Russell Morgan and Steel Tiger

I was recently contacted by a singer songwriter called Russell Morgan who had heard of me through my work with Steel Tiger records. I am always happy to work with musicians, music is close to my heart and I have a very diverse taste. He sent me this track titled 'Follow' and wow! he's a talent, the song blew me away, absolutely beautiful, musically, lyrically and vocally. You can hear a demo here

http://soundcloud.com/russellmorgan/follow-demo

We used an existing illustration which just seemed to work with the title 'Surrender' it's out next month and will make your life better if you buy it.


So a good opportunity to pull out a few older images and give a shout to the good people at Steel Tiger.

http://www.steeltiger.co.uk/

much respect guys! you make the world sound good.

Bubbles

A quick update because, well, it's been a while. I am busy working on three book covers at the moment and trying to find time to keep at the personal work. In the meantime here is an advertising banner I created for my agent here in the UK, the lovely guy and girls at Central Illustration Agency. It's a banner ad, bit of an awkward shape I felt something needed to travel across it, so I went for bubbles, everyone loves bubbles.

Shop magazine and experiments

Here is the full set of Shop magazine covers as I mentioned in an earlier post.







And here are a few sketches I produced. Nothing finished just time to play with Painter and ArtRage which are quite new to me, still includes some hand rendered acrylic but also dropping the photographic elements to see where that leads.




An interesting possibility of a personal piece in my more photographic / spiral studio stylee, more on that soon. I'm working on two book covers and two editorials at the moment, devil cities, super hero business men, midwifery and the American depression ... a diverse bunch of subjects!

Bye for now

flood

Flood

Stem the flood.
It flows like blood,
from an open wound.
Cut by fingers and tongues,
like knives and guns.

Stem the flood.
It flows like blood,
from my veins.
crimson, ruptured, open, gaping,
bits of me escaping.

Stem the flood.
The flow like blood,
fill the breach.
Dam it up with heart and soul,
cap the bloody flowing hole.

Stem the flood.
Dry up the blood,
fade the scar remaining.
Wipe away the crimson stain,
make the deluge calm again.



New personal work.

More soon.

Bye for now

Spartathlon

Here's one of two illustrations I recently produced for the Telegraph. Another interesting piece which I was again left to interpret in my own way, thank-you Telegraph!

The copy was an exert from a book and really was fascinating. The Spartathlon is a gruelling 152 mile run. It was beautifully written (I was lucky enough to get the unedited copy) and delved into why people take on such huge physical tasks but most interesting for me was the description of the mental aspect of the run, especially during the night.

I was commissioned to do one illustration but after rough stage it was decided to use both ideas. The fist aimed to capture how small the runner was in the face of such an undertaking and to capture the feeling of loneliness and solitude described in parts especially at night facing a mountain run, I used the mountains magnitude as an analogy for the enormity of the task as a whole . The other was to include the statue of king Leonidas, the runners kiss his feet at the end of the race (if you make it that far, not many do) and I wanted to show how this run can crush the runner with the statue looming over him.

In a nice addition to the commission the author who wrote the book from which the copy was an extract got in touch and bought a print of one of the illustrations from me!

Medium - Photography, pencil, acrylic, photoshop.

I'll post a couple more of the shop magazine covers soon and a illustration I have just done for the Radio Times.

Bye for now.

Riga and Lithuania

Well, before I abandon my studio for the weekend here are a couple more of the shop magazine covers. Riga and Lithuania. The pattern on the dress and necklace meet to create a statue from a very distinctive art art nouveau building in Riga and the monument at the centre of Europe forms a bracelet for Lithuania.

More to come.

Bye for now.

Beautiful Tango

I have been working on a slow burner for the lovely guys at Studio 8. Over the past three months we have been creating a series of covers for Shop magazine. The project involved five illustrators working on around 40 covers, from what I have seen they have been creating some great work. I was initially commissioned seven covers which increased to nine.

The general premise was to take an iconic element of the given city or area and combine it to become a product ie a dress, a ring, a shoe ect

Here is the first of my nine solutions. This was Buenos Aires, I came up with a few ideas and produced two roughs form the list and this one was chosen to take to final, we took the cultural reference of the tango and the shadows of the dancers became the distinctive architecture of the city.

More to come soon