Graphic Shakespeare competition

I've been busy recently, working on a 4-page comic for a Graphic Shakespeare competition, part of the Elsinore Conference 2016 entitled Shakespeare: The Next 400 Years, which is being held in Kronborg Castle, Helsingor, Denmark in April. You could either adapt the scene of your choosing, or select one of five famous scenes designated by the organisers of the conference. One of the selected scenes was Act One, Scene 1 from Macbeth, which is one of my favourtie Shakespeare plays, so I decided to go with this one. I wanted to create a humourous take on the scene with the three witches that opens the play, and had the idea of one of the witches having to bring along her mobile phone obsessed neice: Three Witches And A Little Lady...

Kung hei fat choy! (Year of the Monkey)

Today is the start of Chinese New Year and 2016 is The Year of the Monkey. The Monkey also happens to be my Chinese zodiac sign, and people born under this sign are supposedly quick-witted, charming, lucky, adaptable, bright, versatile, lively, and smart.

Here's a picture I drew to celebrate...

VAMALGAM 7, The V&A Staff Art Exhibition

As well as doing my freelance illustration work, I've also been working at the Victoria and Albert Museum as a Gallery Assistant since March 2015. And recently these two parts of my working life co-existed, as I submitted an illustration for VAMALGAM 7, The V&A Staff Art Exhibition.

I decided to create a new drawing inspired by the V&A's collection ("Site Specific", innit!) and while looking around at the objects on display, began imagining a knockout slugfest between the plaster cast of Michelangelo's statue of David, housed in the museum's impressive Cast Courts, and the bust of Queen Victoria located in the British Galleries...



The exhibition is on display in the staff canteen area, so sadly isn't on view to the public, but here a few photos of the exhibition...

Happy Birthday Bro!

It's my brother's birthday today and here's a card I made for him...

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!