Be What You Want

I recently did a bunch of illustrations, comic strips and posters for the Be What You Want Campaign, organised by Close The Gap. The campaign is intended to support young people in being what they want to be, and help tackle gender stereotyping and occupational segregation.

It's always nice to have a job where you're drawing fun things and working for a cause you can believe in, so this was a really satisfying project to be involved with. Occupational segregation now joins the ever-growing list of Social Problems I Have Bravely Fought Through The Medium of Comics, along with traffic safety, adult innumeracy and chronic disease in indigenous populations. Oh yeah, and racism. Obviously.


Packs of the posters and comic strips were sent out to every primary and secondary school in Scotland, which is kind of mind-blowingly awesome to think about, too. Anyway, I've put a few sample pieces over on my website, and you can check out and download the full set of resources over on the Be What You Want website.

Conan Sketches

I recently designed a t-shirt for the camera crew working on the new Conan movie, and thought I'd stick a few of the initial sketches /test designs up here...

MEGATONnage

Here's the cover to the first issue of MEGATON, a new gaming magazine for kids which launched this week from Skyjack Publishing! And a couple of my little robots, expressing their approval! It's a great package - 100 pages of reviews, tips, puzzles, stickers and general game-related awesomeness, with a big chunk of Cartoon Network comics generously crammed in the middle for added fun. And, of course, lots of ROBOTS.

On sale now in all good newsagents! And check out the MEGATON website for more fun stuff, coming soon.

MEGATON Noir

I've been doing a bunch of illustration stuff lately for MEGATON, a new kids' gaming mag from Skyjack Publishing, which should be hitting the shelves... oh hey, today! Anyway, while the finished illustrations are all very colourful, I really like how they look in the interim / 'inks' stage, so I thought I'd share some of the monochromatic fun here.

The dude at the top is the Big Robot Editor, and then the little guys are like his assitants.

And then this is what they look like in colour (which I like, too, I just really dig that stark black-and-white:

If you are a kid, and like videogames, why not go and pick up a copy? In stores now!

Back of the Net

Here as a break from all the wearyingly monochromatic sketchbook scans is a bit of actual finished work.



Magazine illustration to accompany an interview with footballer Andy Dawson. The brief was for a portrait in a "Roy of the Rovers meets Manga" style.

I'm not a big football fan but I do really enjoy drawing footballers - they have the same sort of appeal as superheroes I guess, but with the added bonus of wearing actual clothes, which means lots of dynamic wrinkles and drapery, which is one of my favourite things to draw.

(Di finds it quite hilarious that I own a book entitled 'Dynamic Wrinkles and Drapery".)

Illustration Process

I thought it might be (mildly) fun and / or interesting to show the process I go through in producing an illustration - in this case a t-shirt design for AR Mcguire - steadicam operators extraordinaire. This was for a promotional t-shirt to be given away to cast and crew on the set of the new Streetfighter movie, then shooting in Thailand.

Step 1: Roughs

I started with a rough pencil sketch, based on the brief - to produce an illustration showing the AR steadicam operator as a Streetfighter-style character, surrounded by the actual characters in the movie. I didn't worry too much about likenesses etc. at this stage, as it was just to get the basic gist of the design in place.

This then got changed and added to a couple of times, as the client requested additional characters and various minor alterations.

1. First version.

2: Balrog pops up top right, M. Bison (top centre) has his dodgy arm attended to.

3. A new challenger! And another. I forget these guys' names.

Step 2: Inks

Once the client was happy with the roughs, I then inked the design. I usually do my 'inking' in Manga Studio, but decided to try a different approach for this. I started by drawing in the white highlights on the characters, and then filled in the black shapes behind them. I really enjoyed working this way, and love the high-contrast vaguely-Frank-Miller-y effect it gives you. I'm totally going to try drawing a whole comic in this style. One of these days. When I get a minute.

At this stage I had to use a lot of photo reference to get the actors likenesses right - I'm pretty pleased with the result - while being quite abstract / stylised, I think they do kind of look like the people they're supposed to be. (I forget some of them, but casting highlights include Kristin Kreuk as Chun-Li and Michael Clarke Duncan as Balrog.)

I stuck in a red background to give these JPEGs a nice high contrast look, but the actual files were sent to the client as unflattened files with a transparent background, so they could be printed on the t-shirt colour of their choice.

I produced a couple of versions, one with the black figure art for all the characters and one with it only on the camera operator.



I think I like the second one best.

As per my promise to post random doodles...

Pencil study of a Samurai in armour - this was part of a bit of prep work for an illustration I did a few months back. The brief was to do a simple, vector-based illo of a knight and samurai meeting (it was to be used on promotional materials for a London-based international law firm opening a new office in Tokyo), and I wanted to get the costume details right before I went on to the simplified versions.

I drew the knight as well...

...although in hindsight, I maybe didn't need as much practice for that.