Ittan Momen

No space for art in my flat makes Mike's blog a very dull and quiet place...

Any-hoooooo knocked this up over the weekend for my brother's book.

You remind me of home

Finished off this little number today. It's possibly the smallest painting in the world, standing at a teeny tiny 3x2 inches (!). I had to create a special shrink ray to shrink my hands to enable me to paint the finer details (honest gov'nor!).

Aka-shita

A quick illustration for my brother. He asked me to draw a mythological Japanese beastie called Aka-shita, which means "red tongue". I would've like to have coloured it but my brother asked for a quick turn-a-round.

Since I completed Fen, I've moved out of home and into London. Unfortunately all my wondrous arty materials are still at home (I've only partially moved in). As a result though I haven't had much time to illustrate as I would've really liked, hense the lack of any online activity over the past month.

Fen

I don't like painting photorealism these days, nor do I have any experience at painting animals, so forgive me if the proportions are a little wonky.

This painting is a present for a good mate of mine - it's a painting of his young lady friend's horse, better known as Fen.

Created with acrylic, goache and wax crayons. It's a warm up for the new, traditional direction my next few pieces will follow.

Progress

Hmmm, I guess one post in the whole of August isn't good form.

Here be progress on the horsey painting. It looks a lot better in real life, honest 'guv! Also note the little painting on the mini-canvas. I'll post both up when they're done, which shouldn't be too long 'cuz I'm faster in acrylics then I am with digital painting!

In other news, I've entered a couple of pictures in Images: The Best of Contemporary British Illustration (the Association of Illustrators annual competition). Having been sent a (free!) copy of the Images book, I'm confident I can at least get selected to appear in this years book. I will keep y'all posted!

Yo! Yo! Ninja!

Man I need to stop slacking off on the blogging front. The last couple of weeks I haven't been out at the weekends which has given me an opportunity to do a bit of catching up on the art front.

The first image here is a painting I've started today which will eventually be a gift for someone. Im just having a bit of fun with it as I warm up for my next painting project where I intend to flex some more creative muscle.

The second image is a half finished sketch from my sketchbook which I'm still working on. I really need to do more sketching, I've been slacking off on that as well of late.

I know the pics are a bit fuzzy and staring at them for too long may well incur blindness, so please approach with care, but what can ya do eh? Blame the camera, that's good enough for me.

Finally I've done a lot of illustration work recently at the Agency for Toy Story, McDonald's and (as ever!) Nissan. I'll post a few once the pitches are done and dusted.

Polar Playground Parade

FINALLY after months of on/off work during the weekends, behold in all it's majestic glory (!) my latest digital piece - Polar Playground Parade.

Produced using mixed media, including goache, acrylic, graphite, ink, digital and a whole host of textures both produced by myself and some taken from CGtexture.com (thanks to the guys who maintain this site!).

What with me being a full-time munchkin at the Agency now, I'm finding it harder and harder to find the time to illustrate (one day at a weekend isn't enough). So! I've decided to take a break from time consuming digi-wonders to focus on my goache and acylic work, and hopefully produce some rather spif-tastic paintings for others to have a moochy-skooch at! I realised during my work on 'Mars' that it's actually faster for me to paint normally than digitally - how's that for a creative paradox?