Yoshiwara

Have created this illustrated piece for Belfast-based newly established label Yoshiwara. They're focusing on releases of doom/stoner/metal and just downright esoteric material.

The name is taken from the club featured in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) so the direction was 'do something with art deco feel and if possible throw in something dark/fantastic/satanic'. Had a blast doing this as love Art Nouveau/Art Deco stylings and trappings and intersected with dark, murky stuff just made it all the more fun to work on.

It involved original ink elements such as figures scanned in, then a lot of background/environment stuff built up as vector elements in Illustrator, then colouring and textures applied and tweeked in Photoshop. Haven't really had the time this weather to build anything up in that time-consuming intricate fashion so was nice to get to work this up.

Below is illustration containing the Yoshiwara logo created by Will Broadbent, drummer of band Ogre who do a great line in Sabbath 70s-style heavy doom metal. They've released material through the Yoshiwara label. 

Snowglobe

 

 

 

Happy Christmas!

New Empress Magazine - A Certain Nightmare Before a Certain Christmas

 

I've recently created a black and white illustration for the latest edition of New Empress magazine.

The editor had a few jitters about depicting properties that come under the ownership of a certain house of a certain mouse so this called for a bit of abstraction. The final piece turned a lot more abstract and basic (basic in a good way hopefully) than previous work for the magazine.

Stage

 

I've just completed this piece incorporating pencil work, vector line work and a lot of Photoshop.

 

Originally, prior to colouring and adding vector elements such as the stars and anchor and ropes, I pieced all components together in greyscale.

 

 

When it came to overlaying the colour the colour I had to really hold myself back as I wanted a final look that would look like colours washed out with time and age or a look reminiscent of old hand tinted film footage with slightly garish colours such as emerald green and peachy red seeping through.

 

 

 

I'll have prints of this piece available when I'm attending MCM London Comic Con on the weekend of 25th-27th October.

 

Children's Illustrations

Below is a number of examples of interior full bleed spreads I completed for a 48-page children's publication last year.

It was a lot of fun to work in such a brash, bold style and play about with simplified character designs.













Aaaawwww!

Beware... The Man

This is a piece that I submitted to a competition from t-shirt design collective Kurst Wear. The brief was to create a design on the theme of 'supervillain' within the Kurst house style of street art/trashy/comic book/retro.

Ideally, it was to be created as vector artwork, utilising only three colours (as well as black and white).

I wanted to hark back to trashy 50's sci-fi/horror movies with a modern anti-big business spin.