Newtasty

Takethefuckingelephant!

A shout out from Created In Birmingham, nice one!

Trying to get back in the swing of things so I can tie up loose ends on projects before the end of the year, sparking up with a sketch of my favourite tourettes ridden cowboy Al Swearengen. If I was rich and all of my time was my own I would draw the entire Season 4 of Deadwood, hands down the best TV show ever.

The serious lack of posts and warmup sketches is because I’ve been hammering away night and day on a couple of intense projects, one of which is with my favourite design team Fluid and new buddies The Character Shop. It’s a very cool project and something kind of new to me, I can’t share anything right now but Im looking forward to when I can.
Chances are I’ll still be in my workshop until Christmas Eve so in case I can’t pop in with some mindless ramblings I’d like to wish everyone a Happy Holidays, here’s a festively rebadged poster I did recently for a Christmas party!

Thousands of years ago when I was 14 or 15, I created a cartoon character that was a living teddy bear. After years of being subjected to the torturous ‘love’ of little girls he became extremely jaded, started drinking and smoking and pissing people off at every opportunity. His best friend was a toy robot who had similarly evolved except he had turned to hard drugs and let himself go to the point where he had to have an operation fitting him with a car stereo in his chest to keep him in check. I guess it was like Toy Story if it had been written by Bukowski, but hey I was 15 and it was the 80′s, grim existential cartoon characters didn’t really exist

I had lots of stories planned out for the curmudgeonly couple but I didn’t have the patience for sequential art, so instead I would just draw single panels or covers capturing the idea of the whole story. I used to do them in indian ink and painstakingly cut out the halftone letraset to add shading, a ritual that I used to love, and seeing the final product was especially gratifying as it would look like professionally made comic art (at least it did to me).

I was thinking about this recently, how much I would have loved all the toys that I now have at my disposal, and I wondered if years of using computers might have dulled my ‘analog’ skills, and how much more advanced my technique is than when I was a teenager doodling on the back of exercise books. Conclusion: I think I peaked at 15 and thank god for the advances in computer technology!

So much work for the man lately, no time for anything fun… so here’s a quick sketch of the man, from my favourite movie.

I really like this guys face, and he only appears for these 2 panels of a comic I worked on recently. I’m happy he’s out there tho, cleaning streets in some fictional world.

It’s all work work work lately, not even time for warm up sketches so I’ve just been leafing thru my old doodles when I came across this. I have lots of these kind of things where I obviously had something in mind and now, with the damage that time and alcohol have done to my mind, I have absolutely no idea what it is all about. I would really love to read this book about an enthusiastic and plucky chimp detective and his afro wearing duplicitous sidekick tho (if that’s what this was)

Another agreeable cover commission recently, did this for Pink Narcissus Press. Really great clients, a sweet and easy gig, and after I did this I had to download ‘Ben’ and watch it again (it wasn’t as good as I remembered)

Recently did the cover for Area’s Chinatown guide (which is available in B’ham now), it needed to be along the same lines as the British guide I did earlier this year but, naturally, a Chinese theme! I love me some dragons but I got hung up on Tigers when started and then couldn’t back out. I did 2 colour versions because I couldn’t decide which Tiger I liked more. Another speedy and smooth project, my favourite kind!