Hands On

An offshoot from my ongoing 'Train Guy' project. Once I've perfected getting the quality nice these are hopefully going to be prints.

Priestess Process (sort of)

I don't tend to do process stuff of my pictures, technically speaking I don't feel my process is necessarily disciplined enough to warrant it. I've been working professionally as an artist and designer for five or six years now (and  drawing for significantly longer) and as time's gone on I get much less of a kick out of rendering for rendering's sake, and get more caught up in the subject matter and mental processes of drawing from imagination, I mean life's short right? 

Could be a part of how anyone's creative engagement with their work will inevitably change, (or could just be damn laziness...) either way here's kind of a 'creative' process I went through in looking at a priestess type character. Ultimately I think it was abandoned as concept, but it was fun working through these various stages, thematically and stylistically.   

Anyhoo- signed up for the Schoolism workshops in London next month so that'll be a chance to re-engage with the process side of things no-doubt :)

Train Guy: A Lover and a Fighter

Been  having fun designing this guy. Started off with a loose Bauhaus/Constructivist feel, with silly proportions, but wanted to flesh him out in his physicality with these paintings.

 Initially a tongue in cheek Desperate Dan like character who is all things to all men I wanted to be stern and combative, but also creative and gentle. It's been fun drawing a character with silly arms doing a variety of tasks. Next step is to jump back onto the really angular, possibly vector style to see if the solidity of these painted versions can recombine with something more stylistically true to the initial stylistic inspiration of the constructivist figures of old Russian propaganda.

Guilty Faces...

Some test images from a current side project, based on some of my street sketches of the past 6 months, I was keen to have a rough and unpolished way to include these into something. Currently planned to be involved into a comic, I'm deliberately keeping things a bit wonky and messy on this one as its all being done very piece-meal, and the real goal on this is to combine into a small coherent story, so rougher the better at this stage, will probably weed out the weaker images later down the line.

Train Guy Project

I'm flying off to Australia tomorrow so won't be blogging for a while, it's going to be awesome plus I'm packing some serious sketchbook so I will no doubt post some stuff on my return!

 In the mean time I'd thought I'd post up some of my exploratory stuff for my 'Train Guy' project. Still work in progress, playing with styles that I'm not sure I'm happy with yet. I wasn't 100% sure posting incomplete stuff up here is a good idea, but since it's been a slow burning project, I need to get some of this stuff off my desk and (potentially) get some responses.

Primarily exploring the character and aesthetic the 'Train Guy' character was initially an embodiment of old American Railway workers, industry, hardship and pride.

 Thinking about ways of depicting a functional, industrious character led to an alternative kind of culture to draw from Russian constructivism, and so to Bauhaus which has grabbed me as being an interesting potential art style to apply to a video game's art direction.

Having said this, when doing some more painterly work, I really liked how it had some of the qualities of old cigarette cards, which I thought would be an amazing way to tell a story, and sort of captured the romance and aspiration of the railways but from a blue collar grass roots level.

It's my hope to be doing plenty of writing and design over the next few weeks to try and work some of these themes out before pushing the rendering and illustration further.

Space Commuter

Found this old character in a sketchbook today, gave him a digital dusting off! Nice working with watercolours - it responds really well to digital tinkering too.

Pirate Mondays

Quick Blackbeard using some fun new brushes.