Anyway, as January starts to get into gear, I've been taking stock of my work, and realised that I have a bunch of work that I meant to post last year, but never got around to. I think that as I get busier with commissions and personal projects (plus life in general!), it becomes harder to find the time to sit down and post stuff.
I started this blog in 2008 when I went to do a short course in Illustration to see if I enjoyed it, and document what I was working on, and here we are 10 years later(!) and I've gone on to do an MA in Illustration at Camberwell as well as working as a freelance illustrator and comic artist, working on a number of interesting commissions as well as self-publishing my own comics work. I won't lie, at times it's been quite difficult and for all the interesting projects that I've worked on, there have also been times when I've thought about giving up the freelance lifestyle and going to get a "proper job", but then I think "this is what I want to be doing!" and I double down on trying to make it work.
One thing I like about having this blog is that it's a way for me to look back on the work I've done over the year and reflect. And like I said, the last few years, the number of posts I've been making has gone down dramatically, from a high of 166 in 2011 to just 10 posts last year. Am I doing less work? Not really. But I think the time I have to sit down and upload my work when I finish it has decreased. Anyway, over the next few weeks, I want to rectify that, by catching up with my updates from 2017. I have all the image files saved for web on my desktop ready to go.
Also, one of my New Year's Resolutions is to write more! I was having a bit of a tidy up before Christmas and found one of my old exercise books from my English GCSE class, and sat down to have a read through it and found some of it to be really funny and entertaining. Which reminded me how much I use to enjoy writing! I'd like to get back to that in 2018. I'm thinking of starting up a blog just for my writing, but in the meantime, I thought I could try writing a bit here about my own work.
So, HERE WE GO!
I did quite a few (well, three!) Star Wars-related illustrations last year, so the first part of this 2017 Catch-Up will be Star Wars related:
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Way back at the start of 2017, Robin Barnard commissioned me to produce a back cover image for issue 17 of his Star Jaws comic. The brief was fairly open, the only stipulation was that the piece should include characters from the original Star Wars trilogy. I decided to create a Star Wars-themed homage to the cover to another classic comic book: X-men #1 by Jack Kirby from September 1963.
You can read Star Jaws #17 here.
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The fourth of May is Star Wars Day, owing to the tenuous "May The Force be with you"/May the Fourth connection. And I drew a silly doodle of everyone's favourite Star Wars character* to celebrate:
*NB: this might not actually be everyone's favourite Star Wars character :P
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Finally, in 2017 I started being a regular contributor to CBR.com's Line It Is Drawn column (which will be getting a seperate blog post later this week), where each week I produce a comics-related illustration based around a specific theme. Recently, with The Last Jedi being released in cinemas, the theme was Star Wars/Comic Book mash-ups and I drew this picture of Darth Vadar finding the Infinity Gauntlet from the Marvel Universe...
Incidentally, I enjoyed The Last Jedi. It wasn't perfect, and there are a lot of things I think they could have done differently, but without wanting to get into Spoiler territory, I'll just say that your enjoyment of it may vary. I think the biggest thing that the movie had against it was expectation. It set up a lot of potential storylines in the previous film that then seemed to just get thrown away (in one instance, literally!). But I also think that it was an interesting movie because of that. Because going into Episode IX, I really don't know what to expect! In summation, "This is not the Star Wars movie you were looking for!". 3 and a half stars.
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That's all for now. Part 2 soon!
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