Blog-Me-Do Part 3: Daily Drawing Challenges

When I don't have any commissioned work keeping me busy, one of the things I like to do is take part in a personal Daily Drawing Challenge, drawing something on a theme daily for a set number of days. I find it's a good habit to get into every now and then, requiring discipline, plus a good way to generate new ideas. Looking through my work from 2017, I was surprised that I'd undertaken quite a few Daily Drawing Challenges. Here they are:

FACEBOOK PICTURE CHALLENGE

Back in March 2017, my friend Jo tagged me on Facebook nominating me to post a drawing every day for a week. As I already post a lot of drawings on Facebook (and because I like to make things difficult for myself), I decided to use it as a prompt for my own Drawing Challenge and asked people to suggest things for me to draw. I then did a new drawing based on these suggestions, and post these each day. Below are the suggestions along with what I drew:

1. "Spike"



2. "A rubber mallet suspended by a very unwound spring (chrome finish) attached to the bottom of half an upside levitating car that has been cut in half (horizontally, with half of the interior exposed at the top, looking almost like a grey, greasy city)"


3. "Boarding time at Noah's ark"


4. "Penguins going bowling"


5. "Trump in a bath robe as a vampire"


6. "Totoro/Toy Story tea party!"


7. "Samus Aran (Metroid) vs. Magik (New Mutants)"


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THE ILLUSTRATED INTERVIEW

The Illustrated Interview series in T: The New York Times Style Magazine asks the interviewees to sketch their responses to 9 brief questions rather than answering verbally. For this drawing challenge, I drew my own illustrated answers to those 9 questions each day. What I like about this one, is that there's no need to explain your "answers" and it's also quite challenging to first think of a reply and then work out how to draw it.

Q1. What do you look like?


Q2. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?


Q3. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?


Q4. What did you eat for breakfast today?


Q5. What exercise do you regularly do?


Q6. Did you have a favourite toy growing up?


Q7. Which cartoon character do you relate to?


Q8. Do you have any pets?


Q9. What makes you smile?


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INKTOBER 2017

Inktober is an annual project that was started in 2009 by Jake Parker. The idea is to produce 31 drawings over 31 days during the month of October. I've tried doing it in the past, with varying degrees of success and never really completing the project (usually because October ends up being a really busy month work-wise). In 2016 I illustrated 31 X-men-related puns, which I later turned into a printed zine called Uncanny X-Puns. This year I discovered, to my amazement, that there's actually an official prompt list each year consisting of words to use as a starting point for each day. So I decided to give it another go using this prompt list. Here are the results:

1. Swift


2.Divided


3. Poison


4. Underwater


5. Long


6. Sword


7. Shy


8. Crooked


9. Screech


10. Gigantic


11. Run


12. Shattered


13. Teeming


14. Fierce


15. Mysterious


16. Fat


17. Graceful


18. Filthy


19. Cloud


20. Deep


21. Furious


22. Trail


23. Juicy


24. Blind


25. Ship


26. Squeak


27. Climb


28. Fall


29. United


30. Found


31. Mask
(I ended up doing two drawings for this one. I drew the first one and then suddenly realised that October 31 was Halloween!)

Happy Birthday Will!

While catching up with blogging about all the illustrations I drew in 2017, I also want to try to keep on top of posting about 2018. So here's a birthday card I drew for my cousin Will, who turned 15 today and got a guitar as a present. He's also obsessed with London Transport, so I decided to draw him trying his hand at busking on the Underground...

Blog-Me-Do Part 2: House of Cards

Another thing that I don't get as much time to do as I once did, is making cards for friends and family for birthdays and other special occasions.

I still enjoy being able to do it, and it's always a fun challenge to come up with a new idea for a card for someone that I've known for a long time and already made a bunch of cards for, but it's also quite time consuming, so isn't always possible when I have other work demands and deadlines. But I did manage to still make more than a few cards in 2017. I've already blogged a few of them at the start of last year, but here are the others...

My Mum really enjoyed the all-female Ghostbusters reboot in 2016 (and so did I), so I drew her this card for Mother's Day:


My friend Saul is a big fan of My Little Pony, especially Pinky Pie, so I drew this card for his birthday:


I'm not sure I can really explain this card for my friend Jon. He loved it though!


This was a slightly odd commission that I received last year, where someone emailed me and asked me to recreate a Venice-themed birthday card that I drew for my friend Jess in 2013 that they'd seen online, but with their son in Jess's place...


My friends Anna and Paul got married last year, and here's a card I made for them:


My Dad loves cutting the hedge in the garden, and wants to do it most weekends, so I drew him this card for Father's Day...


My Mum was 70 last year! And here's a card I made for her:


This was a commission to draw a card for friends of my brother's fiancee, who were gettting married in Spain...


My friend Kate was 30 last year and enjoys playing the banjo, so here's a card I drew for her:


A birthday card for my Dad:


My parents celebrated their 40th Ruby Wedding Anniversary on New Year's Eve, so I drew this Red-hued card for them:


And finally, my Christmas card that I made for 2017:

Blog-Me-Do Part 1: Star Wars

Happy New Year! Here we are in 2018, which is a lot like 2017 to be honest, but hopefully with a lot less Terrorism, nonsense politics and Donald Trump shouting at people on Twitter.

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!

So long Steve!

Pretty much ever since I started going there regularly since it moved to it's current location on Berwick Street in Soho, Steve Walsh has been working behind the counter at Gosh! Comics. And now he's left and moved to Ireland. It feels like the end of an era.

As well as working at the shop and having an encyclopedic knowledge for comics, Steve also played a large part in building a community around the shop, and in recent years ran the Capers superhero discussion group and, along with Oliver O'Keefe, the monthly comic book reading group Reads. When it became clear that Steve was leaving, Ollie had the idea of commissioning me to draw an illustration that we could give to Steve as a present featuring the various members of the group. I thought it would be a good idea to do it as a homage to a classic comic book cover. Ollie wanted to reference Crisis on Infinite Earths #1, but I suggested Uncanny X-men #138 instead.

Here's the finished piece:



And here's a photo of Steve after we gave it to him:



Good luck in Ireland Steve. And to quote the classic X-men cover-line: "Hope you survive the experience"!