I recently took part in Chris Judge’s Spring Illustration Course which was a lovely experience all round. Met some really nice talented people and picked up a lot of tips. We were set several assignments the results of which I will be posting up over the coming weeks. Here’s one, a mock editorial based on the idea of male grooming in the modern Irish male. I forsook my normal approach of cleaning up my line-work and colouring in photoshop for diving right in with watercolours. Bit messier, perhaps but I was pretty happy with the results.
Did a poster recently for my brothers band. Been a while since I’ve done a gig poster – it was fun.
paper cut-out pylons
Photographs of some pylons I made recently. A lot of people aren’t that into pylons but I think they make great lines. They criss-cross all over the place and they frame the landscape with all kinds of unusual shapes. Let’s hear it for pylons!
Here’s some pictures of a little book I just finished. The cover is embroidered felt and the inside is hand-drawn with markers, pens, pencil, watercolour paint and colouring pencils.
I’ve not really been posting to this blog at all recently, as you may have noticed. There are a few reasons for this – firstly all my time in January was consumed mainly with a web design job that would be of zero interest to most people who actually follow this.
The second, more significant, reason is that I’ve been putting off posting about the new Last Bus because I scrapped the story and a bunch of pages that I had worked on at the end of last year and didn’t want to jinx my progress until I was happy with the script and had a decent amount of work completed. I’m halfway through the new issue, which I started at the beginning of February and I’m very pleased with its progress. Look out for a late March release. The picture at the top of the post is a couple of frames from the main story.
I’ll also be giving this blog and my illustration website an overhaul in early March. Integrate them more closely.
Finally, late last week I got alerted to this article about foreign comics on Paul Gravett’s website. My minicomic, In The Aquarium got nominated, alongside John Robbin’s (really, really excellent)The Monkey Head Complaint, as one of the best comics published in Ireland in 2009. Thanks a million to Paddy Brown for the mention!
Katie did a major posting on the Cardboard Press site of a load of her work from 2009. I’m also going to be posting to this blog more often this year.
The lovely lads from the Comic Cast asked me to put a piece into a Christmas Show they were putting on in the Twisted Pepper. The theme was ‘Just what I always wanted’ and here’s what I came up with.
There’s 24 Fish in the Sea is a short comic I did for the 24 Hour Comic Day Anthology.
page1
page 2
page 4
The Earth is a bit like this Blue Dot. A book of general musings about human evolution and the problems associated with consciousness.
Really though, its just some black and white line drawings and some blue dots stapled together. It comes in a handy size of about 14 x 14 cm.
Brains or cockroaches – who would win in a doomsday scenario?
“I’d like to thank my brain” for all human success and suffering
