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Portfolio 2012

Character Design, Digital Art, Illustration

A selection of work from my time as a student at Hereford College of Arts studying Illustration from 2009-2012.
Balthassar | 2012

Self-promotion piece under the psyseudom Mondo Imbroglio. The 'mondo' comes from the Italian film Mondo Cane, a cult 1960s film famed for it's bizarre imagery, this in conjunction with the word imbroglio gives the definition of the phrase as a bizarre confused mess, which pretty much sums up my mentality.

The imagery for this piece came from listening to a band called The Secret Chiefs 3, their music focuses on philosophy and religion with heavy Persian, Arab and Indian influences. The typeface is based around runic scripture, in keeping with the religious theme.

Adobe Photoshop.
Bananasaurolophuses | 2011
Pronounced banana-SAWR-OL-uh-fus-es. The brief for this project was to create a set of characters for a series of happy families playing cards aimed at promoting healthy eating in children aged between 5 and 10 years old. When considering how to approach this project I wanted to use a subject mater that would appeal to both boys and girls, thinking back to my youth and the popularity of Jurassic Park and Walking With Dinosaurs I reasoned that dinosaurs tend to be neither a boy or a girl specific interest in children.

I tend to paint and draw portraits, usually with a macabre theme, so designing dinosaurs for children was slightly out of my comfort zone. I am however glad with how they turned out, the idea of fusing the banana with the crest of a Parasaurolophus seems to work very well, I liked the idea that the young would have unripened bananas on their crests which would open out and ripen with age.

Adobe Photoshop.
Citrosauruses | 2011
Further character design for the happy families playing cards, This time based around Stegosauruses and citrus fruits. As opposed to just selecting one fruit as with the bananasaurolophuses above, I went with a food group here as it gives off a better sense of family. The natural progression from selecting a food group is to look as which foodstuffs would suit each character best, to this end I used the relative sizes of the fruits and matched them with the Mr. Mrs. Master and Miss.

Both sets of characters were creating using vector shapes in Photoshop, I was able to use the textures of the fruit in this piece to greater effect in this piece, although some of the finer detail is perhaps lost in the re-sizing of each participant.

Adobe Photoshop.
Death From Above 1939 | 2011
A friend of mine collects illustrations of animals with weapons and as repayment for a favour i painted her this piece. The first image I created for her was a kitten in a Panzer, which made me think of the legendary anti-tank dogs of World War II. The natural progression led to a Siberian eagle owl dropping American m26 grenades. The title is an allusion to the band Death From Above 1979.

Adobe Photoshop, Wacom Graphire4.
The Driver | 2012
Little White Lies cover illustration for the 2012 D&AD student awards. The brief was to create a cover image depicting the main character from one of five films from 2011, Drive, Black Swan, Super 8, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or The Tree of Life. I chose Drive as its imagery and 80s themed score and graphic design had stuck in my head since watching it a year earlier. One of the stand out set pieces from the film is the driver (he is never named) played by Ryan Gosling, wearing a rubber head and surveying a man who he would soon murder in an act of vengeance. After this scene he chases him down in his car, it strikes me that for his teeth to show as they are he must be smiling broadly underneath the mask, which is the unsettling feel I wanted to capture form the film.

When designing for Little White Lies the difficulty lies in the restrictive and oddly sized canvas, also there needs to be consideration for the typography which they insist is bespoke and not the font used in the film. Looking back at this piece I'm very happy with how the type came out, though I don't think there is enough emotion in the eyes for the viewer to feel that the driver is manically smiling under the mask.

Adobe Photoshop, Wacom Intuos4.
Fantasy Time! | 2011
A mash-up of my favourite video game from my youth, Final Fantasy VI and the cult cartoon Adventure Time. This was the first time I have ever created pixel art and it was a lot more complicated than I had originally thought. I had to teach myself several techniques such as anti-aliasing and dithering to create an authentic 8-bit feel. I paid particular attention to the size of the sprites and the menus, ensuring that they were the same dimensions as those in the original game to try and give off a feeling of authenticity to the piece.

This piece was incredibly well received on the micro-blogging site Tumblr, with well over 700 notes in under a year, making it by far my most popular piece on my blog.

Adobe Photoshop.
Hipster Penguin | 2011
Christmas for the Instagram generation. Christmas card design for 2011. I like to create my own Christmas cards every year, which as I leave university will become a small form of self-promotion.

Adobe Photoshop.
Oh Hai Vader | 2010
This is biased on a picture of Qian Hongyan after she'd just received a pair of prosthetic legs at 11 years old; she'd her legs amputated at 3 years old following an accident. I liked the juxtaposition of having Darth Vader in a Hello Kitty jumper, and also how Qian's prosthetic legs mirror Vaders lack of limbs. I only un-gloved one of the hands to keep it closer to the original image Qian Hongyan.

Adobe Photoshop.
Ophthalmology | 2011
Oph.thal.mol.o.gy: The study of the eye.

Adobe Photoshop, Wacom Graphire4.
The Company ofWolves | 2012
'The hunterjumped down after him, slit his throat, cut off his paws for a trophy, and thenno wolf at all lay in front of the hunter but the bloody trunk of a man'.Illustration for the Company of Wolves from Angel Carter's the Bloody Chamber.The Company of Wolves is a twisted re-telling of Red Riding Hood, and as such Iwanted to keep away from any of the imagery widely associated with the fairytale.

The idea is that the hand is in between two anatomicalstates that of a human and a werewolf, as it is changing back its structure hasto break and distort hence the hand appears broken in two with the claws facingthe wrong way towards the human half of the hand. I had the transformationscene in American Werewolf in London in mind when thinking about how the handwould change back, with its structure physically changing to a point where itis neither one nor the other. The blood is supposed to look like it is beingdiluted by rain, or the moisture left behind by rain as I imagined the scenewith the hunter and the werewolf to have taken place on a dark stormy night.Some of the texture of the blood is taken from photographs of bloodstains,overlaid over painted portions underneath.

Adobe Photoshop, Wacom Intuos4.
Brew | 2011
Cover illustration for The Landlady from Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected. As each short story in the book ends with a twist I wanted to set the tone of the story without giving away any of the plot. This cover is alluding to the end of the story where the protaganist is poisoned and then stuffed by the landlady of a bed and breakfast.Towards the beginning of the story it is mentioned that she has a taxidermy parrot in her living room, I decided to use the parrot as a device to foreshadow the twist in the book, that she was poisoning and then stuffing her tenants, without giving too much away at the same time. The use of greens in the colour palette is a reference to the use of arsenic to colour green paint, also the layout comes from the classic Romek Marber designs of Penguin Crime novels of the 1960s, though I chose to use Futara instead of Helvetica which was used during this era as Futara has become synonymous with Penguin books in the recent past.

Adobe Photoshop.
The BloodyChamber | 2012
'On her throat Icould see the blue imprints of her stranglers fingers, the cool sad flame ofthe candles flickered on her white closed eyelids. The worst thing was, thedead lips smiled.' Illustration for titular story from Angela Carter's book TheBloody Chamber. The story is a re-imagining of the folk-tale Bluebeard,with some hints of Beauty and the Beast. The story is about a teenage girl whomarries an old, wealthy and sadistic French Marquis, who she finds out haskilled his previous wives and intends to kill her too. In one scene where shesurveys his previous wives, one just a skull suspended from the ceiling, one inan iron maiden and the other strangled to death laid out on a slab. Thedescription of the third and most recent wife stood out for me from the rest ofthe stories imagery so I set out to capture her expression.

I had previously painted with an ancient A6 WacomGraphire4, despite it being in perfect working order it's not exactly ideal forlarge scale painting in Photoshop, and the pressure sensitivity leaves a lot tobe desired. For this piece I invested in a Large Wacom Intous4, the differencein tablets was astounding. The pressure sensitivity has increased tenfold sincethe Graphire, making blending a lot more effective, whereas before the effectwould come off looking ‘muddy’.

I seem tohave managed an expression with varying feelings; the eyes can signify eithersleep or death but the way in which they have slight bags and the eyebrows cancatch your eye sometimes to give her a pained expression, she seems to be morethan just asleep in that respect. And then of course the smile, andwhen considering her off colour it's clear she is dead which makesthe smile all the more creepy. I'm also incredibly pleased with how well I havemanaged to paint her face, as I'm still very new to digital painting. Herfeatures seem to have real depth.

Adobe Photoshop, Wacom Intuos4.
Trophy | 2011
Commission piecefor a friend, asking for an A1 poster to hang in his new house, as the scalewas so large i was able to really ramp up the detail in this piece. Unlike mostof my other work i decided to work from a blank canvas in Photoshop without anyprevious sketching involved.

Adobe Photoshop.
Two-Face | 2011
Self-portrait as two-face from the Batman franchise. Iwanted to stray away from the movie versions of this character, the onlyversion I have ever appreciated was from the early 90s animated Batman series.In The Dark Knight Harvey Dent’s face is almost completely destroyed, down to the bone,I felt that this was taking the idea too far, true on said of his face isdisfigured but such and injury would surely be impossible to live withinfection free? I stayed with the back story from the original comic bookswhere Dent had had acid thrown in his face at a trial. This would be the lastpainting I made with Wacom’s Graphire4 before upgrading, and as such I wouldlike to revisit the idea in the future with an updated version.

Adobe Photoshop, Wacom Graphire4.