Food Monster

Waiter, there's a...thing...in my dinner...

Flying Monster

The north coast of Devon in England is frequented by flying monsters of questionable etiquette.

Peek Monsters

These monsters like to pop up from behind mountains and hills just long enough for the observer to question what they may or may not have seen.

Territorial Monster

Las Vegas also attracts a lot of very territorial monsters. The more novelty the hotel, the greater the prize.

Water Monster

This monster is often seen lurking in the waters around New York, letting off windies that cause mild to moderate rocking of passing vessels (for his own amusement).

Glomp Monster

Morning Monster!

Afternoon Monster

Hazy Watercolour Memories

For those either not from the UK or not old enough to know what it was, Hartbeat was a brilliant children's art show that inspired me and countless others as kids!

Jurassic Dorks Presents: The A-Z Of The 80s!

It's official! The Jurassic Dorks have an exhibition coming up! Tell your friends, invite your family whether they want to come or not, prepare to have your nostalgia buds wangled and buy awesome prints and stuff. Your dreams will LITERALLY come true if you attend this show.* But seriously, we're all pretty excited; expect the following weeks to be full of giddiness as we all prepare for our first, and hopefully not last, show at Centrespace in Bristol!

*Your dreams may not literally come true if you attend this show.

Jurassic Dorks!

I'm delighted to announce that I'm now part of an awesome illustrative collective called Jurassic Dorks! The collective is made up of myself, John-paul Bove, James Stayte, Mark Pearce and Dylan Cook. We have our first exhibition in December, more of which I'll post very soon. Hopefully this will the first of many projects by Jurassic Dorks!

Dumpy Dinosaur!

Research is Fun

If anyone knows whether Skynet has created time travel yet, please let me know - I'd love to be able to fiddle around and get some extra working hours in! It's been a hectic couple of weeks and it's only going to get busier over the next few months. I'm in the middle of the kid's books at the moment; 3 are roughed, 1 approved and most of the work done, 2 waiting to hear back on and currently waiting for details of the fourth book. It's a lot of fun so far and I hope the publishers are pleased with what I've done.

Hopefully in the next week I can finally reveal the awesome exhibition the collective I'm now part of are putting together for December. We're just working out some information details and then we can reveal all! Just to tease, I've been playing this game as research...

I've got 2 big cons coming up too which I hope to get some new work made for, it's just a matter of getting the time to do it all! :P

My Desk: A Productive Day

It's been a while since I did a My Desk update so I thought I'd do one now, on a day where I'm full of caffeine and glucose and being productive! So what have I been doing today?

1. 
   
   Making Roughs: Three (well, two and a half) of the roughs for the kid's books I'm doing. I'll probably be starting on the final artwork this weekend for the first book. Whoop!


2. 
   
   Zombie Stuffs: Extra pages for the soon-to-be-published-again Brains Etc. with all new pages! Having fun coming up with extra goodies for the book and getting ready to scan and reformat everything. Hopefully it'll be worth it!


3. 
   
   Visual Stimuli: Rather than listen to music today, I was in the mood for some horror films while I worked. Having already watched The Blair Witch Project while drawing cute animals, I'm ready to watch Ginger Snaps (a guilty pleasure film) and attempt to watch a recent purchase, Yo-Yo Girl Cop.


4. 
   
   Energy Drink: I look forward to the coffee-followed-by-a-Lucozade-chaser comedown later in the day.


5. 
   
   Making Key Rings: Work to be done for 2011 B.C on Saturday! An excessive amount of number 4 means shaking hands and scissor fun.

More Emirates work!

I'm never disappointed with the briefs I get for the Air Emirates in-flight kid's magazine; here are a couple of the latest pics I got to do. I really like doing the big pictures with lots going on - especially when I'm told to draw lots of cute animals! :P

I really enjoy this job; I just wish it was a monthly gig instead of quarterly but it's always something I look forward to doing!

Tattoo Design!

I got a very exciting commission a while back to design a cute, Japanese-themed tattoo for someone. I really enjoyed doing this and hope it turns out well! I'll be posting pictures when the lovely lady who commissioned me has it done :D

Awesome New Toy!

I'm a huge book fan, but have more than my little house can hold. Most of my precious tomes are up in the loft and I will admit to hanging onto stuff I don't really need more often than not! I made the decision to buy a Kindle so I can continue to buy graphic novels, art books and kid's books but get novels electronically. I have to say, it's bloody brilliant; I've already got over 100 books on it and you get can tons of free books for it. There's a lot of stuff that's very cheap, mainly older sci-fi and fantasy but that suits me fine! Here's a look at my new toy:

Brains Etc. looks pretty good on the Kindle, which bodes well for the digital version being published soon! It's quite a flexible little gadget and I can't stop playing with it. Of course, it's easier to spend more money on books because they download straight away. But it's worth it! Here's a look at some of the books I'm reading at the moment:

I love the Conan film with Arnie and even though I'm not huge into fantasy, this is pretty good. I sometimes find fantasy a bit hard going but pulp master Robert E. Howard makes for an enjoyable sword and sorcery romp!

Another classic series by Robert E. Howard, Solomon Kane is a quieter hero than Conan but the adventures he get into are dark and creepy and I like the pacing. Good pulpy action and very atmospheric.

I've just discovered this guy and don't know how I didn't know about him, being a big Lovecraft fan. I'm already enjoying his work and I've only read two stories so far; one about a sorcerer who kills and dismembers his brother (who's also a wizard) only to have the limbs come back, re-form and kill him. This is looking good already!



I just read this for the first time and WOW. What an amazing book. Two men on holiday discover a strange pit and the remnants of a house in Ireland and soon find a journal that belonged to a recluse who used to live in the house. His story is disturbing and almost unbelievable - the house seems to sit on a gateway between dimensions and the man is soon driven mad by attacks from strange pig creatures, time and space start to meld together and no-one else seem to experience quite what he does. Brilliant sci-fi/horror that kept me reading because I NEEDED to know what was going to happen! There's an amazing few chapters where the man experiences time speeding up to where minutes become thousands of years and the universe ends that just left me in awe. Awesome work from William Hope Hodgeson and I can't wait to read more of his stories.

What I love about the Kindle is that all of the above were either available for free or entire collections of the authors work where under £3.00. Money well spent I think. Time to get my sci-fi on! :P

Rorys!

I had a fun commission to draw Rory Williams from Dr Who over the weekend. Here he is in his normal and Centurion form!

Dog-Bot!

HAL

A while ago I was asked to do some robot designs for a website where computer programmers can test their skills on a variety of tasks/games. They wanted a robot character named HAL that would act as a kind of advancement marker for players as they used the site. HAL would start off as a crappy robot but as programmers progressed through various levels completing different tasks, you could get upgrades and new parts for HAL until you reached his ultimate form. I thought this was a neat idea and had some fun designing new heads for HAL that corresponded to different games. Actually, I don't need much persuasion or excuse to draw a robot so I was happy from the start! :P