Newtasty

Today’s warmup sketch is Birmingham’s very own loveable inner city serial killer, the Digbeth Strangler. You only need to be scared if you’re a nob…

I’m having a recurring dream about the end of the world, very vivid. Anyone who knows me knows that I am always rooting for the end of days, but these dreams have made me completely rethink my apocalypse jonesing. It’s not as exciting as I always dreamed. Anyway, this whole thing has got me thinking about a short story I wrote about a cowardly boxer, which prompted today’s warmup sketch. Too much information? OK, forget all of that, here’s a drawing of a boxer.

Today’s warm up sketch is for my buddy Gary Wood, because I know he’ll be sad. Peter Falk, drawn with heavy shadows in honor of Gene Colan. R.I.P.

After sketching Turkish Superman, I couldn’t resist drawing my favourite Superman of all time, the peanut flicking drunk from Superman 3. Come on, we all know this Superman was the best, from shouting at little kids to straightening the leaning tower of Pisa, this sunnuvabitch gets my vote every time. Plus, he inexplicably sprouted an awesome grey flash in his hair, adding 100% extra cool.

It’s warm up the fingers for work time! After being reminded of this gem of a movie last week I decided to do a colour sketch of my second favourite son of Krypton, Turkish Superman. Seriously, if you’ve never never seen it and want a completely natural high, watch Turkish Superman. you’ll believe a toy doll can fly.

Just finished a new cover for Area magazine. It needed to be a wraparound cover with a kind of ‘remember you are British’ theme. I was uhmmming and aahhing about it for ages, changing my mind about ideas and styles, then deadline poked me in the eye and I had to get started. I got to sketching, but before I could even start agonising over the final product, I found I was happy with what was sat on the desk before me. It wasn’t what I had planned at all but I dig it, and I can’t explain why! Happy accidents are the best.

What is it with me and zombies? Whatever I am working on, there is always a zombie job somewhere in there… recently I had just finished a fairly high profile zombie job (don’t think I can share it just yet) and I had started working on several non-zombie projects. Before I could ask “why aren’t I drawing someone with their limbs hanging off?” I had a request for a poster/flyer for an event in my hometown called Zombie Prom. I guess zombies are so natural to me now that I went into automatic drawing mode and came up with this before I even knew what hit me. It was a neat, quick project for a no-trouble client… my favourite kind! In Birmingham you are never more that 10 feet away from a rat and I am never more than 10 minutes away from someone who want braaaains….

My band, Copter, had been planning to do a Warriors Revue for some time and this year it came to fruition.
Our good friend Mr. Radar made a 30 minute condensed version of the movie and we played along with the visuals creating a musical narrative, a kind of rock opera! For the event, I made subway tickets for entry, Warriors vests for the band (can’t take credit for the design there) and designed a poster with an old school Jack Kirby comic book feel, evoking imagery of the time in a way that hasn’t been used for the Warriors before (to my knowledge).
The whole thing was a fantastic success, with over 100 gang members turning up ,in colours, for Sirus’ big speech!

Been a while, going to try to get a bit more regular with posts this year. Worked on a nice project for Nokia just before Christmas, illustrating a poster for their short movie ‘The Commuter’ starring Dev Patel, Charles Dance and Pamela Anderson which was shot entirely on Nokia’s N8 handsets. Yeah, weird. Anyway, I thought that I would share some of the illustrations, a painted style for that action movie effect!

Poster for a ColdRice party, continuing the theme of comic book-esque soul singers