That's Mister Chief to you

I decided to come up with a poster for Halo 4 after seeing one of my favourite artists, Olly Moss, tweet that he wished he could've designed a poster for the game's release, but had to decline as he simply didn't have the time. This was sad news indeed as I can only begin to imagine the awesomeness that would transpire from a Halo and Olly Moss project. It did however give me the idea to have a go at one myself, seeing as my art schedule isn't quite as busy as his (just a guess).

I wanted to keep the poster pretty simple since I only had a day to do it (I'll be away from home for the next week, and with the game being released on Tuesday, I wanted it ready and online beforehand).

To keep clutter to a minimum, the only text on the poster would be a tagline and release date. Characters in videogames don't get much more iconic then Master Chief, which is why I didn't feel the need to plaster 'HALO 4' anywhere on it. It's also a sign of how successful a character or franchise is: if something is so recognisable you don't even need the name or any information to go with it, you've definitely hit gold.

Image one is how the poster looked at the end of day One. I worked on it some more the next day and produced the second image, where I tried to get MC looking a bit more like his Halo 4 counterpart (his armour has had quite the upgrade in the design department).  Not sure which one I prefered, so uploaded both.

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.

Not my gumdrop buttons!

I became an uncle earlier this year and wanted to create something for my twin nieces nursery. It wasn't the strictest brief I've ever worked to, I think whatever looked good would have sufficed (I wasn't expecting my new born nieces to be my harshest art critics) but their mom Erin suggested a theme of favourite nursery tales which helped me zero in on an idea.
One of the first and only tales which sprung to mind (my memory is quite foggy about that period in my life, its going back a few years now) was the gingerbread man. I decided that two pictures, canvas mounted, would look better then one, and could position the gingerbread man on his own, with some of the animals which chased the poor guy on a second picture. With this being the result!

Tumblr Portfolio

I'm  using my Tumblr page to act as a portfolio until my inevitable .com website goes up. It has the same work you can find on this blog, albeit in a format which allows more immediate access to images, and features far less waffling, so its win win.

http://markusmotum.tumblr.com/