A Truck Drivin' Man

New character sketch from my Product project, designing a range of Designer Toys for mass production. More details and characters soon!

Job's a good 'un

Just finished the character design job for CS One's new website. Before it goes live here's a sneak peak of one the cheeky chaps. Not my usual style but great fun to draw - quick and easy, no time consuming photo ref or mind-nummingly complex foreshortening. I'm going try and work elements of this back into my 'house style' - bish bash bosh ker-ching, that's what you want!

A Man for One Season part two

Righto chums, pages 3 and 4 of the AQQ strip above. As before, nice idea but slightly stiff and inconsistent illustration. The four pages form part of a larger cycle which follow a group of individuals throughout the year as they earn their living doing seasonal work.

There's one important panel from the thumbnail in page one that was omitted due to space, which holds the meaning behind the larger story:

The park-keeper goes back to his shed and realises that now all the fallen leaves have been collected his life has been robbed of purpose until next autumn. Because no matter how menial, no matter how meaningless and ultimately futile his activities are they provide him with a reason to get out of bed in the morning. And so the story goes on... For example, can you imagine the crushing despair of the department store Santa on December 25 when he wakes up to the realisation that his portly frame and robust laugh is going to be utterly redundant until next November?

*sigh*

See you next time chums!

A Man for One Season part one

For some reason I get a lot of jobs where the client wants a robot as a character. I suspect this may be because there's an image of a robot on my business card, which I reason demonstrates the power of subliminal imagery. With this in mind my new business cards will picture a stack of freshly-minted £50 notes with an arrow pointing to an illustration of my wallet. Worth a try...

Anyway, I just found the above thumbnail rough in the archives, which I've posted to address the balance and to prove that I can draw things other than automatons. It's a thumbnail rough for my first commissioned comic strip which was published by AQQ magazine in autumn 2007. It's interesting to see the differences between the rough (above) and the finished artwork (below). I was never entirely happy with the end product, which, as is often the case, was compromised due to publishing deadlines. I still like the idea, though the version that saw print lacks the simple charm and fluidity of the rough.

I'll post some more pages soon and explain what it's all about...

Thank you, thank you

Just finishing off a job for CS One Designers at the moment, a slew of character designs for their soon-to-be-going-live new website. Can't release any of the images yet but in the meantime this is the last piece I produced for them...

'Ere we go, 'ere we go, 'ere we go

Okay, this is me saying HELLO...

Gripping stuff so far eh? Well, that's life chum, deal with it.