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EMELBI

EMELBI

Digital Artist and Illustrator

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EMELBI

Chikket Imps

EMELBI · 20th November 2020 ·

This scrumptious bunch of impish lovelies are part of an ongoing illustrative project. I am interested in the uniformity of the illustrations. I follow a particular set of rules in the creation of each of the characters so that they relate to each other in a very particular way. Also in the way in which they have been placed in the exact same environment. That said, my aim is to make them as different to each other as possible without straying too far from the set of rules I have imposed upon the process. They are a lot of fun to create.

I will be adding more imps as they are created, so check back here for updates, and see how this little family is grow. Each initial drawing gets cleaned up in Adobe Photoshop and converted to an .eps vector file in Adobe Illustrator, after which they all get coloured on Adobe Photoshop. I have made three videos showing the colouring process. These are up on my YouTube Channel. You can find them at the bottom of this page.

 

 

The Christmas Imp

 

 

Super Quick Illustration

EMELBI · 9th July 2020 ·

My wife asked me to do a quick continuous line illustration for a presentation she’s doing over Zoom. It had to be a self portrait and done quickly, almost without thinking. (Fig 1) She then asked me to take that initial drawing and embellish it with texture shading and form etc. Again, I had to make these graphic additions really quickly. (Fig 2) I then photographed the resulting image on my iPhone 11 Pro, sent it to my iMac and ran it through the usual clean up process eventually converting it to a vector graphic so that the line was nice and clean. (Fig 3)

Then in record time gave it my usual graphic, texture and colour treatment to get a finished outcome. Very rough, and extremely quickly. I quite like the outcome. (Fig 4)

This whole process was done in about 40 minutes.

(Fig 1)
(Fig 2)
(Fig 3)
(Fig 4)

What I most love about the creative process though, is that fact that this image didn’t exist when I woke up this morning. Out of necessity; helping my wife out with a graphic she needed, I now have this little illustration. I love what I do.

Here are some other versions of the finished image after having run them through the filters in the app RNI Films on my iPhone 11 Pro. Just for a bit of variety.

Created with RNI Films app. Preset 'Kodak Gold 200 v.4'
Created with RNI Films app. Preset 'Agfa RSX II v.2'
Created with RNI Films app. Preset 'Agfa Optima 200 v.3 Faded'
Created with RNI Films app. Preset 'Agfa Vista 100'

The Unusual Suspects – Nous Trois

EMELBI · 9th July 2020 ·

During this lockdown period I have been getting around to one or two things that I have been meaning to do for ages. There seems to be a lot of stuff that one puts on the back burner until there is time to address whatever it is that needs addressing. Some of it is house maintenance, of which I have done a fair share of late, but also there is always a backlog of things that build up where graphics and file maintenance is concerned. This set of images being one of those jobs that I have eventually got around to doing.

These three characters were images that I painted on large panels of hardboard about 16 years ago. They were about two meters high. The paintings unfortunately are long gone. I don’t even remember what happened to them or whether they still exist in the world? Over the years I have sold stuff and given stuff away. I know these weren’t sold, but where they went is a mystery. Anyway, I only had a set of  low quality .jpeg photographs to prove they ever existed at all. (Fig 1).

I have always loved these three characters. Individually and together as a triptych, as they were meant to be at the very start. I have taken those low quality jpeg images and cleaning them up, running the graphics through Adobe Photoshop and then Adobe Illustrator, using the image trace function to bring them back into the fold so to speak (Fig 2). Now I have got high resolution digital versions of the very same images as they were painted all that time ago.

Not a big job, but time consuming nonetheless. But I’m glad that I got around to doing it.

‘The Unusual Suspects – Nous Trois’ – In Digital (Fig 3).

(Fig 1).

(Fig 2).

(Fig 3).

Symmetry and Negative Space

EMELBI · 9th July 2020 ·

A quick exploration of negative space and assumed negative space within this symmetrical image of a dude on a BMX. I love how art and design can take you on a journey beyond the obvious just by using colour and form. I’ve always been fascinated in the exploration of colour relationships and how colour can completely change to mood of an image, while fundamentally, the structure of the image or graphic stays exactly the same. Of course playing with these structure and exploring their dynamics usually leads to new and fresh ideas and keeps the creative juices flowing.

1 Second Photoshop Tutorial

EMELBI · 8th July 2020 ·

I’ve been having a bit of fun with editing today and I had an idea to make the shortest Photoshop, time lapse, illustration tutorial ever! This is an image of mine called Street Angel. I took 30 snap shot images in Photoshop at various stages of the image build and imported them into DaVinci Resolve and set the project frame rate at 30 frames per second. I had to find a real short audio stab too. The result is this one second time lapse tutorial of the build process of this image. All very tongue in cheek obviously! It was fun to do though. Enjoy!

 

The Day I was Vincent van Gogh

EMELBI · 29th August 2019 ·

Yesterday, I was mostly being Van Gogh. I created this version of Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ for my wife’s art classroom doors, ready for the new school year to start. It was a lot of fun to do. In doing so I felt that I got a taste of the energy and vibrancy that Van Gogh painted with. The mimicking of the technique and style was a lot of fun and it was interesting trying to interpret such a masterpiece. Certainly a lot of energy and verve within each brush stroke. Quite a limited palette too. That said, there is a lot of warm colours that aren’t immediately apparent when you gaze upon the actual painting. Anyway, I hope that I did it some justice. The funny thing is, I can also see my own style in there too. Hard to avoid to a certain extent. It’s amazing how much you can learn through the exploration of someone else’s technique. All good fun.

Codsall Middle School – Portrait Illustration Workshop 2018

EMELBI · 7th December 2018 ·

 

Here are some of the images that the pupils at Codsall Middle School in Wolverhampton produced during a recent portrait illustration workshop. The images are derived from their own portrait photographs. They learned to look for dominant parts of their features to pull out their true character. These are a handful of the images that were produced on the day. It was hard to pick the images for this blog as they were all so very good. There were 138 year 6 pupils that I worked with on the day. The workshops were a lot of fun and I always love to see young people creating great imagery and learning new skills. I’m sure you will agree that these images are just fab. 

A Carton Full of Creativity

EMELBI · 6th June 2017 · Leave a Comment

A gif animation of the EMELBI Boi Carton. I love animated gifs. They’re great things to play with in terms of a quick bit of animated creativity. They make brilliant little adverts too.

Art is a Human Right

EMELBI · 15th May 2017 · Leave a Comment

It absolutely is. Everybody has the ability to create and make art. Exercise your right to be creative. Exercise your right to make art.

All Stars Performing Arts Presents ANNIE 2017

EMELBI · 7th March 2017 · Leave a Comment

I recently designed the ANNIE posters, flyers and social media promotional material for the forthcoming summer show by the All Stars Performing Arts school based in West Yorkshire. The show will take place at the Bradford Play House where tickets can be purchased via the Box Office.

Set in 1930s New York during the Great Depression, brave young Annie is forced to live a life of misery and torment at Miss Hannigan’s orphanage. Annie’s luck changes when she is chosen to spend Christmas with the famous billionaire Oliver Warbucks, at his grand Manhattan residence. Mr Warbucks is determined to find Annie’s parents. However, the spiteful Miss Hannigan has other ideas and hatches a plan to spoil Annie’s search… With its multiple Tony winning book and score, this stunning new production includes the unforgettable songs Hard Knock Life, Easy Street, and Tomorrow. Annie is a show for all the family to enjoy! So don’t miss the All Stars perform it! You can bet your bottom dollar you’ll love it!

Gomersal Primary School – Creative Workshop 2016 #2

EMELBI · 16th December 2016 · Leave a Comment

This has been a wonderful project where the children have explored a wide range of mediums including photography, pen line portrait illustration, textured mark making with a variety of tools, paint blending experimentation on canvas, digital illustration and layering techniques and then bringing all these things together for the final pieces. The finished artworks are absolutely fabulous and so wonderfully individual. It was a pleasure to work with such a great bunch of talented young artists.

Sketchbook Images – December 2016

EMELBI · 12th December 2016 · Leave a Comment

Some quick sketches from a recent sketchbook. Number six was drawn by my 4 year old daughter. I added the kiss speech bubble. We work collaboratively some times. Children’s unbound creativity is a wonder to behold most of the time.

Gomersal Primary School – Creative Workshop 2016

EMELBI · 12th December 2016 · Leave a Comment

Here are some of the images that have been created by the children at Gomersal Primary School in recent creative workshops. These will be added to the canvases that they have been working on for the last few weeks. Can’t wait to see the finished items.

I really love their use of blended digital textures incorporating their hand drawn portraits. Brilliant creativity.

Beardyman – God Damn I Look Fresh

EMELBI · 16th November 2016 · Leave a Comment

A quick sketch of the Vocal Beatbox and Musical Noise genius Beardyman.
He posted a video this morning on his Facebook page running a little competition for fans like myself to get involved with. I freeze framed the video and made this image from the freeze frame.

Never heard of Beardyman. Why the chuff not? Check him out here… www.beardyman.co.uk

Art and creativity is everywhere. You just need to look for it.

Beardyman - God Damn I Look Fresh

Amazing Disgrace

EMELBI · 9th November 2016 · Leave a Comment

It’s not united, but this is the state of America.

Awakening

Birkby Junior School – Personal Story Telling Project

EMELBI · 22nd September 2016 · Leave a Comment

This was a super day long project working with a group of talented creative children on a personal story telling project. The artwork produced was towards part of a community art exhibition with many other schools being involved. The children rolled out a large piece of paper across the school hall floor and each of them worked on multiple areas of the paper creating illustrative self portraits of themselves and embellishing the portraits with images that related to them and their lives.

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Afterwards the children extensively photographed the images that they had made using ipads. That done, they further worked on their imagery digitally manipulating the images using specific apps in the ipad until they had a made a large amount of usable media. The resulting posters were the results of their hard work. A super project with a fab bunch of children.

Here are some photographs from the workshop

Story Time

EMELBI · 11th July 2016 · Leave a Comment

I did a little illustration of my daughter having a hot chocolate before bedtime. We like a good bedtime story in our house. My wife and I collect children’s books, so there is always a good story to hand.

Story Time

Story Time

Story Time

Story Time

Story Time

Story Time

Story Time

Sketch It!

EMELBI · 22nd June 2016 · Leave a Comment

Here are a recent collection of images. They are a mixture of hand drawn and digital art play.

Close - Closed - Open

Thaddeus Hibbard

Where There's A Heart There's Its Shadow

Talking Creativity

Secret-7 Cover Graphic

Mountains of Things

Gomersal Primary School – Experimental Portrait Workshop

EMELBI · 10th December 2015 · Leave a Comment

This was a really fun and creative art club. From large A2 printed portrait photographs the children traced their own images paying particular attention to the shapes that exist within the human face. This made for some really lovely and unusual drawings. The second stage was to make another tracing, but this time from the initial line drawing so that there was some extra degradation of form though this process.

Using a limited palette of colours, the children then inked the second drawing by almost block filling the shapes that they had discovered within the lines of their drawings.

I love how these beautiful images started to appear on the paper. We later scanned the images and went on to do some digital image manipulation with them. Great fun.

Line and Ink Work

 

DIGITAL MANIPULATION

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WORKSHOP PHOTOS

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Mr. Scoper

EMELBI · 18th November 2015 · Leave a Comment

His name is Scoper.
He has just been hit by cupid’s arrow and is about to fall in love.
Maybe he will fall over first.
It’s hard to know.

Scoper

Nimble Line Bimble – 09.11.15

EMELBI · 9th November 2015 · Leave a Comment

Nimble Line Bimbles

Taking the pen for a walk.

Masham Mick (Sketchbook)

Scooner Booner Bird

JEnja JEnja

Nanard

MOON - Nimble Line Bimble

Shelly First School – Digital Urban Mural – Digital Illustration Workshops.

EMELBI · 5th November 2015 · Leave a Comment

Using Dazzle 03 pupils created funky character designs to use in the production of a Digital Urban Mural. Further graphic experimentation had them exploring various tools within the Dazzle 03 software package where they used multiple layers and learned to transfer images from one document to another.  The pupils then combined many graphic elements to form the finished artwork exploring colour, texture, image placement, small graphic additions and much more. I love how busy these images are and how they have come together as a group of images.

Audio Cassette

EMELBI · 19th October 2015 · Leave a Comment

Bag Bandit B Boy

EMELBI · 21st August 2015 · Leave a Comment

Sketchbook image and some iPhone app trickery.

I posted this as I love that raw urban feel to images. It’s no secret that my first major influences in art were street art and graffiti.

Bag Bandit B Boy (Detail)

Bag Bandit B Boy (Detail)

Bag Bandit B Boy

Nous Trois

EMELBI · 21st August 2015 · Leave a Comment

Found this the other day. It’s a triptych of characters painted on board that I did back in 2007.
I’m not actually sure what happened to them or where they ended up, but I have always loved these characters.

Acrylic, Emulsion and Permanent Marker on Board

Hue Too

EMELBI · 21st August 2015 · Leave a Comment

Face illustration on A2 cartridge paper.
Berol Pen, Quink Ink, Posca Pen & Biro.

Berol Broad Pen, Quink Ink, Posca Pen and Biro Pen face illustration on A2 cartridge paper.
Berol Broad Pen, Quink Ink, Posca Pen and Biro Pen face illustration on A2 cartridge paper.

THE GIFt 2

EMELBI · 21st August 2015 · Leave a Comment

Been mucking around with a couple more GIF experiments.
They are always fun to put together. This one is probably too image heavy, but I quite like it all the same.
It may take a while to load due to this.

EMELBI_THeGIFt

Coffee Morning Sketch

EMELBI · 21st August 2015 · Leave a Comment

A quick sketch with a bit of Photoshop play. Faces are just so expressive. They tell us so much about a person. Mood, intention, character, right up front. But sometimes it is more subtle. Micro expressions are harder to read, but they are there. You just have to look!

Coffee Morning x4

Earth Spirit

EMELBI · 6th August 2015 · Leave a Comment

A quick pen drawing, digitally edited and coloured.

Earth Spirit

Shelly First School – IF I WERE KING OR QUEEN – Digital Illustration Workshops.

EMELBI · 3rd July 2015 · Leave a Comment

This was a fun project with Shelly First School where the children got to make King and Queen portraits out of their own faces as part of a whole schools creative arts week. The theme for the art produced during the weeks creative activities was all based around and celebrating the fact that Queen Elizabeth II will become our longest-reigning British monarch on 9 September 2015. A massive amount of artwork was produced during the workshops and a lot of fun was had along the way. Here are a few from the pile. I think they all look positively regal.

Rage Head

EMELBI · 15th June 2015 · Leave a Comment

 

Illustrative play – Texture versions

Rage Head 01

Rage Head 02

Rage Head 03

Rage Head 04

Endless Running Games – Gareth Durasow

EMELBI · 11th June 2015 · Leave a Comment

(Book Cover Illustration)
(Book Cover Illustration)

Yes, I am responsible for the cover design, but the real genius is on the inside.

‘Endless Running Games’ is a collection of poems by Gareth Durasow.

Gareth isn’t at all reluctant about eloquently sketching out the grit and feculence of the human condition. He does it with an almost tongue in cheek poignancy. His observations of light juxtaposed by dark are formed anew as if one had never known the two before.
In essence: refined, brilliant, witty and challenging word journeys.

My personal favourites are PRAYERS FOR CAPTAIN AHAB and FOR THE LAST FLAT CAPPER.

Definitely worth a punt but don’t take my word for it, find out for yourself here… http://inpressbooks.co.uk/products/endless-running-games
or here… http://www.amazon.co.uk/Endless-Running-Games-Fruit-Bruise/dp/1907133909/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1434056268&sr=1-1&keywords=endless+running+games

Gomersal Primary School – Digital Portrait and Digital Urban Graphics Workshop

EMELBI · 10th May 2015 · Leave a Comment

Working with KS2 art club I did a quick photo shoot with the children during their first session to get some source material for their illustrations.

Once that was done we loaded all the images into the computer and started the creative process.
Using Dazzle 3 the children were shown how to use the different layers to derive illustrated images from the photographs. They were then encouraged to experimented with colour to create their finished portraits.

Creative Art Workshops

Once these initial images had been finished I wanted the children to do something different with their portrait images. We looked at further developing the children’s ability to manipulate their original images in Dazzle 3. Using different layering techniques and a bank of texture images, the children added experimental textures and
graphics to form their final piece of work, inspired by the urban graphics that are akin to my style of work. Here are some of the final images…
Wonderful work I’m sure you will agree!

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Creative Art Workshops

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Digital Urban Graphics

A mixture of photographic and illustrated materials.

Creative Art Workshops

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