Beginnings

Heya. How's it going? I apologise about the state of the place, I was having an imagination block and, for some reason, decided that taking a picture of a snapped pen and superimposing words onto it would look cool. Evidently I was mistaken. Perhaps I'll produce something pretty for the site later - something with garish primary colours and simplistic swirly lines that means nothing and reminds you of every crappy club flyer you've ever refused from a fashionable person.

Anyway, here's some artwork I've done. I use the term 'artwork' loosely; mainly because it's quicker to type than 'amateur Photoshop scribblings". They were all made digitally with my somewhat inadequate graphics tablet, and while they're pretty simplistic at the moment, I'm working on improving my style. That hasn't happened so far but I'm guessing it's only a matter of time, right?



This was a cover I submitted to Forge Press (my university paper) because they needed a cover for their FUSE pullout. It was about directors, as you can no doubt guess. I'm pretty pleased with how it came out - especially as it was my first attempt at doing a big photoshop drawing - although the paper didn't actually use it.



This was the first FUSE cover I did which was actually published. I like the way I used colour in this one, although I was getting extremely tired by the end of drawing this and as a result the detailing of the little people (I bet you can't even tell they're people) around the Sheffield buildings is appauling.



Another FUSE cover, which was about the GRIN comedy festival in Sheffield. First person to guess who all the comedians are wins nothing. I'm experimenting with nihilist prizes, you see.



The latest FUSE cover I've done. It's depicting the London Eurogamer Expo, or rather, what the London Eurogamer Expo would have been like if the consoles on show had relinquished the limitations of their binary technology to become sentient beings, spawning abhorrent lifeforms from the nether which were inadvertently manifested through their distorted, subjective view of reality; videogames.

I tried a different method of drawing this time around. Rather than inking the picture with simple lines, colouring it, and then shading it with additional colour, I incorporated the shading into the actual inking process (resulting in comic-book style shading). I'm not really sure whether I prefer the results. What I AM sure about is how much I hate the bland blue background. Perhaps if I were less lazy, and actually pencilled the whole drawing beforehand instead of jumping straight in with my crappy A6 Wacom, I'd have been able to manage the space a bit better. Ah well.



Some artwork I did for some friends a while back - must have been a year ago by now. Looks okay, but the background's pretty simple. They're both DJs who met at university, and after they recovered from the shock of realising how incredibly awesome each other were at their chosen craft (that is, the craft of audible bliss), they decided to collaborate. The spawn of such an unholy alliance was called Synthdromes; a name which, I believe, refers to the synthesis of dromes.



This is some artwork I recently finished for Synthdromes' new Winter Mix. Drawing flesh being torn away from a tormented skeleton is about as much fun as you can have with a graphics tablet. The skeleton is actually an edited acrylic painting I did, which pretty much proves how terrible I am at acrylic painting. You can see a couple of the layers I used here, which I uploaded for... y'know, kicks. While you're at it you should also check out the Winter Mix itself; you can grab it from the Synthdromes MySpace page or from co-member Dan Boaden's blog.

Anyway, that's enough from my thrusting pens for now.

Ciao x