T is for T-shirts...

Just before Christmas, I produced a few t-shirt designs and screen printed them myself at Uni. I really enjoyed doing this, and it was relatively simple – definitely something I want to do again. Here are a couple of work-in-progress shots:





And here are my final designs:


I also produced some other versions on different coloured t-shirts. This is definitely something I want to do some more of, and look towards selling them, either online or at a market...

Merry Christmas!

This year, I designed two Christmas cards to send to my friends and family. I drew the images by hand, then scanned them, and added colour in Photoshop, before printing them out on my printer...

Cover Versions

So I've entered the 2009 V&A Student Illustrator Awards. I had to submit three images of my own work, from my own selected brief. I decided to enter the images I produced for our course-led exhibition at college a few weeks ago. The subject was Cover, with the only stipulation being that the work must be exactly 12x12cm in size. I decided to interpret the subject to produce a series of "cover versions" of famous album "covers", and produced two pieces based on Nirvana's Nevermind, and The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, both highly iconic covers that regularly feature on lists of The Best Album Covers Of All Time.

For the competition, I produced a third piece, this time taking my inspiration from Blondie's Parallel Lines. I also slightly reworked my two earlier pieces. The deadline for the competition is 31 December and the 1st Prize is £2,000 ...and a trophy!







And just for any of you that may not know the original covers...

Macavity – The Mystery Cat

A friend of mine asked me whether I could do an illustration for her featuring the poem Macavity – The Mystery Cat, by T.S. Eliot. When she was little she used to read it with her dad, and she wanted to have something she could frame and give to her baby sister for her first Christmas. It's quite a long poem, with quite a lot going on, so rather than illustrating a specific moment in the poem, I decided to draw a decorative frame around the poem, featuring Macavity, who is described in the poem as being tall and ginger, with uncombed whiskers, and movements like a snake – something I tried to capture in the movement of his tail. Because he's also depicted as a master criminal, I gave him a burglar's mask to hide his identity! Hopefully she'll like it...

Creative Project - "That time of year... is December"

So, it's got nothing to do with my MA project, or my research paper, but f**k it, it's Christmas!!

Wishing you all a Happy Season...

The Ghost of Drawings Past: Episode Two

And lo, just as 2005 had beget 2006, so did 2006 in turn beget 2007. The year in which Bird Flu struck the UK – and didn't actually lead to the impending Apocalyptic disaster that the media forecasted (...although some sparrows did complain of a chesty cough); the Smoking Ban came into force in England, forcing millions of nicotine addicts to freeze their arses off outside, and Leon Jackson won X-Factor (...I have no idea who he is either!).
I also found these drawings that I did...

Get Well Soon:

An online greeting card I sent to a friend.

"Mmmmm, brains!":

A portrait of me as a zombie. I did this as a Valentine's Day cartoon – literally giving someone my heart!

Amy Winehouse:

They tried to make her go to Rehab, she went to the pub instead. Miss Winehouse's increasingly monolithic hairdo made her look more and more like an inebriated Marge Simpson...

Thom Yorke: Paranoid Android:

A drawing I did for the hell of it, depicting the Radiohead singer as a nervous robot, afraid about an imagined catastrophy. The background is scanned from the booklet to Amnesiac, with various Photoshop filters applied to it...

The Ghost of Drawings Past: Episode One

So I found a whole bunch of drawings that I'd done a couple of years ago, back in the dim and distant past of 2006, when I used to have a MySpace page, money was actually worth something, and Jonathan Ross was still employed – crazy times! Anyway, welcome to my little trip down memory lane...

Spongebob's Nightmare:

One of the first illustrations I ever posted online, slightly perverting a much-loved (by children and students) cartoon character. Possibly the result of too much alcohol...

The White Stripes:

I used to love The White Stripes and saw them live at the Reading Festival and in Alexandra Palace. They're last album, Icky Thump was a bit...odd, but this was when they still had a place in my CD player (I don't think I'd actually bought an iPod back then...)

Euro 2006:

Yes, football! Some of you may be surprised to see that I actually drew a football-related picture, given my general disinterest in 22 overpaid idiots running about on a patch of grass for an hour and a half, and failing to justify the ludicrous amounts of money they get for doing it, but I do at least show a passing interest during any International Competitions such as the World Cup, or European Championships (...well, at least until I resigned myself to the fact that England are useless at these things and will never ever win, despite occasionally managing to fluke their way through to the later stages of the competition, only to lose at penalties in the dying moments).

Anyway... this was done during Euro 2006. Some of the references may not be instantly recognisable to people now that enough time has passed, but these are my drawings of lanky, human bean-pole Peter Crouch, the Burns-esque Sven Goran Erikson, and professional neanderthal, Wayne Rooney, who had recently done a "controversial" poster ad for Nike.

The Mighty Boosh:

What a difference a few years can make. Back in 2006, the Mighty Boosh were actually funny, as opposed to the toe-curling, wannabe rock stars that they've become today. This was my drawing of Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt in costume as my two favourite characters from the second series, before they "jumped the shark": Old Gregg and Rudi van DiSarzio. I guess this is quite dated now, but I still quite like the drawing in this one...

Jimi Hendrix: the Original Guitar Hero:

After discovering the rainbow gradient tool in Photoshop, I decided that the best use of this Psychedelic colour generator would be a drawing of the poster-child for the Sixties: Jimi Hendrix. Not much else to say about this one...

Napoleon Dynamite:

One of my favourite films ever – a fact that is proven by the number of times I've watched the DVD – this is a drawing I did of the main characters from Napoleon Dynamite: Napoleon, Kip and Pedro. If you haven't seen this film already, go out and buy it NOW!

Colour in Time

...so this week's exhibition is being curated by MA Book Arts, with the title: Colour in time, Colouring in time, Colouring time. Unlike the previous exhibition subjects, I didn't really have any instantaneous ideas for this one. But then I thought of the "colouring in" and the idea of "time", and decided to produce a sort of colouring book page on the subject of time - people from various periods of history each contemplating a different form of time piece (...and a Back To The Future reference). Then I coloured it in using Crayons for that authentic colouring book feel.

I wanted to leave some of it unfinished to emphasise the fact that it was meant to be a colouring book - colouring-in time. I'm not sure if I've managed to completely convey the idea, but I like the overall composition...