Newtasty

Takethefuckingelephant!

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!

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.

Last year me and my ColdRice friends were asked to host a monthly party at a nice little cocktail bar in Birmingham. As our usual events lean more towards garage rock n’ roll we decided to make this party strictly soul music.

To promote the events I decided on a series of posters depicting some R&B giants in a pulp comic book style, to create an almost unreal image of characters that we are only used to seeing in TV footage or photographs, introducing these 2 things that (to the best of my knowledge) hadn’t met before.
I love the idea of these characters who I consider being larger than life having their tales exaggerated and immortalised in this format. My other reason for this approach was much more simple: Soul music and comic books, me and David Lee Roth both grew up on them!

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.

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….

Had to dig out some old character sketches for a client today. I few years ago I decided to go as digital and minimal as possible to suit my fleet footed way of life, seeing some of these makes me think about the thousands of sketches I threw away before I had even scanned them.
In a way, going being modern and going completely digital has made me more antiquated… remember how there was only ever 1 or 2 photographs of your grandparents when they were young? Save the very few things I managed to scan there is almost no record of my younger days. Piles of records, photographs, art, prints, books, ideas, all gone because I decided to just take hand luggage with me on my trip. I definitely don’t regret it, but seeing some of these makes me think there might have been some lost gems somewhere  in the bonfire.

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!

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