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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

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

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.

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

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

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

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. 

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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,

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.

Nimble Line Bimbles Taking the pen for a walk.

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

Sketchbook image and some iPhone app trickery.

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.

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.

Illustration Concept for a poster.

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

Pen drawing, digitally edited and coloured.

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

  Illustrative play – Texture versions

(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.

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