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Norman’s Head.

Thought I’d share this, it’s Norman mark 2. With the intention of him having less creepy eyes. This image is actually pages 19 and 20 from the book I’m working on.

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.

Norman’s Rocket

I’ve almost finished Uni. what a terrifying thought. Apparently I have ten weeks left to prepare myself and my portfolio for the big bad real world, which is… nice.

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.

Homework.

This is exactly what it looks like, a hastily constructed cover for little white lies magazine. It’s to fulfil the current D&AD illustration brief as required by my uni tutor. I need to design a cover image for little white lies magazine featuring a portrait of the protagonist from one of five films; none of which I’ve seen.

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!

Collaboration Art

I’ve completely fallen in love with a new method of creating artwork: collaboration.

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.

Adios Semester 1!

The time has come for me to wave a worried goodbye to the fist half of my final year of higher education. The big bad world looms. To distract myself from the impending end I shall write blog posts and draw pictures.

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!

Tales from the wasteland – The Airship Docks

Today I’m uploading another brief walk-through of how I approached one of the images I produced for Smokey Bastard.

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

Tales From The Wasteland cover art

It’s not often the ideal job appears, but I can honestly say that there’s very little else I’d rather do than be paid to make steampunk themed illustrations. This was one of those jobs.

With the recent release of Smokey Bastard’s new album; Tales from the Wasteland, I’ve been given permission to post the the artwork I made for it back in April. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to post a little bit of a step by step image showing how I did it. (Click the image to enlarge it)

This artwork forms the front cover of the album, however the entire album is illustrated so when you open it out you get a panorama of a wasteland with an airship flying into the distance. There’s also a double sided poster showing an airship dock and a cutaway plan of the airship. Basically- it’s awesome. Even if I do say so myself.

The first image in the sequence was actually drawn by Chris from the band so sadly I can take no credit for the idea nor the composition. The second sketch was my rough re-drawing of the original image in pencil.

The first monochrome image was roughly blocked out with the brush tool in Photoshop over the top of the scanned-in line art, then refined further to reach the third image.

Once I was happy with the tones and the forms I overlaid a layer of flat colour on overlay and started to paint the colours over the top of the tones. Admittedly this took me some time and didn’t look brilliant at the time, since I was new to the technique. I’ve got it nailed now though! The final image shows the completed artwork with a few colour edits and refinements.

Observe the final cover artwork above! I’m afraid I can’t lay claim to the lovely Victorian text, that was the work of Stuart Smith.  Copyright for the above image belongs to Smokey Bastard.

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
… Also, the music is very good.

In a few day’s I’ll post how I made another one of the images for the album.
Listen to some of the Tracks
SmokeyBastard.com
Buy the album

Yet more concept art

Here for your perusal is yet more exciting horror themed concept-art. For the most part I’m not too pleased with it. I can do better, but I don’t have the luxury of time. I have a uni crit session in 5 hours and I expect I’m going to get toasted. I deserve to. I ought to concentrate better in… oh look at that pretty cloud! Although I am pleased with how the nun turned out.