That's All Folks! (2009–2019)

It's hard to believe that it's been 10 years since I first started this blog! At the time I was working Full Time as an In-House Designer at a Book Publihers in London and had just enrolled on a four day Illustration course at Camberwell College of Art, seeing how I felt about going back to study before deciding whether to enroll in the MA course later that year. I started this blog to share what I was doing on the course.



My first post was on Sunday 30 March 2009 and straight away I was sure Illustration was something that I wanted to explore further, and so I ended up quitting my job and starting the MA course at Camberwell in the Autumn (after taking a trip to Melbourne and Sydney in between)!

The course gave me the time to really focus on what I wanted to do with my Illustration work and I think that I started to develop my Illustration style a lot more during this time. And I continued to share my work on this blog! I always found it a good resource to be able to look back over what I'd done, especially in those moments when I felt like I wasn't quite achieving enough. Creativity and Anxiety are strange bedfellows!

I recently took part in an Illustration Fair in Kings Cross, where someone came up to my table and told me that they started following my blog about 10 years ago, so pretty much from when I started it, after her sister suggested that if she was interested in becoming an illustrator, she should have a look online and see what people were doing. It's not often that you get to meet your online audience IRL, but it was definitely humbling to know that someone had been looking at what I was doing all this time!

And so I kept posting work, and even when I wasn't getting much commissioned work, I was still trying to produce work to post on my blog. I think one of the key things to try to achieve as an Illustrator is to remain visible. With so many other people out there trying to make it work, if you drop off of people's radar for too long then it's hard to get back on there. It's part of the reason I named this blog (and my first printed comics collection) Look What I Drawed! It made me think of that kid proudly clutching his painting in his hands and showing it off to his mum on the way home from nursery: "Look what I drawed mum! Look!" (And yes, I know it should be "Drew", as one person once commented criticising my use of grammar. But "Drawed" is funnier! And it's my blog, so I'll spell how I want to! :P ). This blog was the digital equivalent of that. Proudly shoving my latest drawing into people's online faces! (I think this metaphor may have run away from me...)

But over the years, I've been picking up more commissioned work, as well as working more hours at my other jobs, plus the proliferation of various Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter which provide more immediate ways to get people to see my work, and gradually I've been posting less and less on my blog. I've gone from posting nearly 150 posts per year back in 2013 to barely double figures in the last few years. And most of those have begun with an apology for not posting for ages, followed by an endeavor to post more frequently for a few weeks, and then nothing again till the following year. Rinse and Repeat.

My last blog post was almost exactly a year ago on Sunday 25 February 2018. And after thinking about it over the last few days, I think it's probably time that I retire this blog for good.

Anyone who is still Following me on here, please do go and check out and Follow my Instagram page where I regularly post updates and new drawings: www.instagram.com/paulshinndraws. I'm also on Twitter as @paulshinndraws and I have a Facebook page too. And I have a website, which is www.paulshinndraws.com and my comics are also available to buy from my Etsy Shop.

I'm not going to be deleting this page, so it'll still be viewable. And anyone who is only just discovering it now and is bummed that I'm not gonna be posting any more stuff here, you have 858 previous posts to look through, so that should keep you busy for a while!

Like I said, I occasionally like to sit and have a look back through my previous work to remind myself of what I've done before. It's amazing how much stuff I completely forgot I even did. Like this drawing of Ghandi from my first Movillustrations project back in 2012, which seems like an appropriate image to end on:



Thanks for reading and following!

The Line It Is Drawn: Week 379

This week's The Line It Is Drawn was a theme close to my heart: videogames! I was so enraptured with the suggestions made, that I ended up producing three pieces for this week!

Cyclops and Havok in Super Mario Bros (Super Summers Bros?), as suggested by therealAstrozac


Q*Bert meets Doop, as suggested by BigMike20X6


Magik vs Samus from Metroid as suggested by Brian_Cronin (This one was actually an existing drawing I did last year, but it seemed to fit the theme!)

Character Design Challenge: Alice In Wonderland

The Character Design Challenge Facebook page is a monthly creative competition to design a character illustraton based around a theme. This month's theme was Alice In Wonderland, and I drew my design for the Cheshire Cat. Smile!

The Line It Is Drawn: Week 378

This week's The Line It Is Drawn was a fun one: mash-up a comic book character with a famous album cover! Here's Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Jessica Jones and Daredevil in a homage to the cover of the Gorillaz album Demon Days...

Word On The Street #2

Word On The Street is a weekly column in Time Out where readers Tweet the most ridiculous things they've overheard in London during the week (#wordonthestreet @timeoutlondon) and the best ones get printed in the magazine.

For a long time now, I've been meaning to pick one quote each week to illustrate as a semi-regular personal project, and like a lot of the ideas in my head, I haven't got around to putting pen to paper...until now!

This week's Word On The Street:

'This beer has gone straight to my eyebrows.'

The Line It Is Drawn: Week 377

This week's Line It Is Drawn theme, with the release of the latest Marvel Studios film: Black Panther, was to team-up Black Panther with another comic book character. I chose werehawk1's suggestion for Lockjaw chasing Black Panther...

Word On The Street #1

Word On The Street is a weekly column in Time Out where readers Tweet the most ridiculous things they've overheard in London during the week (#wordonthestreet @timeoutlondon) and the best ones get printed in the magazine.

For a long time now, I've been meaning to pick one quote each week to illustrate as a semi-regular personal project, and putting together some illustration samples that I could submit to Time Out in the hope of getting some work from them. And like a lot of the ideas in my head, I haven't got around to putting pen to paper...until now!

This week's Word On The Street:

'I've eaten peacock. It's just a chicken that wears Dolce & Gabana.'

The Line It Is Drawn: Week 376

With the Super Bowl happening this weekend (apparently!) and quite a big deal being made about what adverts will be shown during half-time, this week's Line It Is Drawn theme was to suggest a superhero and a product and come up with an ad for that product starring that superhero: Superhero Superbowl ads.

I went with dansjostrom's suggestion for The Vision doing an ad for Specsavers:

Happy Birthdays!

My Brother and my future Sister-In-Law have their birthdays just a few days apart. Here's a couple of cards I made for them both:

My Brother has quite a few Funko Pop toys, so I drew this card with him as a Funko toy. By a strange coincidence, his fiancée bought him a custom Funko toy that she got made to look like him. I had no idea!


My brother's fiancée is a big fan of Disney, so I drew her this card featuring Stitch from Lilo and Stitch...

Commissioned work: Leaving Drawings

I was contacted a few weeks ago about a possible illustration job. It's only in the early planning stages and won't be ready to work on until later this month, so I haven't started anything yet, but it's nice to have some work lined up.

But then a few days later I got an email from them asking if I would be able to draw a couple of cartoons of some staff that were leaving, that they could get printed and give to them as leaving presents. They sent me photo references and gave me a brief summary of what they wanted, and away I went. This was a fun commission and they were really pleased with the drawings I sent, which is a good feeling. I hope that the people leaving were happy to get them too.

The Line It Is Drawn: Week 375

This week's Line It Is Drawn theme was to draw the Comic Book Wedding of the Century! I chose CyberVenom2001's suggestion for Captain America and Iron Man settle their Civil War differences with a Civil Union!



This was a fun one to draw, based slightly on Andy Kubert's cover to X-Men #30, the wedding of Cyclops and Jean Grey.

You can check out the complete gallery of Comic Book Weddings over at CBR.com: https://www.cbr.com/superhero-wedding-gallery/

The Line It Is Drawn: Week 374

This week's The Line It Is Drawn theme was a fun one: mash-up superhero comic book characters with famous comic strips!

I chose BigMike20X6's suggestion for a Flash of Two Worlds cover homage starring Dennis the Menace (both the UK and US versions).

Here's my piece for The Line...


And here's the original cover from Flash #123...


Also Brian_Cronin suggested Spider-Man/Garfield, and I already had a strip that I drew a few years ago now which was pretty much that:



If you enjoyed these, definitely go and check out the other contributions to this week's Line over at CBR.com. It's one of my favourite ones in a while!

Graphic Shakespeare Competition 2018

A couple of years ago, I entered the inaugural Graphic Shakespeare Competition. While I didn't win, it was a lot of fun to take part in and so I really wanted to enter again this year. The initial deadline of 31 December 2017 came and went, and I hadn't managed to get anything done, but fortunately the deadline was extended to the 15 January 2018, and after the excesses of Christmas and New Years, I sat down to put something together.

Being slighty tight on time, I decided to adapt an earlier Shakespeare-themed comic that I'd put together a few years ago featuring a penguin making a series of unexpected cameos in Shakespeare's Hamlet. I expanded on my initial strips to make a slightly longer work for the competition.

(Click to enlarge)


I'm happy with the end result and have a bunch of other penguin-related Shakespeare strips jotted down in my sketchbook now, which I'd like to do something with someday...

Happy Birthday Tadhg!

My friend Tadhg turned 30 today. Here's a card I made for him!

The Line It Is Drawn: Week 373

This week's The Line It Is Drawn theme was to draw a comic book character as a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes.

I must admit that I'm not really familiar with the Legion of Super-Heroes, but fortunately BigMike20X6 suggested Yakko, Wakko and Dot from Animaniacs (which was a cartoon, but also had a comic book series) who I'm more familiar with!

I thought I would mirror my own ignorance regarding The Legion of Super-Heroes, by having Yakko get mixed-up with Legion, the son of Charles Xavier from the X-men comics.

https://www.cbr.com/legion-of-super-heroes-rejects-gallery/

Blog-Me-Do Part 8: Odds and Ends

I'm coming to the end of my 2017 catch-up blogs and this last one is a bunch of random drawings I drew last year that didn't really fit in with any of my previous posts.

News hit late last year that Jodie Whittaker was going to play the first female Doctor Who, which caused a lot of debate (to put it nicely) online. It also gave me the idea for this drawing, based on the famous Rosie the Riveter poster from the 1940s:


The new Thor movie, Thor Ragnarok, hit cinemas towards the end of 2017. If you'd asked me about this film at the start of the year, it wasn't even on my radar, but fast-forward to after the first trailer showed up online and this film jumped straight to the top of my must-see list! The trailer had all the energy, action and humour that were missing from the previous Thor films, and they dynamic between Thor and The Hulk looked like being a real highlight. In particular, one line, Thor's line "He's a friend from work" about The Hulk, led to me scribbling down this little cartoon:


Aside from a PS1 when I was a teenager, my videogames taste has always been almost exclusively Nintendo-orientated from the NES to the SNES and N64, right up to the Wii, the slight hiccup that was the Wii U, and now the amazing Nintendo Switch, which I love. Anyway, during the summer, me and my brother swapped consoles so he could play Breath Of The Wild and I could play The Last Guardian on his PS4. I really loved it and drew this picture of Trico:


Here's a robot I drew in 2017:


Apropos of nothing, here's a picture of The Simpsons:


Finally, towards the end of 2017, I took part in The House of Illustrations' Illustrators' Christmas Fair in Kings Cross and designed this flyer to promote the event:


And that brings me to the end of my 2017 catch-up blogs. I've now managed to post all of the drawings I hadn't already posted from last year. I'm hoping that I'll be able to keep more on top of posting images as I produce them in 2018, but let's see...

Blog-Me-Do Part 7: Portrait Commission

My friends Anna and Paul got married last year and commissioned me to draw a picture of them and their parents at the wedding, which they could have framed and give to them as presents. They sent me a reference photo from the wedding. This was a fun job. I've drawn both Paul and Anna before for cards I've given them, but it was a challenge to draw a good likeness of their parents. I'm very pleased with the final image and happily so were their parents.

Blog-Me-Do Part 6: Revenge of The Herd

Sometimes working as a Freelance Illustrator you can end up with some quite surprising jobs. This one rates pretty high in the "Wait! You want me to draw what?" categories.

In June last year I received an email from a woman in the US with a commission request. They wanted me to draw a cartoon for their kids' pediatrician in the style of The Far Side one panel comics. They were quite clear in what they wanted me to draw: the pediatrician walking down a dark alley, and a bunch of kids waiting to jab her with needles containing vaccines. The reason behind it was that her pediatrician had said that she experiences feelings of guilt when she is injecting vaccines and making children cry and jokingly commented that one day her kids may come back for revenge. The caption at the bottom of the picture: "Revenge of the Herd."

Initially, it seemed a bit of an odd request. Something about drawing a bunch of kids waiting to stick needles into someone walking down an alleyway seemed a little bit ...odd. But after reading my client's email explaining the story, it made more sense, and also it was an interesting challenge to draw without it coming off as too creepy. I think I succeeded...

Blog-Me-Do Part 5: Dirty Rotten Comics

I contributed a comic to the 10th issue of Dirty Rotten Comics in 2017. I wanted to try something a little bit different, so it's a 4-part story made up of 4 single page strips, themed around the subject of Fake News. My original idea was to have the pages printed individually throughout the comic, so that they were almost like those news reports on tv, interrupting the regularly scheduled program. In the end, because of page count and the length of some of the other strips, this wasn't possible and it ended up being printed as two sets of spreads. Either way, I'm happy with how this strip turned out...
(click on the images to enlarge)

The Line It Is Drawn: Week 372

This week's The Line It Is Drawn theme, in honor of the return of the X-Files, was to have Mulder and Scully mash-up or team-up with comic book characters. I chose dhacker615's suggestion for Mulder & Scully finding baby Kal-El (aka Superman).