Tuesday 22 September 2009

Japan Matsuri Festival

This weekend I went to the Japan Matsuri Festival, in Spitalfields. It was a really good event, and I had a great time eating sushi, and watching Japanese musical performances.

I also met up with Zarina Liew, who was exhibiting her work at the festival after entering a competition to illustrate a traditional Japanese tale. While I was talking with her, material for a new comic strip literally happened before my eyes...


...Sometimes you just can't make this stuff up!

You can check out Zarina's winning illustration here.

Sunday 20 September 2009

Happy Birthday To Me...

So it was my birthday last week, and here's a comic I drew the day after while feeling a little delicate after a very enjoyable birthday drinks the night before...

Thursday 17 September 2009

Look What They Drawed...

So, yesterday was my birthday, and I got a lot of hand-drawn cards from my friends which I wanted to share. As someone who is always drawing cards for other people, it was really nice to get some of my own, so thanks to everyone!


Yuki


Kazu


Joe


Elli


Hayley


JoCo

Monday 14 September 2009

Illustration Friday: Welcome



Okay, stick with me on this one! So this week's Illustration Friday topic is Welcome, which made me think of the opening lines from the song Welcome To The Jungle, by Guns N' Roses:
"Welcome to the jungle, We've got fun 'n' games".

And what better "fun 'n' games" than an interspecies game of Pop-up Pirate to determine who's the real King of the Jungle!

Paul Shinn covers Amazing Spider-Man 16

So, I found this really cool blog site called Covered where a variety of artists have redone existing comic book covers in their own style. It's an open submission site, and updated daily (Mon–Fri) with a new selected work.

Last week, I had a go at producing my own cover version of Amazing Spider-man #16, originally drawn by Steve Ditko in 1963. Unfortunately my submission did not make it onto the blog this time, but I was happy with the final image and wanted to post it here. Here is my submission on the right, next to the original cover:













I enjoyed working on this piece, and will definitely work on another cover to submit in the future.

Sunday 13 September 2009

It's a nice day for a white wedding!

So yesterday was my friend Laura's wedding, and was a beautifully sunny day, with not a cloud in the sky! Here is the wedding card I drew for her and her new husband Callum, also featuring their absolutely adorable dog Pippa, who was not at the wedding, but this is my idea of what it might have been like if she was there...



I spent quite a while trying to come up with an idea, before finally reaching a Eureka! moment and doing a quick thumbnail sketch...

...then I drew up a pencil rough to size...

It then struck me that although in my head I was sure that Laura had mentioned that Callum would be wearing a kilt to the wedding, the more I thought about it, the less certain I became. I sent a quick email to Laura to check (which probably sounded very strange: "Hi. Yeah, I was just wondering...is your future husband planning on wearing a kilt to the wedding? Bye!"), and she replied slightly curious, to say that he had been planning it, but then decided against it! Good job I checked so I was able to change my drawing before I finalised it.

I then used a dip pen and black Indian ink to draw the final version onto card...

...before adding colour by hand using marker pens and using a metallic silver Sharpie pen on the lettering for a bit of razzmatazz...


I was torn for a while over whether to leave it like this, or to add a background to make it more complete. I sort of liked the white space, but also felt it was maybe a bit too empty. As you can see from the final version at the top of the page, I eventually decided to add a quite minimal background just to give the image more a semblance of space and setting. I drew this using a fine liner pen rather than ink to make it visually move back from the main image.

Saturday 12 September 2009

Birthday Bonanza Month #1

September is truly the month of birthdays (which is probably due to people getting particularly amorous during the Xmas and New Year period, which is about 9 months earlier...).

Yesterday was my friend Hayley's birthday. I was thinking of what to draw for a card, and then remembered a rather unusual Facebook status update she wrote earlier this week:

"Hayley Clarke saw Bob Dylan and Boris Johnson buying Citizen Kane outside my house this morning."



...it turns out that what actually happened was that she saw somebody that looked a lot like Bob Dylan walking by, and then a short while later saw Boris Johnson on a boat called the Citizen Kane that's been for sale for ages, and she assumed he was there to buy it. In this case, I think I prefer my version of events...

Monday 7 September 2009

Illustration Friday: Strong



This week's Illustration Friday topic is "Strong". I immediately thought of a drawing I did early last year which fitted the topic, but I wanted to update it slightly and make more of a scene out of it, so I redrew the main figure from the previous image, added some more characters, and coloured the figures with marker pen. I then added the background and coloured this in Photoshop.

Sunday 6 September 2009

Collaboration project 1

After working on a sketch together during the Collaborama! event last month, me and Kazu have been working on another collaborative illustration together, which we just finished.

I started it off by drawing the initial image on an A4 page, and then scanning and emailing it to Kazu, who then drew another part to the image, scanned it and sent it back to me. We kept on sending it back and forth until we'd pretty much run out of space to draw. Here is the finished piece...



It has been very interesting to work together on a single image, and I'm very happy with the final piece and seeing our characters and styles interacting. We've decided to work on another collaborative illustration and see where it leads...

Wednesday 2 September 2009

Florence And The Machine

I was watching footage of this year's Reading & Leeds Festival over the weekend and really enjoyed seeing Florence And The Machine. But then I got to thinking about what that name actually means, with the only logical explanation being that she is, in fact, a cyborg...

The Amazing Spider-Mouse

Here's an image that appeared in my head after reading the news about Disney buying Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion...