Happy Birthday Anett and Anne!

As well as sharing the first two letters of their name, my friends Anne and Anett also share the same birthday. Last year I made them both individual cards that joined up to make a larger image. This year, I decided to go for more of a mutual thematic response.

After Anett posted a photo on Instagram of herself standing next to The Wilton Diptych, I came up with the idea of drawing a card of her in a similarly angelic style...



Anne also recently posted a photo of herself and a fluffy cat belonging to her in-laws, and I took that as inspiration for drawing a card for Anne based loosely on Leonardo Da Vinci's Lady With An Ermine...

Happy Birthday RIchy!

I still have a couple more 2015 catch-up blogs to run, but in the meantime I'm going to take a quick trip back to the future, and post a couple of recent things I've drawn...

My friend Richy started off 2016 by celebrating a pretty monumental birthday. And as we share a mutual love for Charles Schulz's Peanuts comic strip, I made him this Peanuts-inspired card, featuring his beloved cat, Suki Kabuki...

Blogs of Future Past (Part 4: Into The Sun)

Back in June of last year I took part in a group exhibition called Into The Sun at the A-side B-side Gallery in Hackney Downs, curated by my friend Ivy.

I created two new pieces for the show...




And here are a few photos from the opening night...

Blogs Of Future Past (Part 3: Weddings)

Continuing my belated catch-up with things that I didn't get time to actually blog about in 2015, we now move to weddings. I guess I'm at that age now where weddings become an almost permanent fixture in my annual schedule, which equals wedding cards and invitations!

During the Summer, my friend Giacomo commissioned me to draw a card for Nur and David's wedding...


And a few months ago, my brother comissioned me to draw a card for Ethan and Gemma's wedding...


My friends Zarina and John got married in August...


And I also designed the wedding invitation for my friends Claudia and Neill, for their Neapolitan/British wedding...

David Bowie Is...

Like most people, I was shocked to wake up this morning and hear the news about David Bowie's passing. The only album of his I actually own is the 2002 greatest hits compilation, Best of Bowie and I never made it along to the David Bowie exhibition at the V&A a few years ago. But I enjoyed his music, and the movie Labyrinth, and that time he played Nikola Tesla. And the stars look very different today....

And for someone that started making music in the 1960's, he was still so culturally prevalent, a fact that was reinforced by the solid wall of David Bowie tributes that quickly made up my Facebook news feed this morning. And just yesterday while I was sorting through the work on my computer, I found a couple of Bowie drawings I'd done in previous years...

First, a piece I did for an art show in East London by the band Emperor Yes, for the release of their single Cosmos. I drew an illustration of the band surrounded by various space-themed pop culture characters, including (of course!) a cameo from the Starman himself!



The other was a card I made for my friend Nanae, who as well as being a fan of David Bowie shares the same birthday as him (8 January), and has a pet poodle...

Blogs of Future Past (Part 2: Comics)

So continuing my catch-up of 2015 in the early days of 2016, here's a couple of comics projects I was part of last year which I hadn't got around to mentioning properly...

(Click on the images below to enlarge)

I contributed a page to A Bit Of Undigested Potato, Keara Stewart's anthology about bad dreams and nightmares, which is available to purchase from her online store.


I was also asked to contribute to Richy K. Chandler's second Tempo Lush anthology: Tempo Lush Tales of the Tanoox, the follow-up to Tempo Lush Tales which was released in 2014 and which I provided artwork to a 12-page story that Richy wrote. This time I was contributing to a collaborative comic with a dozen artists all illustrating a page of a comic based around the lyrics to a song Richy wrote called Bugleberry Tree.

Richy sent me the lyrics for the whole song and told me which verse he wanted me to illustrate, but that was it really in terms of direction. Everything else was up to me in terms of how I chose to interpret those lyrics and even how the main character should look. I didn't see any of my fellow creators' work until the book was all put together and it was fun to read through it all together. Tempo Lush Tales of the Tanoox also features a number of other stories and is available to buy from Richy's online store.

And I drew a one page comic for Frame By Frame, a free Film and Television zine put together by Steve Walsh and Shaun Richens from Gosh! Comics. I don't think there are any copies still available, but I drew a comic about Spoilers!


I'm hoping to have a lot more comics projects happening in 2016, so watch this space!

Blogs Of Future Past (Part 1: Birthdays)

I got a bit lapsed with updating my blog in 2015 and only managed a paltry Thirty-three posts last year. Part of this was due to the good news that I was pretty busy with commissioned work, particular in the second half of the year, but regardless, I want to ensure that I'm more active with my blog posts in 2016! Before I get into the New Year though, I thought I'd better catch up with a bunch of stuff I never got around to posting last year. So these next bunch of posts will be a bit of a retrospective look back at 2015.

Surprising nobody, I made quite a few cards last year. And in no particular order, here are some I never got around to posting...

A birthday card for my friend Ivy...



A birthday card for my friend Janice. Who likes Star Wars and goes to Pole Dancing classes...


For the last few years I have been making Jess a birthday card based on a different Hanson album cover each year. Because she is a massive Hanson fan, not because I hate her! And as if that isn't enough, this year she commissioned me to draw a Hanson card for her friend Clare. So once again, I traweled through Google Images to find yet another Hanson album cover to use as inspiration for her birthday card and ended up going with the cover to (what Wikipedia tells me is) their third album Underneath...




Here's a card I made for my friend Anna...


And here's a card I made for another friend of mine called Anna. She told me a story about waking up to find a cat in her bedroom, which reminded me of The Cat Came Back...


This is a video game inspired card I made for my friend Richard...


And here's a card I made for my parent's wedding anniversary which is on the 31 December. When I was telling my mum about seeing a Full Moon in the sky during Christmas, she told me that the last time there was a Full Moon at Christmas was the same year that her and my dad got married in 1977. 38 years ago!