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).

Blog-Me-Do Part 4: The Line It Is Drawn

The Line It Is Drawn is a weekly column over at the CBR.com (formerly Comic Book Resources). Every week Followers of the site's Twitter page come up with responses to a comics-related theme, and a group of artists pick a suggestion from this list to illustrate and is then posted online the following week on CBR.com.

I've been following The Line It Is Drawn for a good few years now, and tried out to become one of their regular artists in 2011 and again in 2014.

Both times I wasn't selected, but last April I got an email from Brian Cronin who works at CBR and puts together The Line It Is Drawn each week, asking if I was still interested in being one of their regular artists! So I guess patience really is a virtue.

It's been a lot of fun to be part of, and an interesting challenge each week to come up with a new image based on that week's suggestion. For me, part of the challenge has been to draw something that is hopefully accessible to everyone and not too bogged down in too much Comic Nerd details (although I do enjoy including references to that stuff in my images, but I want to create something that everyone can enjoy).

Below I'm going to post all of my pieces from 2017. Enjoy!

My very first Line It Is Drawn theme was to take a classic comic book cover (Captain America #367) and then draw what happens One Moment Later. Here's the original cover:


And here's my One Moment Later drawing:

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For the Comic book character/movie mash-up week, I drew Studio Ghibli's Squirrel Girl, in a homage to My Neighbour Totoro:


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This Guardians of the Galaxy/Peanuts mash-up strip is one of my favourite pieces that I've done so far:


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What If... Doctor Doom was on a Mother's Day card?


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An evil version of Patsy Walker (a.k.a. Hellcat)


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Pirate Squirrel Girl!


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Wonder Woman and Thor in the style of the cover to Superman vs. Spiderman:


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This week's theme was to suggest the worst possible crossover between the Watchmen characters and other comic book characters. I chose to draw the cast of Watchmen transported to the Archie Comics Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles universe, (although I think that would actually be pretty awesome):


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A tribute to the late Adam West (RIP):


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Batman and Catwoman in a homage to the cover of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours album:


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A Marvel Legacy cover for Nextwave, homaging Avengers #4:


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MCU Spider-Man teaming up with Netflix's Daredevil:


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Draw a great comic book romance in ah homage to a famous romantic scene: Thanos and Death in a homage to Titanic...


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Team-up an American comic book character with a European comic book character: Thor meets Asterix...


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Nico Minoru from Runaways in a homage to Kill Bill:


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If Wolverine had Mr Fantastic's powers instead of his own, would he still be a badass?


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Stephen King/comic book mash-up week: The Joker and Pennywise...


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Dark Multiverse Thomas The Tank Engine:


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The Silver Surfer and Black Rider team-up for Jack Kirby's 100th birthday:


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The Defenders as Simspsons' characters:


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Based around the fact that IT, from Stephen King's book of the same name, appears to people as their greatest fears, suggest a comic book character and what IT would appear to them as. "Being a devoted Marvel reader, Gwenpool sees IT as Harley Quinn".
I ended up doing two drawings for this one, as I wasn't happy with how the first one turned out:



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Splice together two comic book characters to create a new one: Fin Fang Foom + Doctor Doom = Fin Fang Doom!


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Batman on holiday:


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Squirrel Girl cosplaying as Sailor Moon:


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A Marve Legacy cover for Cable, homaging Joe Madureira's cover to Uncanny X-Men #345:


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Wolverine in A Nightmare On Elm Street:


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Frog Thor vs Battletoads:


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Wolverine vs the Demogorgon from Stranger Things:


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The All-Batman Justice League: Bruce Wayne, Terry McGuiness, Dick Grayson, Thomas Wayne and Jim Gordon.


I also did a variant cover for this one with Damien Wayne, Jean Paul Valley, Jason Todd, Batman Jones and The Batman Of Zur-En-Arrh:


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The Punisher "kills" Mojo Jojo:


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Kraven's Last Hunt with Kraven The Hunter replaced by Elmer Fudd:


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Darth Vadar wielding the Infinity Gauntlet:


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Chris Evans' Captain America and Chris Evans' Human Torch celebrate Christmas together:


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And that's all for 2017. We're already one week in to The Line It Is Drawn for 2018, and I'll be trying to post each week's drawing as I do them this year, so keep checking back...