Awesome bad VHS art!

In an impressive show of knowing how much I love crap films and wasting time on the Internet, my friend Tom sent me a link to this immense site: http://www.coverbrowser.com/covers/vhs-videos. Literally thousands of old VHS covers! I'm a bit of a film freak and constantly horrify my friends with my random knowledge of weird films and actors thanks to hours upon hours of watching the Sci-Fi Channel (when it was good) into the wee hours of the morning. I've yet to look through all of these but was delighted to recognise many covers from my childhood of staring in fascinated terror at the horror section of our local video shop, and horrified in realising how many of these I've actually seen.

No doubt I'll be posting more of the humorous and terrible gems I find on this site, but for now some of my favourites so far!

I'm still waiting for this to come out on DVD; awesome cheesy horror film about brain-slugs and zombies!

I used to see this cover in our video shop and it never failed to unsettle me. It's only looking at it years later than I realise it's a H.R Giger picture.

I very sadly own the very VHS version of this and the re-released DVD...

Bought this for £1 at our local cheap secondhand DVD shop and it wasn't bad! Great cover though...

And some crap horror for the win! You really don't see DVD art like these now-a-days (for good reason) but there is a kind of wonky charm about the badly painted covers you used to get. I for one, am in love!

Great Uncle Guppy

I recently found this portrait of my Great Uncle Guppy, an American ancestor. He lived in Massachusetts in a small town called Innsmouth. Apparently, he got in with a bad crowd over there and dissapeared in the early 1900's. I'm not exactly sure which side of the family he comes from as there seems to be some bitterness about him and his "dealings." No-one else in the family looks quite as fishy as he does though...

Apologies for the cheesy Lovecraft reference! Another attempt to get back into painting and the first in a series of ten "portraits" I'm working on. Some bits of this I like, some I don't. I was going for an old photo/portrait look and I'm not sure I really got it. I'd like to get a better scan of this as the original painting is a lot darker!

Acrylic on canvas paper.

Robot Bits and new project

I had a bit of a mess about the other day, just to get into the swing of painting again. I'm not all that impressed by what came out but it was nice to have a scribble!

I've started work on my new pesonal project which is going to be a series of ten acrylic protraits. Expect Lovecraft-style creatures, posh monkeys and multiple penguins!

More Japanese Characters!

More awesomeness, mainly on the streets of Tokyo! The bum wearing a hat was a particularly spectacular find, while the 2 squid men in the Toei Film Studios in Kyoto remains one of my favourite pictures from the whole trip!

Veg Out!

The 26th saw the opening of Veg Out; the exhibition I'm doing with the awesome Katie Green http://www.katiegreen.co.uk and Sophie Swindells http://sophieswindells.co.uk. It was part of the Bristol Art Fringe and it was absolutely rammed! We had such a great turn out and it was a lot of fun. The exhibition itself is on until the 29th of May.

Me putting up my stuff; that nail did NOT want to go in...

Katie and her babies!


My table of goods; I made a small killing that day on posters, stickers, prints and postcards!

Sophie's giclee prints.

Me and Katie caught off-guard having a break from making tea for the customers. What the hell am I doing with my legs?!

I was surprised to sell my pixels to a lovely couple who wanted it for their son's nursery!

It was like this the whole day; apparently, the shop was the busiest part of the whole Art Fringe!

All in all, we had a great day and it was really nice to be able to test my stuff out on an entirely fresh audience and still get a great reaction. I wish I'd had time to frame my stuff a bit better but people were obviously looking at the work and not what it was up in!

Japanese Characters!

I'm a huge fan of character design in general, but nothing can quite compare to Japanese character design. Characters are on everything: food packaging, subway adverts, restaurant menus, signs for no fouling - literally everywhere! So when I actuallt went to Japan two years ago, you can imagine how overjoyed I was to see what I could take the oddest character piture of!

I was recentley introduced to this cool blog http://characterhunter.blogspot.com/ which made me want to post my own Japanese character finds!

Painting again!

This image has nothing to do with my painting but I thought it would just brighten things up a bit! As much as I've enjoyed using my Wacom to colour digitally the last few months, I can't help but think I need to get back into some painting, just for a change and to freshen my artwork up a tad. I'm looking forward to just messing about for a bit but the only problem I have is that I don't feel productive enough when I take a break to fiddle about.
One of the reasons I love using a tablet is because I can crank out a lot of work in a short space of time. I know that doesn't necessarily mean it's all good but there is a certain sense of accomplishment when you have a goodly body of work under your belt. As much as I enjoy painting, I'm going to miss having work finished quickly, but saying that I've done well over 100 pictures since January. I guess I just don't feel like I'm productive unless I'm constantly cranking out work. But then, I always have been too hard on myself whenever it comes to my artwork!

Prague!

I've just come back from an awesome break in Prague. It was fantastic and I picked up a lot of inspiration for artwork! I bought some great Czech children's books which I'll post about as well as posting pages from the sketchbook journal I kept. It's pretty shoddy but should be good for a laugh or two!

Fat Chunk volume 2 cover

Very much looking forward to this now! There are some awesome people lined up for it. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that there will be a volume 3 to contribute to!

My Squid Collection

My contribution to the "Obsessions" zine that I'm soon contributing too! I'll be doing a colour version of this soon too.

Rosemary's Baby

After much searching, I finally got hold of a copy of the novel, Rosemary's Baby. RB is one of my all time favourite films; the build-up of creeping horror and suspense is amazing and the ending is one of the bleakest in modern cinema! I have to say, so far it doesn't disappoint and reading the novel, I realise what a faithful adaptation the film is. Even Ira Levin was impressed that Roman Polanski pretty much filmed the movie scene-by-scene from the book. Even the dialogue is spot on.

I'm actually surprised at how hard it is to find the novel of Rosemary's Baby in the UK; Ira Levin is a staple of modern horror/thriller writers (he even has a street named after him in Silent Hill!), with books like The Stepford Wives, The Boys From Brazil and Sliver to his name. I'm a huge fan of his all-is-not-as-it-seems story-lines and Rosemary's Baby is one of the all-time greats of paranoid suspense. Highly recommended if you haven't read the book or seen the film; it was one of many movies in the late 1960's that changed the face of modern cinema.

New KON Shoe Designs!

My new High Top sneakers are now available to buy at www.kingsofneon.com ! Fancy some ninja action on your feet? Or how about a flaming pig?

Pac-Man cakes!

How awesome are these? I want to make them! In fact, I keep getting hassled at work to bring in some home-made cakes...

Original story here: http://www.tokyomango.com/

Fat Chunk volume 2!

After being too late to grab a spot in Fat Chunk volume 2 way back when, I had an email from Jamie Smart yesterday asking if I wanted to submit something as a couple of people had backed out. Due to being away for most of this and next week, I won't be able to draw anything new (the deadline is a bit tight) so hopefully Zombie Dog will be making an appearance in the book!

The ZD strips are pretty old (2003 if memory serves) but I'm not as ashamed by them as I am most of my older work. If anything, I looked back over them yesterday and thought I could use a thing or two from them in my work now! Anyhow, it's a nice bonus to have this pop up out of the blue and if the strips do make it into the book it's another published notch to add to the belt!

Obsessed with Squid!

As part of the Girls Who Draw/Love to Print collective (http://girlswhodraw.wordpress.com/) I will be producing an A4 spread for their next project; a zine dedicated to obsession! The zine will also be sold as a colouring book which is an idea I've been toying with for a while so I'm really looking forward to taking part.
My chosen obsession is squid and octopi (octopusses?) which I love to draw! I'm going for a slightly victorian feel to the image as well as a bestiary style theme. Bring on the tentacles!

I Heart my Nintendo DS!

I've had my clunky Nintendo DS for a good two years now, and I can happily say that I'm in no way bored with it at all! I've long been a fan of videogames (I got my Spectrum ZX when I was 8) and I think the DS is one of the most versatile little consoles out there. I'm still a huge fan of the PS2, pine for my Amiga and Mega Drive and long for an XBox 360, but the DS really has some awesome little games. The inventiveness and originality of a lot of them is great and I never fail to be impressed by some of the gems that Nintendo come up with, not just because of the playability of the games, but also the design and execution. Here are a few I'm obsessed with at the moment...

San-X is a series of characters in Japan not unlike Sanrio (of Hello Kitty fame) but for me, has a much better range of characters and is so cute you could puke. The same goes for the two San-X DS games. Chara Sagashi Land is pretty much just a spot-the-difference game under time limits and with a few gimmicks thrown in. It's pretty obvious it's just an advert for the franchise but it works for me! Theme Park de Asobou is a bit more varied, with tons of mini-games including rhythm games, block puzzles and the like. The games are only available in Japan and are probably only worth getting if you like lots of twee characters and plinky-plonky music. Personally, I think they're awesome!
Ah, Bomberman; how I love thee! I've been a die-hard fan of the Bomberman franchise since I first played it's incarnation on the Amiga called DynaBlaster. I love that the series is still going strong and I adore the two Bomberman Land Touch games out at the moment. As well as being able to play the original blow-'em-all-up, multiplayer original (I have DS WiFi if anyone ever wants a match!), the main bulk of the game consists of a story-mode and dozens of awesome mini-games. The games are pretty inventive and a couple of hours will fly by before you know when you play this. I still drool over the character design and treasure my Bomberman figure that hangs apont my DS; one of the only bits of merchandise I've ever been able to find of the game, and that was found in Japan!
Zoo Keeper is a simple yet highly addictive game. Kind of like Tetris but not, basically you have to get vertical or horizontal rows of 3 or more animals on a grid and score as many points as you can. As well as the "just one more go..." level of playability, the game is a colourful treat with the top screen of the DS home to cute blocky animations of the various animal characters. Many an evening have I burst a blood-vessel in my eye playing too much of this one.
Gabu-Gabu Planet: Prey the Starts is one I took a chance on because it looked pretty! And as it turns out, it's not a bad game at all. You play as Gabu; one of a set of strange alien dogs wgo have come to Earth to eat everything. Each level sees you trying to out-eat your opponents, using an arsenal of strange and wonderful weapons at your disposal. The look and over-all design of the game is gorgeous (the main reason I went for it) but it's a surprisingly fun game once you get into it.

Food Fun!

More food-related doodlings for the upcoming Veg Out exhibition!