Submissions

Over the course of the year I love to enter competitions with a creative brief. They come with a ready-made theme, the similar artistic freedom of a personal project and the potential bonus upside of some nice exposure if your submission does well. If they get nowhere then you've had fun making it and spread your creative wings a little at the same time. Here are a few of my recent submissions that fit firmly into that category.

I really enjoy tackling The Folio Society Book Illustration Awards literary briefs every year if I can. The subject matter is usually something I wouldn't typically get commissioned to do and the stories are always imaginative and worth exploring creatively. This year it was the classic Grimm Brothers dark fairy tale Rapunzel and I found the immortal 'Let Down Your Hair' passage irresistible. The previous year was Neil Gaiman's similarly dark and strange The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains and I depicted a climactic scene within the titular cave 'From Out Of The Shadows It Came'. Both of these stories coincidentally featured red-haired characters prominently and I seem to have gravitated towards that for some reason. I really enjoyed exploring more painterly atmospheric digital techniques with these. You can see other Folio Society submissions here and an entry for Sherlock that made it to the shortlist in 2018 here.

Another project with a great creative brief, and a good cause to boot, is Secret 7" . People are invited to submit a 7" cover artwork for a choice of a track from seven musical artists with the final selected 700 submissions sold to auction for charity. I didn't make the cut this time but I've been lucky enough to get selected for the show a few times in the past and love giving it a go at each opportunity. For 2025 I created covers for Scissor Sisters 'Return To Oz' and The Cure's 'Warsong'. For the former I focussed on a druggy depiction of Emerald City and the latter an out of left field response to vague lyrics and a sudden obsession with a tech-militaristic portrayal of a Portugeuse man o'war. I experimented with a 3d style for these, creating and lighting the models in Cinema 4d with digital comping and finishing in Photoshop. There's a couple of rougher alternative takes added here also. See all previous work for Secret 7" here.

Mega Pets Escape!

It was fantastic to be asked back again this year to illustrate D. Zollicoffer's continuing adventures of Zhuri and her pals in the third instalment of Game On, Zhuri!: Mega Pets Escape! This time, the video game world escapes into reality in the form of virtual pets - Roxy the dog, the Swift Brother snakes and Crystal the snow dragon. Zhuri, Keyona and Eli must capture the pets and return them safely to the virtual world with much ensuing hijinks. It was great fun creating all the creatures, along with some new characters, in the slightly more grounded setting of Zhuri's real world. Again, the illustrations were put together with digital collage techniques, and some mouse-hand drawing, in Photoshop with a few elements crafted in 3d. Many thanks to D. Zollicoffer, Katya Schultz, Billy Ray and the team at Benchmark / Reycraft Publishing for another wonderful illustration experience in children's book publishing. You can also see more work on the main site here along with Book 1 and Book 2.

Beakdancers

Here's the latest poster design for Dance Dance Dance at Margate Arts Club tomorrow. This one features a couple of volucrine beaky blinders ready for a swan dive into the psychopolis. See the full set of posters on the site here.

Wired For Weather

Here's an unusual online commission (for me) for a collaboration between Adweek and The Weather Company looking at how 'Humans are Wired for Weather' when it comes to marketing. The brief was to provide all the illustrations and an opening animation for an immersive story brought to live with Shorthand's scroll-based features. This meant that some of the main illustrations would build on gradually as you scrolled down the web site so I had to consider the design stages of how they would appear over four frames - which was a first for me.  A collage illustration style was required for this featuring contemporary photography, graphic/diagrammatic shapes with flat, bright colours and a science-forward approach and the modular compositions helped with building the images as the user scrolled down. The opening animation loop was created with the traditional After Effects route. A fun and interesting project overall put together with engaging web design as you can see with the final product online here.