I’m not entirely sure on the success of the graphic design but I am at least pleased that the site is now pretty damn consistent. I’ve also stripped away the old chaff that google analytics informed me nobody ever visited, so goodbye to the tutorials, links and downloads sections of the site.

In their place is a shiny new sketchbook section of the site, which features  lot of sketches (mainly faces and airships as it happens) that have never been on public display before! Go check it out here, I mean come on, if you’re on this site at all you have time to spare don’t you.

I’ve also been adding a few things to the shop section, since I have student loans to pay off. I’ve got a few more bits to do yet but I’ll have even more stuff available soon.

In other news, I’ve been busy working on my new kid’s book: Norman’s Rocket. Here’s some rocket based sketches from that to have a look at:

Also, those who’ve been to this blog before may notice that it’s changed slightly. There’s more orange involved for starters. Well, that’s part of a bigger redesign of my entire site which I plan to have finished in the next few days. I’m excited! Someone has to be.

So having just finished the penultimate university project of life I think now is perhaps a good time to show you the stuff I’ve spent the last few weeks on:

These are all illustrations from my latest creative endeavour a children’s picture book entitled “Norman’s Rocket”. The title was inspired by the story of Noah’s Ark, though the story itself has very little in common with its inspiration. It’s essentially very stupid and involves vegetables. Also, it rhymes.

“Prince Norman was a beastly child
loud and rude and very wild.
In fact dear reader I can bet,
a more spoilt child you’ve never met”…

More stuff coming up soon.

The only one that looks of interest to me is Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy, the others look boring (plus some little git on youtube spoiled the twist of Black Swan with a comment). Maybe I’m being close minded with that, but I also happen to think that Gary Oldman as Smiley has the most interesting face. Can’t see the film until it’s released to rent/buy on the 30th January so I’ve resorted to reading the book in order to get a grasp of the plot and characters and watching the film trailer and staring at screen-shots to familiarise myself with the main character. This attempt is unsatisfactory, not just because there’s naught to it but a pretty emulated oil paint effect (it’s digital of course) but also because on closer inspection of the brief it transpires I needed to include the name of the film somehere.

Well if at first you don’t succeed, next time read the brief.

Happy new Year everyone!

I have to say I didn’t come up with the idea myself, I nicked it from people more creative than me: http://crookedfaces.blogspot.com/2011/11/coop-artwork-heroes-of-valley.html

I convinced a good friend that we should give it a go and make a collaborative piece. the rules were simple, one of us would paint a few random marks on the paper and then send the picture to the other who would then interpret the marks how they liked by adding to the picture, we both had to keep adding to the picture until we reached a complete piece of artwork. Also, no communication about the artwork or the process, only intuition. this is what we ended up with:

I have to say I’m really pleased with how it worked out. It was incredibly good fun, and I think the results speak for themselves. I was also impressed by the fact that we completed it so quickly. We calculated that overall it could only have taken us 15 hours or thereabouts, which is less than half the time would usually take on a picture on my own.

I enjoyed the process so much I asked my little sister (aged eight) if she wanted to have a go at one too. She said yes, here’s the results:

She had more input than I did. Honest. In truth though I’m quite taken with it, I think it brings the best of both our styles to the piece.

The end of year exhibition was frantic to set up, and lots of fun to view. I was somewhat less organised than almost everyone else, which you can see if you look at the images in this blog post from comrade Matt McKinley. it was great to see everyone’s work together presented so well, I can only regret that I lowered the tone of the exhibition with a display that kept falling off the wall. Alas, next time I hall refrain from using double sided tape.

Blog posts with no pictures are boring. Here’s a picture I did:

It’s one of my final illustrations for this recently deceased semester, being a scene from David Mitchell’s (not that one, the writer) novel cloud Atlas. I don’t want to give too much away, since I suggest everyone read the book, which is excellent, preferably before you watch the film due out next year.

More pictures and couple of walk-throughs to come soon!

If you want to help a bunch of struggling unloved student illustrators you can buy a Christmas card or two featuring this image over on deviantART

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This time it’s an image of a steampunk airship dock, port of origin for the crew of the “Widow Garret” which you can see docked in the bottom left of the images.

The brief was very clear as to what the band wanted, I had to show them as they are inthe cover image painting, stood on front of their airship with the bustling industrial docks behind them. Initially I didn’t know how to approach such a complex image so to get the image under way I started with a rough pencil sketch on paper to try and get the image worked out in my head (the sketch below is actually the 3rd I think). At that stage I still wasn’t ready to approach the final image so I made a very rough google sketchup model to give me a solid understanding of all the perspective involved. I then exported the model  into photoshop and painted over it until I had the beginnings of my final image.The next stage was simply adding more detail to the already blocked out image You can see I messed about with the colour scheme a bit. It was looking a bit too serene in the second image.The final stages of an image are often the most enjoyable, and by the time I was up to the images below I had the fun job of simply adding little details and correcting small problems. The sky colour got changed once again to look more oppressive and industrial, and a handful of airships got added to the sky. along with the crowds below.The finished image:You can buy the album here, which you should because it looks lovely and you can get a limited edition poster that I also did for the band (as well as a poster of the image above)
… Also, the music is very good.

Listen to some of the Tracks
SmokeyBastard.com
Buy the album