bravery is a top drawer musician and supermagic being one that i was in. Peter Attridge is a prolific producer of posters (particularly for the ukraine girls) and I have honoured him in this scene, check out his beef. I've been attempting to create a slightly more organic feel to the colours, I want the comic to have a lived in feel.

GOD

yo, this is a design for the don't panic pack competition. There aren't that many in the running this month so i stand a reasonable chance of getting somewhere. your votes would fill me with such joy! end date is the 15/09/08. big love

vote for me please!

I will also be posting a high res version on flickr so you can see the glorious screen tone in all its crisp edged wonder. I've just moved house and BT are screwing around with our broadband. Hence the limited number of posts this month. Bastard BT!

JOHNNY OMENS

These are some early character designs for a new comic project that I'm working on in my spare time. The character is called Johnny Omens, I can't take imaginative credit for this name however. It was my sister's imagination that conjured the name when she heard it banded around in a meeting, having made a note of it she asked a colleague about him, only to realise it was John Yeomens! I declared that Johnny Omens was a badass name and could I have it? So thank you Sara! Mr Omen's features are based on those of Stephen Malkmus..

A BOY NAMED SUE COMPLETED

Yeah! This little project has achieved some state of completion (on a cottage industry level anyway). The cover was a new challenge. This is the first fully painted illustration that I've done in a long while. I wanted to do something a bit different to the inside and you often see comic covers painted or at least very highly rendered. Its pretty crude but I like it, I think it does a good job of setting up the inside. I read the 'comics patriarch' Infantino's words on the subject of covers where he talks about 'irritating the eye' and using negative space to draw the reader in. I've found this with my own work where some of the throw away crude drawings that I have produced are the persistently popular ones and the examples of finer draughtsmanship go under the radar. Sometimes the little oddities in an illustration are the things that really give the character.

A BOY NAMED SUE

my first real endeavour into drawing comics, i've taken the johnny cash song 'a boy named sue' and developed it into a short comic story. this is page 1

PEACE

This is another design for don't panic on the theme of peace. You can see and vote for the finished poster here. I was quite pleased with the camo pattern, its something I made up with inspiration from the 'full metal jacket' design. The bright yellow (apart from looking more striking) was to indicate peace in its inefficiency as camouflage. Looks pretty cool though, I thought!

BABYCROW

(after Hokusai's "Crow, Sword, & Plum Blossom") I have a love and fascination for crows and their spiritual significance. They are often considered in mythology to have connections to the afterlife, acting as a vehicle for shaman to transcend worlds when they enter a near death trance in a journey for enlightenment. This is one of the reasons that crows are thought of as spiritual guides and messengers. This void they inhabit is free from our perception of time, therefore they sense past, present and future at once. You may be surprised to hear that I'm not a particularly big fan of the Brandon Lee film 'the crow'. I found it a bit angsty!

This image is a retelling of a Hokusai woodblock print. Crows seem to crop up quite a bit in Japanese culture, I don't know much about any Japanese mythology behind this phenomenon but it may be something for me to explore. I love the fantastical themes that Hokusai depicts, I don't know what the story is behind this print but I want to know!

The benefit of a crow as a graphic element is great for striking silhouettes and compositions.

WARRIORS

Sir Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari sits with assembled Afghan Sirdars.

TEN PACES

Another design idea for 'Dead Maids' depicting the duel element of the ghosts story. I'm trying to make the designs simple and where possible one colour so that they are versatile for tshirts, posters etc.

DEADLY RHYTHM

Poster design for a 'deadly rhythm' club night competition via don't panic. I'm quite an expert on dancing so the drawing came quite easy to me! I'm interested in this idea of a macabre disco where revellers are destined to dance forever in a the swirling, smothering mists of the infernal dance floor. Sometimes it feels like that's what you've been through when the lights come on and the bouncers start herding you through the door like reluctant cattle onto a livestock lorry. I certainly feel like its what I've been through the next morning when I realise I've been writing dance move cheques that my body needs remortgaging to cash! Anyway.. I've always wanted to draw skeletons well and its something that I've been putting some time and research into. I looked into seeing if I could pick up a skull on ebay but then thought better of it, not sure how keen I'd be on the idea when it was sat looking at me all day. Come to think of it, its probably illegal isn't it? selling human remains. You can get prop ones on ebay but for this I had to rely on comics and old 1980s skate graphics!

vote here my friends!

LOTUS

This is a little practice at drawing robots. I actually used inks to colour this one, something i haven't done for a while. These inks are designed purely for reproduction as they are super bright (to the point of making your eyes go squiffy) but not lightfast so when they fade they virtually disappear! There's something quite precious about having artwork that can't be exposed to light, you have it all wrapped up and stored away, like vampires...

THREADLESS

I'm having a stab at turning a few old designs into threadless entries. Threadless is a site that lets you submit designs, people view-discuss-rip to shreds-vote for the designs and if the threadless people see fit they get made into printed t-shirts. I have a couple on the critique section now which is before they get fully entered. Have a look!

king

dandylion

BTP - WHITELADIES

The newest boston tea party to open. its in the remains of an old fopp(RIP) cafe at Whiteladies Road in Bristol. The setting isn't as scenic as Park Street or Bath so a little poetic license was required and ultimately i feel it looks pretty cosy. If you look close on the bottom right of your screens you will see a little figure in a black coat with rayban wayfarers and a quiff, this is me!

DOWN WIND?

Here is a brief snippet of my band supermagic live at moles. Thanks to Bella who took the video.

supermagic

DON'T BRUSH ME

This was one of the first drawings that i produced with a brush and ink. I did it about two to three years ago I think, before that it was all rotring pen which I found became lifeless and time consuming. Around this time i was looking at comic artists and desperately trying to figure out how the weight and character of line was achieved. In particular it was the work of Geof Darrow that inspired me and i was convinced that he had to be using technical pens to draw with that kind of detail but my own endeavors with the pen (although at times very successful) just wasn't blowing my skirt up. I think Darrow actually uses a brush (don't quote me) aided by some drugs. No drugs for me (except coffee) but there has been no looking back from brush work. Its quite a revelation to discover a new medium like this but its taken me a couple of years to develop and polish up on, when i started it was painstaking, deliberate and lacking fluidity which you can see here a little (this was me really cutting loose at the time). Now i'm finally getting to the stage where I can draw almost as swiftly as i can think about drawing, leaving me now to concentrate on coming up with ideas!

GASTRO!

Sometimes you have to wonder where the ideas come from. I've drawn some weird things in my time and have on occasion sat and considered mid drawing, "what would Gran think of me if she saw this?" Particularly at uni where i spent most of my time drawing street ravaging monsters and severed heads. In this instance I have somehow managed to knock out two images that carry a gastronomic theme with Alice consuming a growth inducing cake and the other being a great grotesque orange stomach. I still doubt if this is up Grandma's street but its a step from severed heads.

The designs are for don't panic's poster and flyer competitions, you can vote for them here if you love me!

sick of nature

'change' poster

voting ends 01/02/08 x

KILL IT KID

The finished cd cover for Kill it Kid's new ep. i was particularly pleased with the sketch i did for this image which made it really hard to improve upon with the main artwork. I'd left it a bit late so it had to be a quick turnaround piece but that works in my favor here with the subject being quite a kinetic one. I'm happy with the boots and the reflection on the guitar of mr turpin's shirt. Its funny how you have a bank of resource material in your head that you call upon whenever you come to draw something, for example, whenever i come to draw boots i end up drawing them like a pair I own myself. I might be stuffed if i have to draw womens shoes.