Secret 7" 2026

Secret 7" recently closed their 10th edition with another hugely successful record sleeve art auction for charity, raising more than £115,000 for Warchild UK. I'm always keen to submit work for the show and was lucky enough to get selected this year with my take on the single 'Purple' by Skin, which can now be revealed. The abstract head design was inspired by lyrics such as 'Purple washes over me, Seeping through my open seams' and I created the 3d artwork in Cinema 4d/Redshift with some Photoshop tinkering. I went to see the exhibition last month, marvelling at all the amazing art on display and taking some cheesy pointing snaps for good measure. Wonderful to be a part of again.

I submitted three other pieces this year which I've included here. Mostly made for the enjoyment of creatively interpreting the different songs but also to boost the chance of selection, of course! In order are entries for Glass Animals: Take A Slice, John Lennon: Out Of The Blue and The Last Dinner Party: Let's Do it Again! All created with Cinema 4d and/or Photoshop. I've also put together some alternate takes created along the way. You can see these and previous Secret 7" entries on the main site here.

Dance Cop

Here's the lastest animated poster design for the upcoming Dance Dance Dance night at Margate Arts Club. Furthering the visual adventures into a psyche-punk universe with illustrated type and a sun-bleached palette. Digitally collaged with 3d modelled elements, 2d textures and photography in Photoshop with the short social media animation put together in After Effects. See the full series of posters on the main website here.

Dance Flyers

Here's a brand new illustrated poster design for the first Dance Dance Dance of '26. More experimentations in the psy-fi playground, a 3d modelled multi-level dance emporium for winged party-goers to ascend to. I enjoyed mixing up the Cinema 4d architectural elements with 2d textures and working with a fresh Spring palette. I also created a simple animation for social for this one. See more posters on the main site here.

Dance Doubles

I've recently been moving studio and off on my hols for a couple of weeks so playing catch up with a double hit of Dance Dance Dance posters. These are my 13th and 14th designs so I've tweaked the art and typography style again to try and keep it phresh and interesting. I'm still enjoying playing with mysterious psy-fi characters mucking about in abstact landscapes and future cities though so sue me. Thanks to Katie & Joe as always. Dance on! See the whole series of posters on the main site here.

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.

Oasis Live '25 Tour Visuals

After enjoying working on Oasis' Stop Crying Your Heart Out visualiser earlier in the year I was super excited to be asked by Chris Curtis at I'm Your Boss Films to work on the animated visuals for the gargantuan Oasis Live '25 Tour with a crack team of talented illustrators and animators. Featured here are live videos I took at Wembley on August 2nd and a series of stills from the two song visuals I animated.

First up was the animation for Stand By Me working with Director Chris Curtis and ace collage artist Mia Angioy on Art Direction duties. The overall theme was that of an emotive scrapbook-esque journey through old family photos and Mia supplied some beautifully collaged style frames for me to begin structuring the animation around. The format was super-wide with space on the outer edges for live band video feeds so I designed moving textured backgrounds based on blocks of flats and unfolding paper effects to suit the collage style and content. The hefty After Effects project evolved as Mia supplied further collaged material, photos and some lovely stop motion unfolding imagery to work with. The majority of photos featured came from the family albums of the production team, including some of mine, and it was a joy to animate and design the camera movement through them all. Really happy with the final animation and it was unbelievable to watch (and video) it live at Wembley with the huge crowd singing along. 

 

The second animation for Champagne Supernova had originally taken shape as a visualiser to appear on Youtube along with Stop Crying Your Heart Out and other recently remastered releases. I'd created the original animation with Director Chris Curtis and super talented Art Director Mario Wagner and was really proud of it so when I heard it would be graduating to the big concert screen I was elated. The concept for this was a continual upward looping journey through epic vistas that would gradually become stranger and increasingly psychedelic as the song progressed. Taking Mario's really strong style frames as a starting point I developed the After Effects journey through volcanic lakes, cloud cities, underwater kingdoms and space canyons and loved making every frame of it. For the tour visuals I needed to expand the original 4k 16:9 frame to fill the super wide tour format and make a few tweaks and changes to improve it's impact at that scale. I don't mind saying that it's probably my favourite Oasis song so it was overwhelming to watch it at the end of an amazing show at Wembley followed by a huge fireworks display. A proper career highlight and very grateful to have had the opportunity to work on it.

Dance Valkyrie

 

Here's the latest Dance Dance Dance poster design for their upcoming evening at Margate Arts Club. Another animated offering, this time designed around a sky chariot-riding DJ valkyrie of some sort.  Always fun to indulge my psy-fi predilictions on these! See the full poster series on the site here. 

Dance Dance Dance For The Win

Here's the latest Dance Dance Dance poster design for the regular Margate Arts Club event hosted by Katie & Joe. This one continues the atmospheric style refresh from the previous poster with illustrated type framing an amphibious character having a golden hour dip. I also tried out a short and simple animated version for social media posted here. 

Speaking of the previous poster I was very happy to hear it had picked up an Applied Arts award for Advertising Illustration and will appear in the Annual Awards issue and online here.

Let's Dance

Here's the first new Dance Dance Dance poster illustration and design of 2025 with a bit of a stylistic tweaking. Continuing the 'Sci-chedelic' vibe and illustrated type of the series so far but with a more atmospheric/textural approach to the imagery. Also having me some fun playing with True Grit brushes and texture effects. I've included here the progress from basic black and white comp to colour test and developed rough below. See the poster series on the main site here.

Merry Dancemas

Happy New Year to you all! I'll kick off 2025 by going back to Christmas '24 with this recent yule-flavoured poster design for the regular Dance Dance Dance night at Margate Arts Club. For a festive feel I wanted the suggestion of a tree with the stacked vinyl/discs and an angelic vibe from the floaty psyche-nauts. Adding a warm glow and a Xmas palette wrapped it up nicely. I've included the sketch to final rough sequence here and a horizontal formatted version. You can see the whole poster series on the site here.

Dance Me Up, Scotty

Here's a new illustrated poster design for Dance Dance Dance's latest night at Margate Arts Club. Continuing the psychedelic tinged sci-fi stylistic odyssey, this one focuses on a winged city gal just looking for a place to let loose after sunset. Have included the process from monochrome composition 'sketch' through to colour tryout and developed rough before final refinements are made to the image and illustrated typography. See the full set of posters on the main site here.

MVCDO Summit

Here's a recent illustration I enjoyed working on for the Martha's Vineyard Chief Diversity Officer Summit 2024. The brief was to create an inspiring image of diverse business leaders centred around a lighthouse to symbolically represent the summit's hopeful aims and the iconic landmark at Martha's Vineyard island, Massachusetts. Initially the proposal was to have a futuristic look and feel to match the 'Future Is Now' tagline and I modelled a concept lighthouse in Cinema 4d based on some supplied reference then worked up some ideas shown above. It was decided the lighthouse should look more like the existing one so I recreated that with a modern spin and combined elements from both ideas for the final. A satisfying commission and a lovely client to work with. You can see it on the main site here also.

Dance Tower

Here's a new flyer in the Dance Dance Dance series for the upcoming regular event at Margate Arts Club. More enjoyable sci-fi-delic shenanigans, this time under a Fernsehturm-ian tower with the city dwelling folk. Here's a sequence of progress from sketch through to colour rough, before a late date change for the final, and a horizontal comp. See all the posters on the site here.

Dance Moves

This is the latest entry in the DanceDanceDance poster series promoting a regular night at Margate Arts Club hosted by Katie Barber and Joe Lye. For the fifth in the psychedelic/sci-fi inspired series I wanted to expand the world a little with new characters and hints of new places to venture into such as the distant tower. This one features a sort of psych-deco Amelia Earhart from Mars 2.0 and was fun to make as usual. Also a cheeky Death Star-esque orb that might have nothing to do with the May 4th (be with you) date. I've included the process roughs here from initial black and white scamp to colour test then back to monochrome for detailing before presenting the developed colour rough for approval. Elements get added,  removed and refined at each stage and for the final I tweaked the overall background colour for a more upbeat Spring feel. You can see the full series on the site here.

Secret Swan

I was really happy to have my submission selected for this year's return of the Secret 7" exhibition and auction in aid of the charity Warchild. All artists involved were asked to choose from seven tracks to create a unique 7" vinyl single artwork and remained anonymous until close of the live auction. I chose Siouxsie and the Banshees' Lullaby to base my artwork on and found the evocative lyric 'The dream swan spins' as good an excuse as any to build that robot swan I've always wanted to! Using Cinema4D I designed and modelled the swan before taking it into Photoshop for some violet-hued cygnetpunk styling for the final piece. I've posted an unused alternate version here along with some of the untextured 3d model shots to see. Also included are a couple of photos of the final sleeve displayed in the exhibition at NOW Gallery in North Greenwich, courtesy of Clare Mallison and Al Heighton. You can see some of my previous Secret 7" submissions here.

Making A Dance

 

Here's the fourth poster in the series for the regular Dance Dance Dance event at Margate Arts Club serving up a sci-chedelic soufflé with a dollop of hand rendered type and an acidic Spring palette cleanser. Fun to make!

Dance On

Here's the latest poster design for Dance Dance Dance at Margate Arts Club. A continuation of the psychedelic design and type style established previously with a darker wintery palette spin. The central character enters a portal overseen by a tripped-out local suzerain of some sort. See the poster series so far on the folio site here.

Dancerella

Here's the second poster design for Dance Dance Dance at Margate Arts Club that continues the scifi/psychedelic style and hand rendered typography of the original design. I'm aiming to create a narrative of sorts if I get to do more, loosely inspired by pulpy Barbarella/Flash Gordon tropes, following a central figure on a kaleidoscopic journey. Stay tuned.

Dance Triplicate

Here's an enjoyable commission for a recurring Margate Arts Club DJ event called Dance Dance Dance hosted by some of my friends, Katie & Joe, and their guests. They were looking for a new flyer /poster design so I started out with an open brief and flirted around with a few mirrorball-centric visuals before the brief was honed down a little with some classic psychedelic art references from UFO Club to Grateful Dead poster designs. With those inspirations in mind I set about designing illustrated typography and fantastical cosmic scenes with female figures and ended up with the final poster artwork. You can see some of the visuals created en route below the final design above. 

Toronto Time

This is a commission that's been on the shelf for a while. It was originally created in 2019 for a TD Bank event in Toronto which was hastily cancelled in 2020 by a certain global pandemic and rescheduled for '22 I believe. The brief was to illustrate the city's landmarks and activities in an exciting way so I (virtually) went to town with this dynamically composed collage featuring the CN Tower and the pretty cool looking Royal Ontario Museum. Would sure like to visit the city in person one day.