Meet Juliette

Juliette hangs out with Stan and Mike. She's optimistic and happy with her life to the annoyance of those around her.

Meet Mike

Mike is a musician and Stan's best friend. Music is his one and only interest. During the day he is a part time water fountain man and part time dog walker.

Meet Stan

Stan is an IT technician but he wants to be a ROCK STAR in his dreams. But he's torn between an artistic life and paying his rent and trying to get a girlfriend. 

Adventures of Stan

I'm working on developing a few ideas for a comic strip. By way of introduction, I thought I'd share the cast so far.

Ben 10: Waybig

Ben 10: Ghostfreak

My son and I enjoy a cartoon called Ben 10, well he's really into it and I like to watch it with him. The 10 refers to a number of alien lifeforms that Ben can turn into using an alien watch that is permanently attached to his wrist, called the Omnitrix. As a gift to him I subscribed to a Ben 10 magazine that has a lot of stuff about the show, including pictures and puzzles. One section of the magazine that we sort of ignored until now was a section in each issue about how to draw the characters. My boy enjoys picking one of these and asking me to follow the instructions. This one is an alien form called Ghostfreak.

Book cover design

At the weekend

It’s Moider!

A slow start

Spiderman painting

My son helped with one leg and then I continued to paint after he got bored. Watercolours were the hard disk type, colour selection was just the primary colours.

Face

New Season

It's officially autumn 2008 and I thought it was time to get back into art. Over the last few weeks we bought a new wi-fi scanner/printer and it means I can scan stuff and work on my own machine in another room to where my wife does her work. So all systems go for the new season....just have to start creating.

Illustration Friday: Mask

I was going to draw a mask - the kind you see to represent the theatre. Then I thought about how our faces can be a kind of mask - depending on our mood and circumstance. Lines in our faces are drawn through our experience, our expressions and their frequency of use. I find faces continuously fascinating.

Illustration Friday: Might

This week's topic was hard. I'm not totally happy with the result, due to a last minute rush. Oh well, hope I find more inspiration with tomorrow's topic. The guy above is meant to be Albert Einstein!

Happy Snowman

Donnatello the Snowman, cousin of Frosty the Snowman

Illustration Friday: Invention

Whenever I draw a spaceship, this is the one that most often comes to mind. I used to love those washing up bottle rockets with the sparkler hanging out the back that the 30s and 40s Flash Gordon serials used to use as model spacecraft. I've taken some of that influence and mixed it with a cockpit that sticks out a little like the Millenium Falcon's. This is the rocket I'm using in a story I'm writing with my kids about an inventor called Professor Popplepot.

Illustration Friday: Thanksgiving

It took me a while to get the idea for this believe it or not. I guess because until this week I didn't really know much about thanksgiving. It's not a holiday over here in the UK. This image of a full table of food with a roast turkey in the middle waiting to be eaten is probably a very obvious image but it has only just come to me that this is what I should do. As a child I used to think Thanksgiving was the same as Christmas just in a different country.

Illustration Friday: Clear

I've thought long and hard about the brief this weekend, I came up with a lot of common understandings: water, glass etc. This morning a new interpretation struck me as I was thinking about a friend of mine.

Illustration Friday: Smoke

An area in England just West of Birmingham is known as The Black Country. Charles Dickens's novel The Old Curiosity Shop, written in 1841, described how the area's local factory chimneys "Poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air". This doodle is my little homage to the area.