Play!

When I left my teaching role at UCLAN last year, it was clearly obvious that a 'sense of play' had somehow disappeared from my illustration work. Probably as a result of trying to keep too many things going on at the same time. Play? Work just for fun? The what if approach? Material experimentation? Call it what you will, but I had just a couple of weeks where I raided my paints, collage drawer and some of the throw always the kids had been drawing and scribbling on and just let loose, scanned the results in and just played :-) No brief or theme to any of the images, just a reaction to the materials in their own right and then a tiny bit of computer manipulation. A couple of the images went on to become a finished images - usually semi abstract backgrounds with a central figurative theme. Just a few favs of the many that were done...

Footballing Heroes

This project developed about a month ago. I was invited to contribute to the Footballing Heroes project, now in its third incarnation: http://www.footballheroes.org/

I don't often get to do portraits, so this was a really fun, challenging project to undertake. I started in usual way by doodling in a sketch book and copying photographic reference, but expanded this once the likeness was more or less there. I used both Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to build these two images, starting out by blocking in colours in Illustrator and then by adding paint (scanned and digital) in Photoshop. I ended up playing with different versions of each character, mainly tonal changes, but enough to make a noticeable if subtle difference.

Images of the printed versions will follow in due course.

Diego Maradonna

Ademir Menezes...

Introduction...

Hello! This is the first entry into my shiny new blog. I work as an illustrator, based in the North West of the UK and I'm planning on using this blog space as an extension of my own web site. Expanding on some of the illustration work in detail, showing sketches, layouts, experiments, some golden oldies perhaps and of course the inevitable cock ups that go hand in hand with the creative process. I guess the first thing to do is publish a couple of photo's of my studio and some of the kit therein...