Acid 2 Time

Here's a fun experimental animation project created with Cinema 4D/Redshit and After Effects. It's a music video for the track Acid 2 Time taken from the album Drift by friend and collaborator Graeme Swinton's latest Acid House incarnation Mobile Mother.

Crafted with high-end 3d graphics, gritty moving textures and vfx, the video is a series of animated loops of swirling 3d sculptures that progressively deteriorate and overlap as the soundscape intensifies. It's also a cracking excuse to indulge in a fetish for late 90s techno aesthetics, see Autechre's Incunabula cover. You can watch the video on the main site here also and get Mobile Mother's Drift from Bandcamp here.

Champagne Supernova Turns 30

I was really pleased to see the Oasis Champagne Supernova visualiser I worked on a year ago get an official unveiling on Youtube for the 30th anniversary of the classic song. Created for Director I'm Your Boss Films, with art direction by Mario Wagner, it was upgraded to play with the song during the finale of the awesome Oasis Live '25 concerts, detailed in this post from last August, so didn't think it would see the light of day as a visualiser. I had a great time animating it so it's wonderful that the original cut is now out there for all to see.

Finely Tuned Piano

Here's the latest cover for ABRSM's Piano Exam Pieces series featuring the new brand design I developed with the team last year, covered in this previous post. It was nice to work with the template I'd helped devise but there was still a lot of invisible fine-tuning that went into getting the pianist photography just right and compositing seamlessly with the background. Enjoyable experience as always working with Darren Ellsmore and the ABRSM team. You can see the other covers in the newly branded series on the 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.

ABRSM Revival

Happy 2026 to all. For the first post of the year I thought I'd write about the recent work I've been doing with wonderful long-time client ABRSM. At the end of 2024, and after twelve years of illustrating their music exam book covers, ABRSM notified me that they were looking to rebrand and would be inviting new designers to tender for the work. I was a little deflated but figured that nothing lasted forever. I was offered the chance to pitch for the new work and didn't want to give up without a fight so took the opportunity to see how I fared with a new approach.

The initial pitch designs were to be for the Woodwind books and the chosen style would be rolled out across all the various instruments over the coming years. Working with the supplied photography of Clarinet, Flute and Saxophone players I developed a number of illustrative approaches presented with ideas for typographic layouts and was chuffed to make it past the first round. Over the course of the three month process my big breakthrough came with a wave design I created, based on an existing marketing asset, to define the lower illustration and upper title areas. With that direction as a basis it was the consensus to simplify the illustrative approach and have the photography cleanly presented on colour gradients chosen by ABRSM to represent the instruments. This resulted in a more graphic approach than my previous work and felt like the rebrand they were looking for. When I finally heard that I had won the pitch I was over the moon that I'd get to keep the job and continue to work with ace Content Operations Manager Darren Ellsmore and the ABRSM team.

So, presented here are the first pitch-winning Woodwind book cover designs and final typographic layouts with some of the initial illustrations put forward during the development process. Looking forward to the next performance. You can see other ABRSM work on the main site here also.

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.

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.

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. 

Stop Crying Your Heart Out Visualiser

Back in May Chris Curtis at I'm Your Boss Films got in touch about working on a 'visualiser' for Oasis to celebrate the launch of the remastered Time Flies singles collection and generally get Youtube audiences pumped for the Live Tour this year. I was happy to jump onboard this exciting opportunity and join an amazing team of creators already busy at work mass-producing incredible Oasis visualisers, which I soon discovered were essentially animated music videos sans the fiddly lyric bits.

I was tasked with creating the Stop Crying Your Heart Out visualiser with a quick turnaround time and got straight to work. Chris and art director Mario Wagner had established a lovely retro look and feel with a library of assets to play with so I pillaged the image and video banks and added a few of my own elements to the mix. The process was an adhoc and intuitive construction of the animation in After Effects around a loose narrative as it formed in my mind to the looping music based on memory, dreams, and capturing nostalgia. It was a tad stressful turning it around in a few days but creatively energising and rewarding and I'm pleased with how it came out. There's a wonderful collection of visualisers on the Oasis Youtube channel to check out and more being produced. Excitingly, this process has lead on to greater things and has been something of a warm-up for getting to work on the Live Tour concert visuals, more on which to come. 

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.

'Tinkering' The Ivories

Here's my latest cover illustration for ABRSM's new Piano Exam Pieces syllabus for 25/26. The process started with a selection of photographed pianist references sent over to have a play with and come up with a number of visual routes to get the ball rolling. I've included some initial concepts here that experiment with textures, shapes and lighting that are cherry picked by the ABRSM team at each stage to arrive at a final design. I'm happy with the atmospheric results on this one and enjoyed working with Darren Ellsmore and the ABRSM crew as always. You can see this and further work on the site here.

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.