Influence Map

I resisted the urge to do this meme when it popped up on DeviantArt about a month ago, but everybody's been having so much fun on Twitter today I couldn't abstain any longer. If you fancy spending way too much time than necessary on your own map the template is available here.

Draw Serge

Here's a portrait of Serge Gainsbourg I created for Jonathan Edwards' wonderful Draw Serge! blog. It's an immense honour to be featured at the blog as I have been a Gainsbourg fan for many a year now and never tire of listening to his music.

The figure itself is taken from this photograph which was drawn and coloured in photoshop. The lettering (all Gainsbourg compositions) is all hand-drawn. I thought that it would be interesting to show the various stages behind the creation of the text jacket.

I decided that it would be too labour intensive to use my Bamboo tablet to draw the text. So I printed the basic shape of the jacket onto A4 and the traced the outline on to layout paper. I added the lettering quite loosely and then began to ink.

It quickly became apparent that working at A4 was very restrictive, even with a 0.25 pen and my choice of using layout paper was a mistake as it soaked up the ink. You can see, in the bottom left hand corner, an ever growing list of song titles that I was dissatisfied with and had noted for later retouching. Despite these problems I soldiered on as I wanted to take a break from the computer and try and tackle a project with pen & paper.

My eagerness to include all of my favorite songs led to the very squashed text on the shoulders of the jacket, making the whole thing look uneven. To eliminate this I would have to go into photoshop and reconstruct the layout. This turned out to be immensely liberating and the final jacket, after intensive copying, pasting, re-sizing and re-touching and a lot of re-drawn text, is very different to the pen version above.

Overall a very enjoyable project with some important lessons to be learnt along the way. Add to that the fact that I worked exclusively to a Gainsbourg soundtrack I'm already hatching ideas for my next Draw Serge submission.

Doctor Who Novels - Penguin Style

I've recently hit a brick wall on a couple of projects, so for fun I've created these Doctor Who book covers in the classic Penguin house style.

More Whitechapel Remakes

Here's a couple of recent cover re-imaginings by myself that originate from Warren Ellis' fiendish remodel challenges over at the Whitechapel forum.

Here we have an imaginary third book of the short-lived literary magazine of the British Vorticist movement, BLAST.

And secondly, volume 14 of the Nineteenth century periodical, The Yellow Book. I originally used the Adam & Eve illustration on a record cover I did some years ago. It's based on an sculpture that forms one of the arched doorways of Notré Dame Cathedral and it lends it's self quite well to what was considered a rather decadent publication.

Latest Projects

For shame, I haven't posted anything here for over a week, so let's catch up on some recently completed projects shall we.

A couple of weeks ago I featured a selection of re-designed Superman covers from Warren Ellis' Whitechapel forum. I love these kind of projects but rarely find the time to contribute. But when I found out that the next challenge was to re-design 2000AD #1 I just had to chip in. Here's what I came up with:

Although I'm pleased with the general look of the typography and the metallic finish, the fact that I failed to come up with a decent central image somewhat lets the side down. You can see the some of the more successful entries here.

As I was putting it together I was reminded of this 2000AD cover by Brendan McCarthy. I believe it accompanied an Alan Moore future shock which was a Hitchhikers Guide parody. It's amusing to see that 1981's vision of the future still comes with play/record buttons.

The following week's challenge was to re-design Amazing Fantasy#15. When it comes to something as iconic as Spider-Man's debut, you've got you work cut out not to refer to it in someway. The book's title immediately suggested a 1950's pulp magazine style, an idea that seemed to be popular amongst the other entries. The Pulp Fiction Flickr pool proved invaluable when it came to reference. As you can see below I pieced the artwork together from various sources.

Getting involved with the Whitechapel challenges forced me to sideline my submission to Brendan Tobin and Pedro Delgado's, March MODOK Madness, a month-long celebration of the much ridiculed Jack Kirby creation. I'd actually started this back in February and had been puttering about with it for nearly a month before a sedate Sunday afternoon allowed me to complete it before April set in.

And finally, I created this montage to celebrate the first Anniversary of Kirby-Vision. It features just some of the fabulous artists who have submitted work to the blog. It was another race against time to get it finished and I eventually posted it three days later than the actual date, but I won't tell anybody if you don't.

I've been Interviewed

A fake house ad for a fake Jack Kirby comic which I created for an interview about Kirby-Vision for Tim Miner's Marvel Smartass! blog. Read all about it here.

The People vs. George Lucas

Premiering on March 12th at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival in Austin, Texas, The People vs. George Lucas explores the often conflicted dynamic between Lucas and his fans. I'm looking forward to seeing this, but what's even more exciting is the fact that my first Star Wars: Uncut animation in the opening and closing montages of the trailer.

Star Wars Uncut - Scene 134

Here's my third and final submission to the Star Wars: Uncut project, this time in the style of Terry Gilliam's Monty Python animations. I've been planning on trying out Gilliam's style for a while now and this scene (taken from the Leia hologram sequence) was visually quite straight forward which allowed me to take it out of context and drop in a couple of silly gags. All of the images used were culled from various sites (see links below) and the vinyl crackle and yawn were sourced, again, from Soundsnap. There's minimal animation, so it was a lot quicker to put together than my previous submissions. Great fun though, I'm raring to try this style out on some other ideas.

Original images - Alec Guiness, Man in chair, Gramophone, Yoda, record sleeve, wallpaper, carpet, table, Lady in bonnet.

Merry Christmas One and All

Tommy, 1975 (dir. Ken Russell)

Movies In Frames

Star Wars Uncut: Scene 248

Here's my second submission to Star Wars: Uncut project, inspired by The Beatles film, Yellow Submarine, directed by George Dunning. It was great fun to re-design the characters in the style of the film, especially Chewbacca in the part of Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D. There's a bit more movement in the figures as opposed to my last submission, but I've yet to graduate to any fully-fledged acrobatics. All of the interiors and backgrounds are taken from the film and 're-imaging' in Photoshop and the whole thing was put together in Flash. Sound effects where obtained from the rather marvellous Soundsnap.com and the voices where provided by myself (with apologies to any Liverpudlians out there wondering why the cast have Birmingham accents!). Not sure just yet if I'll take on another scene, but I have a few ideas on how I'd like to render it, so watch this space.

Star Wars Uncut

Busy on my second animation for Star Wars: Uncut. Here's a sneak preview.

New Portfolio Website

My new portfolio website is now on-line. This is the first website I've designed and built and I'm not shy to admit that it's been an intense learning curve. The site concentrates on my commercial work as a creative artworker with a smidgen of personal stuff. It's not all there yet but now that I'm free to concentrate on other work, I'm intending to update it with new projects regularly.

A Patchwork of Flesh

Paul Cooper has posted my tribute to Ken Reid's Frankie-Stien, along with my daughter Eden's SpongeBob Frankenpants, at his wonderful blog, A Patchwork of Flesh. It was fun sitting with Eden on a rainy afternoon and doing some colouring in, but I prefer the original pencil and inked versions.

Exterior

Spent a couple of hours today experimenting with colour in Illustrator and Photoshop.

Kirby-Vision out-take

As you know, I curate the Jack Kirby tribute blog Kirby-Vision over at The Jack Kirby Museum. I've contributed a number of photoshop collages to the blog and here's one that I didn't think was strong enough for inclusion. It's based on the Italian one-sheet for Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West using scans from a Kirby issue of The Rawhide Kid.

Original one-sheet here