Christmas Cards

I'm delighted to have my work up on MOO.com for the second year running - royalties have been modest but very welcome - but now they've expanded into the US with both offices and a dedicated US site, so who knows could go better - in the meantime, this years paperchase card (pictured) is in the shops and as you can see I introduced a slight hint of topicality into the design - hope it goes well, they've already bought another design for next christmas...but it's a tad early to be posting that one up...

Where I (now) work

A few weeks ago Creative Review had a 'show us your work space' type article running, and I quite wanted to post my new studio up there - trouble was at that stage it wasn't finished and I was, despite building it on and off for 2 months, having serious problems finishing it, so much so Tim the builder had to come to my rescue as we battled over 2 days putting it all together in lashing rain (It weighed a ton too which didnt help, I'm a light weight illustrator after all !).

After a lot of hard work the result - a fantastic work space I'm thrilled with and better than my last studio on a farm which was a tad cold and damp and got broken into (losing all my hardware, note to all digital illustrators, back up and keep the back up elsewhere). Trouble is this is only a few paces from my backdoor so no more cycling to work - so out with the jogging gear ! That's all for now as I'm busy with Christmas commissions (before it all goes horribly quiet over christmas !)

The Ashes 2009

Cricket, paint drying material for some , passion for others - this illo I did today, as 2 quick Aussie wickets fell, should tell you where I stand on the issue ! Comon England !

Emoti bots

Carrying on with the robot theme - I was going through a vintage tin toys book when I became inspired to create the above illustrations. I started with the dog - which is an almost faithfull reproduction of a 50's tin toy, but from there took it off into new characters. I may well put these up on MOO.com as I think they could make a fun set of mini cards, and may add more characters.

Manga Studio

I was down the pub with my friend (and illustrator par excellence)  Peter Richardson and he was enthusing about a piece of software called Manga Studio - in particular the speed and way in which the software handled brush stokes - having had numerous attempts at tweaking brushes in illustrator (and not achieving what I want) - I was keen to try out something new, so downloaded it yesterday and although I am on the 30 day trial, I shall no doubt be buying this excellent piece of software. After shelling out for CS3 its refreshing to find software priced at $39.99. I'm on the initial learning curve (and I've gone for the debut version as opposed to the all bells and whistles EX version (quite a bit more expensive). Its been around for a while and there are posts on you tube about it for those interested in taking a look. In the meantime here's my very first experiments. I placed a pencil sketch on a layer and drew on a separate layer using the brush tool. This is a bitmap program (vector brushes available in the EX version) but nevertheless produces sharp clear line (the default working environment is 600dpi) and it exports to photoshop too.