Heisenberg

I haven't posted in an age cos I've been busy enjoying the Toronto summer, but now it's getting cold again I'm starting to get back into it. 
Here's a sketch of Walt from Breaking Bad that I messed around with adding a couple of watercolour textures, red to show the rage & increasing violence of the former snivelling, high school chemistry teacher and blue for the product! He has such a great face to draw, full of lines and character.

Erica Irvine logos

I haven't posted anything in ages cos I've been trying to find somewhere to live & find a job & become a proper grown up again plus it's hard work designing out of a rucksack!

But here's a couple of logo options I did for my photographer friend Erica Irvine.

She wanted something girlie so I went with camera lens shutters that turn into a flower and tried to pick colours that are feminine but not too obvious.

The second is a more simplified version that she asked for because she photographs a lot of weddings, hence a lot of love! It also works a lot better as a watermark and facebook page logo.

Gardening still life

This is one I did just before I left, my parents got me to do it for my aunty's wedding present. I hadn't done any still life drawing in ages and I wasn't sure how the oil pastel would work on canvas but it turned out pretty good!

Skull sandwich

My bread looked like a skull today...

...that is all.

Mossy Nolan album cover

Here's some pics of the finished album cover and close ups of individual scenes, as well as what the front cover will look like once it's all folded up.

I was really happy with the way the scenes intertwined and bled into each other and also that I was able to incorporate elements from Mossy's instruments into the piece.

Cuttings

I finally finished cutting out the album cover, it took 4 days of cutting and 4 scalpel blades and I managed not to slice off any important pieces or fingers, although I do have a slightly numb finger from pressing on the back of the scalpel! Haven't had a chance to take any photos yet, but here's a pic of all the leftover cuttings from it.

Album cover layout

I haven't posted in a while cos I've been busy moving home & getting ready to move to Canada and stuff. I've also been busy working on an album cover for my friend Mossy. It's going to be an A3 poster which will fold up to hold the cd inside, and features scenes from the 10 songs on the album around Mossy playing his mandolin, which will be the front cover.

It took a lot of drawing, which I photographed & then layed out on the computer, to make the final composition which I will then print out & use as a template for an A1 papercut (biggest one I've done yet!)

Bluetit papercut version

And here's a papercut version of it that I did for my sister's birthday.

Bluetit

Here's another minimalist bird illustration.

Tufted Titmouse papercut version

Here's a papercut collage version of the Tufted Titmouse illustration.

Tufted Titmouse

Building Inspector

Here's an animation of the illustrations I mentioned a few posts back.

There's a few more on my vimeo page.

Spydentity

Here's a digital piece I did in work about a year & a half ago when I was learning how to use Flash (I'd probably use AfterEffects if I was doing it again now as the animation in Flash is a bit jumpy). This was an internal presentation piece for a communications client that bookendended the rest of the presentation, so whenever it fades to black in the middle it would then cut to more info about that type of customer.

They wanted it to have a kind of techy spy movie vibe to it, so it's kind of a homage to the Bourne films and Bond and the like.

I only had a few hours to design & animate it so it's pretty basic & repetitive and some of the sound effects don't synch up exactly, but it was a fun little piece to work on!

Get Carter

Turned my Classic Caine illustration into a poster for Get Carter, which got featured on Reelizer again. This might become my new hobby!

Classic Caine!

iPaddy

I recently did some illustrated borders for Paddygram, an iPhone app for St. Patrick's Day where you can add a frame to your photo & send it to someone as a Paddy's Day greeting. The deadline was pretty tight, had to turn them all around in about a day & a half, and they were going to be seen on a fairly small screen so decided to keep them fairly simple.

I was given the four titles and it was up to me to add as many Oirish clichés as I could muster, like a pint of Guinness doing a jig!

begorrah.

Poor old Bill

Bill Murray at his most downtrodden & dejected in Groundhog Day.

Presentation Animation Illustration

Here's some illustrations from a couple of short animations I did a while back. The client had written the script & was pretty specific about what he wanted, they were sort of little gags that he'd play during a presentation. I had a really tight deadline on this so I chose to do a sort of 60's style and keep all the shapes fairly simple to make it easier and faster to animate. The animation itself was fairly crude which added to the humour of them.

I'm on Reelizer!

Reelizer is a fantastic gallery of alternative movie posters. I submitted my Shaun of the Dead papercut to it not really thinking it'd have a chance of making the cut, but they put it up!

There's some amazing posters on there by some really talented people so delighted that they stuck mine up too.

woop!

Linotype

Went to an open day in the National Print Museum in Beggars Bush last weekend where they demonstrated various old printing presses & printing techniques.

I got them to do the letters of Tinderbox on the Linotype hot metal press, which was really interesting to watch all the intricate workings of it and amazingly fast as it takes a cast of a row of individual letters and injects molten metal into it to form the line of type, all in about 20 seconds!

Here's some photos of it that I took for a new banner for the Tinderbox blog. I was using a very tight macro lense to get a shallow depth of field as the letters are only about 4mm high.

Sunflower

More practice at adding vintagey textures on a gloomy day.

Tinderbox banner

New banner for the Tinderbox blog using my new bag of tricks! I wanted it to have an off-register screenprint look.

There Will Be Milkshakes

The Frolicking Smudge

I was messing about trying out textured brushes in Photoshop, some of the chalk & pastel ones are pretty realistic looking.

Some people off the telly...

...well the wire mostly!

Sunrise

This is the engagement card I did for one of my best friends.

Baby Vader

Again this is an exercise to practice drawing on my wacom tablet & colouring in Photoshop. I'd seen a kid's drawing of Darth Vader & loved the simple shapes they'd used to make up his face so I tried to do a really simplified version and include some elements that a toddler would have that would fit into the star wars universe...like a teddy bear ewok!

I have an idea for doing a few panels showing why Vader had such a chip on his shoulder when he grew up!

Life Drawing

Went to the City Life Drawing in the Grand Social last night. This is what I drawed.

I was happy with most of them for a change, normally life drawing can be pretty throwaway stuff. Still can't draw feet properly though!