...and then some.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ANYONE WHO READS THIS AT ANY POINT IN THEIR LIFE! I hope you all spent 2013 preparing yourself for 2014, and I hope you spend 2014 being awesome.

Now that's out of the way, we can get down to the all important task of looking at a few things I've designed in the last few months. It's been a while since I updated, so there's a nice little collection. Especially as my last few posts have been photography-exclusive. Time to mix it up!

Chronological order is probably the best, to avoid any anti-climaxes or anything of the sort.

This is probably one of my favourite posters I've done! Toby, who runs the screenings that I do a lot of the posters for, really just said that he wanted something a bit psychadelic and trippy, so I had to try and work that into the way that I like to create things. El Topo is an amazingly visual film that has a lot of strong imagery. Lots of fun things for me to play around with.

The original poster idea was going to have more of a traditional colour scheme, with a blue sky and the such, but I felt that colourising it really added to the more surreal feeling that was wanted.

This was designed for a all-night screening of Season One of The Walking Dead at the Duke's at Komedia cinema in Brighton. The original idea was just to have a dilapidated version of the Palace Pier. I decided I wanted to have some sort of nod to The Walking Dead's origins as a comic, which is why I drew the gross zombie mouth and kept it as a hand drawn image rather than recreate it digitally. I often try to include slightly subtle, hidden or faded imagery in some of my work, and this poster has one of my favourites - the bloody Brighton & Hove council logo just behind the main title. BLOOOOOOD. Also, I'm really not sure why I chose a white border for this. Oh well. It was three months ago. I was young and foolish.

CARRIE! CARRIE! CARRIE! What more can I say? I was really excited about doing this poster, and I pretty much got it exactly how I wanted it. The gradient, the texture. I hate to say it, but I was quite pleased with myself. The only thing that was missing, according to Toby, was "more blood". So more blood there was, added at the top.

I wasn't actually asked to make this poster, but I was going to the screening and I really wanted to have something awesome made on the off chance that I might have been able to get Chuck Pahlaniuk to sign it. I didn't get the opportunity. Sob.

Christmas!!! I had so many half-baked ideas for this poster, but thanks to sitting down with my colleague over lunch, he helped me sort them out and this was the final idea I came up with! I'm not sure if it's obvious enough, but the shape of the city and the underground layer are meant to mimic that of a christmas tree. I actually ended up selling a few copies of this and still have a few left!

I created this as a Christmas present for someone special! It went through a few terrible looking stages before reaching this finished version! It's the first out of four that I am making, based on SEEMINGLY unconnected films, and I shall be posting them up here as I do them!

Space Bear!!! The first of three, the other two being worked on at the moment.I will hopefully have number two up and about soon, I'm currently in the process of finishing the sketching and then it's onto the ink!

Well, THANKS! if you made it to the end of all that. I will soon be setting up a facebook page for my work, where there will be more updates and also an opportunity to buy some excess prints I have from older screenings that I designed posters for. How exciting for you! How exciting for me! We can all be excited!

Off you go now.

So Edgar Wright drew a self-portrait for me once...

So I've been drawing. I don't know how you'd go about classifing them, I guess they're somewhere between a vague form of illustration and a doodle. Doodlestration? Another word like "ghostaroid" that I'll forget I ever used.

I've actually been doing a lot more drawing than anything else. Though I still really think of myself as a 'photographer' and that photography is my 'thing', working full time all the time doesn't lend very well to being able to set up and shoot the sort of things that I want to achieve in the studio. Drawing is something I can do when I have a free moment, pretty much wherever I am. The whole process of sketching something, erasing MASSIVE parts of it that I'm not happy with, re-sketching and then inking is totally therapeutic. It's also something I can do while playing video games or watching Buffy.

As a matter of fact, screw my drawings. I'm going to write this post about what I'm playing at the moment - Bioshock Infinite

It's good and I like playing it.

The End.

Ok. So, I don't have much to say on that at the moment. Let's try...

Ok, no. Maybe another day.

Back to whatever it was I was talking about before. As I have updated my gallery with an illustrations section

I thought I'd take this opportunity to post a few of the things I've been drawing to practice my skills. I'm still learning a lot about shading and shadows and what makes a face a face and things like that.

So here we go.

So one thing I've really wanted to improve on is drawing faces. When it comes to photography, I do a lot of portraits. Over time, I just came to realise that most of the images that I was happiest with were of people, and people are fun to work with. So it seems to me that it makes sense that I'm trying to get better at drawing people also. I'm not sure why I've written that like I'm trying to convince myself that's the truth.

So these are some of the most recent drawings I've done. We'll sort of be going reverse chronological, starting with the more recent and heading back through time.

Old acquaintance, but a new friend - Charlie has colourful hair. So I thought I'd take my first step into the world of using colour in my drawings. I snapped open a felt tip pen and dunked it in a glass of water and painted with the furry insides. Came out kinda cool!

I drew this for Fran, who is living in Japan. I took a photo of her a long time ago and thought I'd attempt to make a portrait for her birthday.

Brighton Summertime

Here's the original image, shot on a Lomo LC-A, longer ago than I care to try and remember.

I have titled this "An Illustration of a person who may be, but probably isn't, comic book artist Kate Leth."  Kate Leth is a Canadian webcomic artist...well, that's kind of all I have to say. Immediate cool points awarded based on pure description. But this image is based on a photo from her instagram, but it also looks like it could be Brody Dalle. The fact that I drew something that looked like anybody is pure amazement to me.  But anyway, I've no idea how I came across her website but I have a feeling it might be some sort of Adventure Time or Ryan Pequin related tweet or link on a wiki.

Either way, I like the way she thinks

Go check her stuff out, she resides here, here and here.

So along with people, I decided to draw my second favourite thing. Batman.

The idea behind was this was it was meant to be drawn from a description of someone who had seen Batman attacking someone, presumably a criminal. So it's kind of this creepy, unnatural, deformed shape stooped over someone, questioning them or checking their pulse or I don't know. That's why there's a pair of legs just coming out of nowhere.

Now here's a little look into how I design some of my posters for the Duke of York's cinema. I've also done this sort of comparison before with my poster for the Korean monster movie 'The Host', but this ones more directly related to drawings and sketches.

Now we're getting into dangerous doodle territory. I think I've included a few of these in my post when I started this website about a few of the things I'd drawn and what artists inspired me. But now they're scanned in nicely! I'll give a brief description of each!

I saw a incredibly interesting documentary recently called Blackfish, which explores the history and treatment of killer whales in captivity. Whether you like it as a documentary or not, it really is an emotional piece of film and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in animals. I drew this with help from my rather cool drawing nib, nib holder and pot of ink, bough from Pen to Paper in Brighton. They're an amazing shop of notebooks and drawing supplies!!

I couldn't even  begin to start to explain why I drew this.

Slightly Twin Peaks inspired cup of coffee.

Drawn after a really good christmas. I think I felt I had to draw something depressing to balance it out.

I felt it totally necessary to sign and date this doodle, so it must have had some importance? Can anyone tell me what the importance is?

This is the facical expression of a man who wakes up one morning, looks in the bathroom mirror and sees that he has started to grow tentacles. On his face.

Everyone's favourite Jhonen Vasquez created robot dog G.I.R reimagined as a cat. Pure genius if I do say so myself. This is the oldest thing I've included in this post, this must have been from about 2007.

So that's a nice little collection of things that I've drawn. Now for an image of something someone else has drawn for me.

The year was 2010. The month was December. I had decided that Scott Pilgrim was one of the best films I had ever seen and GOD why couldn't more films be made with that much attention to detail in every tiny little aspect of it - but yes it was 2010, for sure. Edgar Wright was doing a signing at Forbidden Planet in London, and me being the awkward gentle boy that I am, decided it would be a good idea to not just get him to sign my Scott Pilgrim DVD.

Just for the record, I have a bad history of awkwardly getting famous people to sign things. I once asked Amanda Palmer if I could take her photo with my polaroid camera, and then she insisted on me hanging around so we could do more. Like, a polaroid of her holding a polaroid of her holding a polaroid. WHICH WAS GREAT. Like, actually pretty awesome. I think I probably felt it was really awkward at the time though.

A much younger, beardless me with AFP

I also got Kathryn Isabelle, the star of Ginger Snaps and American Mary, to sign my "Grubbs Burgers" travel pass holder. Anyone who lives in Brighton knows how good a Grubbs Burger is, and now I have told Kathryn Isabelle and the Soska Sisters of this fact also. Go me.

ANYWAY, I asked Mr. Wright if he could draw a little self portrait of himself for me. And he did. And here it is, on the internet proper for the first time.

A Handsome Chap

Truly a thing of beauty. You can thank me and Edgar later for bringing this to you.

WELL THAT'S ALL FOR TODAY. Oh, except I did this

My t-shirt collection is so large that I decided to document a month of wearing different t-shirts. Damn, I'm interesting.

So now that's all for today. I hope you have a bloody lovely weekend.