Lapland Games

Here's a Christmas Knit pattern design for agency Cai and Kyn's HoHoHo Journal of Christmas Creativity and upcoming exhibition at Breese Little Gallery from 17th December. It was quite a fun challenge coming up with something simple enough to work well with the knit template, akin to pixel art really. I chose to stand on the shoulders of the Atari giants and reworked the graphics from the 80's Winter Games with speed skating Santa and conniving elf. See larger images on the site here.

Baltimore Tetris

Here's a recent cover editorial for the The Baltimore Sun (as seen in The Wire!) for their annual look at the Top 100 Workplaces in the city. The building blocks of the brief were to reference the arcade classic Tetris, work in the Baltimore skyline and give the image a metallic awards-y sheen. It all pieced together quite nicely in the end. See a larger detail on the website here.

Camber via Venice

Here are a few pics from recent escapades taken from the canals of Venice to the chalets of Pontin's, Camber Sands. In October we spent a lovely week in Italy getting agreeably lost in the stunning maze of hustling alleys and bustling waterways that make up Venice before moving on to the relative calm of Lake Garda in Sirmione and Desenzano. Naturally we were forced to consume many amazing pasta dishes and copious Negronis for our sins.

In November it was the End Of An Era for All Tomorrow's Parties British holiday camp music festivals. The last ever two of which were held at Pontin's, Camber Sands over consecutive weekends and we attended both for the craic. As usual there was a great, eclectic mix of bands and ATP stalwarts including Mogwai, Shellac, Television, Loop, Haxan Cloak and Har Mar. The last night saw attendees wearing black tie evening dress to commemorate. Adios Pontin's!

I Didn't Mean To Call You A Meatloaf Jack!

This year's Serco Prize for Illustration had the largely open theme of London stories from any source, fiction or non-fiction. I had to go with my gut and choose a classic London set film and personal, childhood-traumatising favourite, An American Werewolf In London (1981). It also happens to feature a couple of gory set-pieces based around London Transport so that seemed to fit the bill. Appropriately enough, in the same week I designed the poster we had a special studio double-bill screening of An American Werewolf In London and They Live! projected on a photographic studio infinity wall to eerie effect (photo: Alex Dobbin). You can see my other entries for the Serco Prize over the years on my site here.

Setting The Pilocene

  Here's a fun commission for BBC Focus Magazine, well, as much fun as you can have depicting impending environmental catastrophe anyway. The feature looks at how rising man-made carbon dioxide emissions are returning the Earth's climate to the kind of prehistoric conditions not seen since the Pilocene epoch when the wooly mammoths used to hang out. The time-spanning montage was built around a nice bit of wooly mammoth stock and the commission included an illustrated pie chart and short animation for the iPad edition. See more of this and other BBC Focus work on my site here.

Pep Talk

Here's a recent footie themed portrait for a UEFA Champions Matchday Magazine profile on Pep Guardiola. Back of the net! etc.

Showboating

Here's my cover illustration for this year's Boatshow International guide to all the mega-yacht action in Fort Lauderdale. See more work for Showboat magazine here.

Financial Crisis In Pictures

Here are a series of illustrations for The Economist's recent weekly Schools Brief breakdown of the financial crisis. I had to create each of these with very quick turnarounds and in two different formats, a tricky super-narrow landscape print version and a more forgiving rectangular online version. The copy was quite heavy on the technical financial jargon (deleveraging anyone?) so it was a fun challenge to come up with visual ways to represent the main thrust of each feature and keep a consistent look and feel. More Economist work on the main site here.

Doc Rocket

Here's a Rocketeer inspired cover illustration for Canada's The Medical Post looking at how doctors boost their income. Probably not by wearing rocket-propelled backpacks but what the hey. See more work for The Medical Post on my folio site here.

Quantum Questing

Here's my lastest illustration for Nature magazine on the tricky subject of quantum physics. The article looked at the latest attempts by a group of physicists to reinvent quantum theory and this seafaring image popped to mind recalling earlier expeditions into the unknown.

Elsie

Doing a bit of blog catch-up today after a lengthy period of silencio. I've been busy working away on a new animation project amidst the regular illustration commissions so time has been scarce. Will report on all that soon. In the meantime here are a few pics from a recent weekend away in the Wye Valley, Herefordshire. My wife and I spent the last few days of Summer in a lovely 1950s Stirling caravan that went by the name of Elsie. Toured the local area visiting Ross-on-Wye, Ledbury, Hay-on-Wye and Symonds Yat by day and relaxed with Elsie, a stunning view and a cosy campfire by night.

ABRSM Woodwind

Here's the latest work for the ongoing ABRSM Music book cover rebrand. An all new Woodwind Syllabus cover and a colour rework of the Info & Regulations covers for 2013. See all of this year's ABRSM work on the site here and last year's here. Play on.

Only God Forgives

Here's my entry for the latest Little White Lies creative brief to design a poster for Nicolas Winding Refn's hypnotic, neon and gore drenched Only God Forgives. I settled on a design splicing the pulped face of Ryan Gosling with his inner Thai demon rendered in the primary palette of the film. The director himself is judging the entries, all of which you can see here, so (severed) fingers crossed. You can see the design and original sketch in greater detail on my site here.

One Another

I was recently asked to dust off my graphic design skills and create a brand new logo for production company One Another Films. The brief was to come up with a design that conveyed the idea of a positive interaction between an individual and another to create something new. I worked through a few logo concepts to present and this simple, clean, overlapping letter design was chosen. The next step was to produce a logo animation fit for a cinema screen which was great fun to do. Ahhh...takes me back to the golden age of Cannon Films, Orion Pictures and Carolco. You can view the work, with some of the early concepts, on my main site here along with my full motion folio.

Microsoft City

Here's a recent editorial illustration spread for PC Pro magazine for an article asking the question 'Can Mircosoft Survive?'. The image depicts the still thriving Mircosoft-opolis surrounded by an encroaching wasteland of recent failed enterprises piling up at the (Bill) Gates. No? Ok.

Claude Debussy's Life In Miniature

Here's a great animated project I worked on earlier in the year for classical music site Sinfini Music. Their mission is to 'cut through classical' by commissioning interesting online content including animations, of which this is part of the composer's Lives In Miniature series. The brief was to capture a flavour of the life of Claude Debussy, a composer I was only vaguely familiar with I'm sorry to say, in an animation under three minutes long. It was an education delving into his lovely music and dramatic history to write the script and develop a suitable visual style for the proposal.

Debussy's music was groundbreaking and radical for the time and his personal life proved equally unconventional so I focused on those aspects for the narrative. His was also the era of the Impressionists and, even though he disapproved of any association, I thought a modern and colourful painterly approach was appropriate mixed in with an inky brush pen style for the drawn portraits. The beautiful composition Claire de Lune was chosen for the piece and all was in place. It was put together in After Effects with a single unbroken 3D camera move and was a real joy to make, hope you enjoy.

Life Begins

My wife and I hit the big 4-0 recently and celebrated with a couple of weekend reality-breaks. For Liz's birthday we headed off to Iceland for ATP's latest music festival staged in the unusual, semi-deserted environs of a former NATO Base in Keflavik. Highlights included Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, The Fall, The Notwist and local talents Æla. In the downtime we gave the old bones a geothermal soak in the amazing Blue Lagoon and spent the last day in Reykjavik, enjoying a birthday cocktail in the stunning new Harpa concert hall.

For my 40th we popped down to Bridport in Dorset to see The Wedding Present play on their Seaside Tour at the fantastic Electric Palace. The weather was playing ball that weekend so we toured the Jurassic Coast visiting West Bay, Portland Bill and Lyme Regis while munching on some ace seafood at the Crabhouse Cafe on the Fleet.

In between those two trips we had a joint birthday do at Dalston's Cafe Oto and a lot of fun was had, if my hazy memory serves! Here's a souped-up tractor flyer invite I designed for the bash. The second illustration features an Icelandic food highlight, and our staple diet at the festival, the delicious hot dogs of Baejarins Bestu. Their jogging sausage-dude logo formed the basis of this birthday card design I made for Liz. Now, on with this 40 lark, harumph.

Hot Hot Hot

It's hot in the city so I thought I'd commemorate the good weather with a couple of drawings of the amazing melting man, Emil from the classic Robocop, as potent toxic waste strips his flesh to the bone. 'Don't tzatch me maaannn!'. Enjoy the weekend!

Autocar

Here's a futuristic illustration for Car & Driver Magazine looking at the rise of the autonomous automobile for their science non-fiction column. Just sit back and let the car drive you. Can I get a Johnny Cab from Total Recall for mine please?

ABRSM Flute & Clarinet

I've been plenty busy this year with ongoing work for ABRSM, the UK's largest music education publisher. First out of the gate in 2013 are the covers for the Flute and Clarinet Exam Pieces, both part of a complete design and illustration rebrand of all their exam publications, art directed by Kate Benjamin. More to come soon.

Flying Business

Sorry for the lack of recent posts. The last few weeks have flown by, as did this cover illustration for Business Airport Magazine (ahem) which looks at the wealth of training required in the corporate aviation world. More work landing soon.