Comic Book Art course

On the Comic Book Art short course (which I teach in the holidays, at Chelsea College in London), we had a group of girls from an animation school in Moscow. They were all good artists and inventive in their ideas, and the course was a lot of fun. At they end they gave me a memento:

Games Technologies course - 'pixel art'

As part of an introductory course into Games Technologies, I've been teaching the students Adobe Illustrator. As part of a fun exercise in the last lesson, we produced bitmap style avatars for ourselves, limited to a very low 'resolution'. Mine is below!

Character Design using Paths

As part of a level 3 Multimedia course, I've been teaching the students how to use the paths feature in Photoshop to produce clean artwork. It's slightly clunky compared to using Illustrator, but we are using PS for the unit. After scanning in the sketch, adjusting it and tracing over to produce the line art, we then used Multiply, Overlay and Adjustment layers to add the shading.

The demo character below is a futuristic version of the Wolf from Red Riding Hood, this time as a robot. He is designed to walk on two legs or four, depending on the situation. The large head on his chest can open up to swallow you whole! Click to enlarge.

Recent competitions

Been busy teaching a bunch of courses recently, but found time for a couple of competition entries on the IFX forum.

This was a quick speedpaint for a brief called 'The Race':

This one I had a bit more time for. The brief: 'Death':

Frazetta homage

Illustration for a birthday card, inspired by a mix of Frazetta and Ta Prohm.

Art competition win!

Just heard that I won the Stellar Dawn art competition, hosted by online games company Jagex, to promote their upcoming sci-fi MMORPG. The brief called for an illustration inspired by the tidbits of info and artwork that have been released so far. My entry depicts a damaged mech, lost and seemingly alone in a vast alien forest...

I submitted the entry under dodgy forum name "U1tral33t", which I had chosen at random a while ago  when I needed a login name to play their fab games. Didn't think it would become public! Oh well.

Here's the entry:

Future Mega-City

A vast future city. My main aim was to create an atmosphere of scale. The lighting suggests late afternoon, as dusk approaches.

Future Port City

A vast future port city. I'm pleased with how the water came out; I used a custom brush originally sampled from a painting of an iceberg, but it seemed to work.

National Poetry Week illustration

A quick illustration for the Putney Book Illustration course, to mark National Poetry Week. I took my inspiration from a poem about the roar of the furnaces at Battersea Power Station.

Rumplestiltskin

This illustration is my entry to a recent fairytale illustration competition. I chose to update the Brothers Grimm story Rumplestiltskin, with the title character now a little robot that can turn straw into gold.

Hip-hop artist illustrations

Some intentionally loose sketches of Aaliya, Biggie, Left Eye and Tupac. Linework with brushpen; colour with Corel Painter.

Guyver illustrations

A few old illustrations of Yoshiki Takaya's Guyver character. Drawn fairly large with a brush and Chinese ink, then coloured in Photoshop. Found them on the ol' hard drive and thought I'd share.