Today's Guardian

I thought I'd also show a bit of the process of a commissioned illustration. What normally happens is that I get a call asking if I'm available, I then get a bit of a verbal description of what it is that the client wants me to do, some times referencing colour or other work I've done in the past, but mostly describing the context of the illustration. I then get emailed the copy (the article I'm illustrating) I then read through the copy a couple of times and try and work out the feel or crux of the piece, this becomes my starting point. I then start doodling to come up with a very rough idea of what the copy is talking about. once I have an idea I work on the compositional elements of the piece and produce a rough:




After emailing the rough attached with colour notes to the art director, we then have have a chat about the image, in this case it was felt that the stress aspect was too much and that the begging hands and bike was enough, so I got the go ahead to do the final artwork. a few hours later its finished it's emailed off, all being well the art director then approves the artwork (or asks for changes) and a few weeks later it appears in print.

Teaboy!

15 min painting on paper

finished painting

Currently on the Drawingboard.

I've been commissioned to do a CD cover / itunes image for a rather excellent band called The heights. here is the initial painting:





I was worried I was going to gory but after speaking to Sarah (lead singer) It seems It is to be gorier (which I like a lot) so I will make the necessary changes and post the finished artwork up here when its done.

New idea for portfolios

I've been planning on updating my portfolio for quite some time now, its shocking that i haven't updated the thing in almost 18 months and I got to thinking about how much tougher it is to get your work noticed than it was when I first started out. so instead of re organising and printing new pages for a folder I decided to try something new. I used a very underused feature on iphoto to arrange jpegs of my work into photo album (books). i decided to do an experiment and organise my fine art (not my illustration just yet) into their appropriate exhibitions and make books of each one.
it took about a day to do each and a week for the books to arrive from apple. when they did I was extremely impressed with the hard back books that arrived in slip cases. the cost of each wasn't too bad either, still less than what i would have paid out in printing to do a portfolio the normal way. I think I may do one for my illustration work and plan a trip to london and attempt to get some illo work that way. though it will have to wait a little while as I have a few projects up in the air at the moment. these books were an experiment worth doing.

Mannanan

After finishing work on the paintings for the DoE, I've been mucking around with the subject matter a bit as I don't have much freelance work on the go at the moment. I'm in the process of altering my work a little, I'm trying to do more work with out out the odd little black figure I've been using over the last few years. I've always liked fantasy artwork, so maybe in this down time, I'll do a little more of that, any way this is just a messing around piece, just trying things out really.