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.

TIME100 AI 2025

Here's a great commission for Time Magazine and their annual TIME 100 AI 2025 list of the most influential people working in Artificial Intelligence. The loose brief was to create an image that was interesting and abstract and conveyed the concept of AI without being too obvious. The design director Chelsea Kardokus had referred to some of my 3d work in the past, such as the Secret 7" chrome swan and the BBC Science Focus Dark Universe cover, so it was a no-brainer to turn to Cinema 4d to begin creating this piece.

My first ideas revolved around the notion of a cybernetic flower of some sort with metal thorns to convey the notion of a flourishing technology with potentially very prickly elements to it. I really enjoyed modelling the flower and experimenting with textures and lighting but soon decided to move on to another train of thought. The image of a spherical egg-like object came to mind with an all-seeing eye, suggestive of the birth of a powerful new technology possibly, so I modelled and rendered that to present with my other concepts, some of which are shown here. The cyber-egg won the day so I developed that further in Cinema 4d with a ripple effect beneath, catching some interesting reflections, and took the renders into Photoshop to refine the eye with its luminous data-strewn field of view.

I've included here a Cinema 4d render of the basic model and an alternative version with subtly different lighting and textures. A really satisfying and enjoyable job and it's a real pleasure to see it across the Time website and print edition so many thanks to Chelsea for taking a chance on me. You can see this on the website here also.

Galaxy Glitch

Here's a new, and always very welcome, commission from BBC Science Focus and art director Joe Eden. This one was a cover and spread on the theme of The Galaxies That Shouldn't Exist and strange signals from deep space that reveal flaws in our understanding. The brief was to depict a galaxy with some sort of distortion so I had fun going to town on glitch-in-the-matrix visuals. Joe asked me to try out some type treatments to accompany the illustrations and I worked up some pixel-warped ghosted headers. You can also see these on the site here and other Focus work 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.

WIA2025 Shortlist

Very pleased to get the news update that my longlisted WIA2025 entry made it to the shortlist! 

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. 

Politico

Here's a nice little commission for Politico for an article on Trump's allies pushing a bill through the U.S. House to steamroll state AI regulations and controls. I worked through a few initial ideas with art director Jade Cuevas and this chosen piece seemed to convey the themes with the most visual impact in print and online. See it on the site here also.

3x3 Merit Haul

Over the moon to hear that three of my entries gained a Merit in this year's 3x3 Illustration Show No.22 and will be published in the Annual and appear in the online gallery. My illustration for Al Majalla Stellar Competition with art director Sara Loane scored in the Editorial category. Merit two for my AI Weather Prediction piece with Caitlin Choi for Wall Street Journal's Future of Everything in the Newspaper Cover category. Finally, a merit for my illustrations in D. Zollicoffer's Game On Zhuri Book 2 published by Reycraft Books in the Children's Illustration (Published) category. Phew! 

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.