Ho ho ho

Our Etsy shop sure is looking a little fuller these days, what with my cards for this year now up, plus the hand made decorations Charlie has been working away on busily. See for yourself at our ridiculously Chrtistmassy looking shop.

The first lot of this year's Christmas cards are up and ready to go at our Etsy store! Charlie's designs are new for this year and feature what she does best, some great illustrations of some festive animals.

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/HelloFoss

More goodies coming soon!

A is for....

UK film mag Little White Lies has had another creative brief running, this time to do with Nicholas Winding Refns' new film Only God Forgives. As if the prizes didn't make the competition alluring enough, Refn himself is actually judging the competition entrees, so I thought I best get involved! I started on the poster 5 days ago, but only had precious little time each evening from 6 til 10ish to work on it, so it was definitely an exercise in working to a deadline. Without having seen the film (out today) it's hard to know how well I've captured the film (if at all) and there were a hundred different layers and colours I continue to tweak and mess about with to slightly change the look of the poster, but this is it as of the competition deadline today. That and the alternate version.

The idea and design basically came from noticing Ryan Goslings simple wardrobe throughout most of the films trailer. Much of the time there (and in Drive) he wears a well fitting plain t shirt. I figured if he was a superhero, that would be his iconic super hero costume. With the t shirt switching between black and white, immediately I thought of the negative space it could create, as the more colourful neon lights the film is basked in surrounds him.

The first of many updates from now on

Finally! Foss Art (or Charlie and Markus to everyone else) have finally got hooked up to the world wide webs in Brighton, after moving here a month ago. So far so great, and it's ridiculously easy to get inspired or have a new illustration idea pop into your head when walking around here, which has happened a few times already, so expect to see more movement on this page from now on.

Two pictures today. I'm down to my last lot of business cards. You can't tell from the photo, but Moo produce such awesome quality cards, Patrick Batemen would be proud. Might give them a bit of a redesign before ordering the next lot.

And here's another picture from my on going pet project, which won't mean much out of context, but it will all become clearer as I get closer to finishing. And needless to say, the planets distance from one another isn't entiiirely accurate.

I was inspired by the new Little White Lies issue with a Man of Steel cover to do a simple portrait of Henry Cavill as big blue. LWL covers always feature great covers, with the brief simply being the chosen films stars face on the cover. 

This is where my idea for a simple portrait came from. Click for full size.

To boldy go...

So things are about to get very hectic around here, what with uprooting and moving to Brighton, so this could be my last chance to post anything for a while, so here are some seemingly random pictures, all from my ongoing project I'm working on. Hint - it's about spaaaaace.

Man of Posters

Needed a break from my current project. I'm drawing alot of pages with a deadline I've set myself. It worked pretty well for my final major project, so I'm hoping I repeat that situation here. But in the meantime, this is the result of me blowing off steam for the evening.

And since there's no 'S' on the cape to this costume, a more movie accurate version.

Birthday invite!

So Charlie and I (collectively Foss Art) were recently asked to create a birthday invitation for a couple of very special birthday twins, to the theme of Doctor Seuss. The brief was really open ended, which basically meant I could design whatever I wanted. That was the easiest part. The hard part was realising what's Doctor Seuss without a really cool rhyme to go with it? I was completely stumped and didn't come up with anything more then a line long, but Charlie came up with this rhyme out of nowhere, and we had our invite!

My current project...

..is still in the planning stages, but looks like this

Valentines day

It's fast approaching, and I see it as the next opportunity to roll out some more illustrations/items under the Foss banner. These are what I have so far. The idea is that leaves resemble hearts ( I'm probably not quite the first person to realise this) , so I managed to get a whole bunch of hearts on there without making it look too 'lovey dovey' - not that is anything wrong with that! The colours are perhaps not quite what you might think of when you think 'Clintons Valentines day card' but they are in there, so I hope I get the best of both worlds from them, something which stands out, but is still a bit traditional.

So this is what I'm playing around with for now.

Super short update - really enjoying quick little crayon sketches at the moment, these are my latest two. Definitely want to produce a proper series of these. Probably once I buy more crayons as I'm running out fast.