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.

Attack Of The Robo-Bugs

After really enjoying the process of illustrating Game On, Zhuri! Book 1: How To Defeat A Blob Monster I was delighted to be asked to work on D. Zollicoffer's sequel Attack Of The Robo-Bugs! The follow-up similarly followed Zhuri and her friend's exciting adventures in a video game environment and was more ambitious in scale than the first book. This expansion also applied to the creative demands of envisaging bustling city scenes and interiors, mechanical spiders and the titular robo-bugs themselves. For these elements I turned to Cinema 4d to design and build the various robots and sets and transformed an off-the-shelf model into the video game's Hero City. Having these 3d elements really helped with the workflow, especially when presented with depicting armies of robo-bugs.

New character designs were also called for and I made some subtle suit upgrades for the central trio to keep it fresh. Once again, it was great to work with the team at Reycraft Publishing on the cover and 20 interior illustrations over a six month period with three months apiece for roughs and finalising. I also relished the slightly darker tone and techy sci-fi edge of this instalment and got a real kick out of building the robo-bugs. Roll on Book 3! You can see more of this project on the main site here and the book is available to buy now.

The Fliers Of Gy

I entered the Folio Society Book Illustration Awards again this year as it's always a rewarding creative challenge to take on. The chosen book was Ursula K. Le Guin's short story The Fliers of Gy and the brief was to create one illustration based on a passage of your choosing from the set text. The book is about a society of feathered human beings of whom a select few grow wings and face persecution if used to openly take flight.

I worked on two illustrations and chose the first one to submit, titled 'Love Letter' and based on this passage - 'Lovers exchange feathers with which to write love letters to one another, a pretty custom, referred to in a famous scene in the play The Misunderstanding by Inuinui.'

The second un-submitted illustration was based on this passage - '...I turned around and there I had the full run ahead of me, clear across the market-place to the Assay Office. And I ran, and I took off.'

The longlist was announced this week and unfortunately I didn't make it this time but huge congrats to the excellent illustrators who were selected, all fantastic entries. You can see my entries for previous Folio Society book illustration competitions here.

Mill Town

Here's a recent commission for the Boston Globe's Books section reviewing Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains by Kerri Arsenault. The book looks at the rural working class town of Mexico, Maine, where the author and generations of her family grew up. It charts the social, economic and environmental impact of the declining paper mill at the heart of the area for over a hundred years. Really enjoy working on illustrations based on literary sources with a sense of place and atmosphere.

Book Illustration Competition 2020

This year I thought I'd have another crack at the Folio Society/House Of Illustration Book Illustration competition after making it to the final short list with my Sherlock entries a couple of years ago. No room on the long list for me this time unfortunately but I really enjoyed the creative challenge as always. The theme was Love Poems and there were three to illustrate, the details are below. Congratulations to all the long listed illustrators! You can go and vote for your favourite here until 16th March and you can also see these illustrations on my site here with related work.

The first illustration focuses on the following lines from The Good Morrow by John Donne.
'My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,...'.

Secondly, this extract from Wild Nights! by Emily Dickinson.
'Rowing in Eden -
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor - Tonight -
In thee!'

Finally, this passage from The Trick by Imtiz Dharker.
'...till that time comes when you come to the door
of dreams, carrying oranges that cast a glow
up into your face. Greedy for more
than the gift of seeing you, I lean in to taste
the colour, kiss it off your offered mouth.'

Play With Fire

Here's a cover jacket illustration for a new book by Nick Francis of Casual Films called 'The New Fire'. It's a guide to successfully using video to promote businesses so a blazing play icon seemed an appropriate way to visualise the theme. You can see this and related work on the site here.

The Cresswell Plot

I've always enjoyed illustrating for book covers so I was really pleased to work on this recent publishing commission for the paperback edition of Eliza Wass' The Cresswell Plot from Hyperion. Starting with the initial client sketch of a young female next to a tree I worked through various colour schemes and tree sizes before landing on the final combination seen above before the lovely type treatment was added by the designer. See this and related publishing works on the site here.

Tomorrow's People

Here's a selection of work from a really rewarding book project for UKTV. I was commissioned to illustrate the cover and 8 essays for the publication, called Tomorrow's People: Making Cultures For Creativity, promoting British creativity and launching at the 40th Edinburgh International Television Festival. It's edited by Zoe Clapp and some of the contributors featured here include Piv Bernth (DR's Head Of Drama - The Killing/The Bridge), John Kampfner (Director of CIF), Chris Chibnall (writer of Broadchurch), Dougal Wilson (music video director) and Sharon Horgan (writer of Catastrophe). All of the anecdotal essays offered plenty of inspiring and funny morsels to illustrate and once I'd settled on a style and palette the job was a joy to create in a relatively short turnaround time. You can see all the illustrations on the site here and even download a copy from UKTV here if you're in the mood for a read.

Space Hostages

Hot on the heels of Sophia Mcdougall's Mars Evacuees last year comes the follow-up book Space Hostages with a new illustration from yours truly gracing the cover. The brief for this one required a little more dynamic flying action, in place of the cucumber-cool stances of the original, and the Martian red has become a more earthy, yet alien, green. Hugely enjoyable to work on again. You can read some book extracts on Sophia's interesting blog here and see more of the work on my site here.

BSFA Award Nom

Very pleased to find myself nominated in the Best Artwork category at this year's British Science Fiction Association Awards for Sophia Mcdougall's Mars Evacuees cover. The awards are held at the Dysprosium Eastercon convention this coming Easter weekend and I'm up against some stiff competition so my fingers will be crossed at all times until then. Looking back at the history of the awards it's a real privilege for me to be nominated amongst some of the hugely influential names on there, Jim Burns in particular, was a big inspiration for me as a sci-fi art obsessed youth.

3 x 3 Show Success

Very pleased to see that a couple of my entries in this year's 3 x 3 illustration shows were successful. Claude Debussy's Life In Miniature animation picked up a Merit in the Professional Show and my cover illustration for Sophia Mcdougall's Mars Evacuees received an Honorable Mention in the Picture Book Show.

Mars Evacuees

Here's a cool commission I've been waiting to shout about for a while. It's a cover illustration for a forthcoming sci-fi novel called Mars Evacuees by Sophia Mcdougall. She's written a great, and very flattering, post about the anticipation of seeing cover illustrations for her books for the first time. It was a real pleasure to work on so I'm glad it went down well and Egmont gave the finished cover a glorious shine. You can see more on my website here. I was also asked to write a little about the process of creating the image, so here it is...

It was really exciting news when I was asked to design the cover of Mars Evacuees as I'm a bit of a sci-fi nut and find the genre instantly inspiring. My first instinct was to make the illustration relatively simple, colourful and eye-catching as those are the covers I tend to respond to. After digesting the brief I had a strong mental image of what I wanted and set about designing my initial draft illustration in Photoshop. I worked up the red planet and background digitally using unusual textures I'd photographed and collected, including images of peeling paint from the sides of old boats! I then designed the main characters as stylised silhouettes, I prefer this approach as the reader can create the character's faces in their own mind. I found the cyber-goldfish guardian character particularly fascinating and made it a major part of the design. The first rough was sent over, as well as a version with a hand drawn type treatment. The illustration minus the type was quickly approved, which is always a relief, and with a few tweaks the cover was finalised. I'm really pleased with how it turned out and owe a big thanks to Sophia and Egmont for getting me involved.