Happy Halloween!

Or at least, Happy Saturday night before Halloween. I suspect this is the night most of us will be dressing up if were going to this year. As a student, Halloween was one of the highlights of the year as it meant dressing up and at least one evening of watching scary movies. What follows is a collection of those movie monsters, and what they would look like if I had 6 pumpkins to carve them onto. If I did 3 more to make up a 3 x 3 grid, I forsee them making a nice enough screen print one day.
Can YOU name them all?

Editorial stuffs

So I decided to set myself a project to practice illustrating to a tight deadline, much like artists working on newspapers etc no doubt have to keep to. I picked an advice column out from a weekend broadsheet and set about coming up with a drawing per week, which would go alongside the letters.

First up, this lady had written in because she was worried her 18yr daughter was seeing a 28yr old muscian but wasn't being honest about it, and the mum suspected he was exposing her to drugs. The daughter is off to a charity gig next month and the mum has just found out the musican is playing there, and is worried sick about what kinds of debauchery could happen!

Next up was quite a sad letter, written in by a 14 yr old. His gran had died a few weeks back, and this kids mum was devastated, the kid writes his mum cries all the time and there seems to be nothing he or his dad can do to cheer her up. I tried to get across this inconsolableness by making his mum so much larger then him, his arm not being big enough to put on her shoulder and comfort her.

Last one so far is about a guy who cheated at a vegetable competition in a village flower show. He used disallowed fertiliser on his onions and went on to win the competition  After winning, he was made president of the show for next year. He is racked with guilt and doesn't know whether to confess and bring shame to his family (who would be made guilty by association, his father and grand father were all presidents of this show) or keep quiet and remain president, which means so much to him.

Illustrating this is a nice challenge, as the pictures have to work immediately, and will no doubt be seen before the letters are read by readers, so have to clearly give some insight into the story.

Decided to upload a few close up's of the illustrations as they appear in my final major project from this year. Can't wait to get stuck into my next book, which is currently in the planning process now.

Little White Lies

Next competition! I had 50 minutes to do this one, the magazine needed an image of Daniel Craig as James Bond to go in their next issue. Since time was so short, I went for a silhouette, hoping that he would still be recognisable. I didn't win (they had 90 entries in an hour!) but it was good fun and practice, looking forward to the next one.