Merry Christmas!

And to one and all a happy new year!

Bears in Ill-fitting Hats

I love online group sketch idea things!

This one is for a group on flickr where you submit bears in ill-fitting hats - my effort is above, and a link to the group is here:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/bears-in-ill-fitting-hats/

This one was a very quick sketch (about 10 mins) in Painter, roughed out with the 2B pencil, 'inked' with the scratchboard tool (found under 'pens') and coloured with oil pastels. A bit of blending with 'just add water', a couple of gradients to fill out the background and I'm done!

Train Ride

An illustration for a History Books project - this particular page needed a train cab from the late 40s / early 50s.
There's some more detail in this one, as requested by the clients - but I've tried to strike a balance between suggesting everything and painstakingly depicting everything. I tried instead to give an overall feel of detail by including some in appropriate places, and hoping it all adds up to a satisfying image.

Pilate

The things you have to do, eh? I was working on a series of presentations involving 'hands' and needed to find a copyright-free image of Pilate washing his hands of responsibility - or something. Anyway, could I find one? Well, no. So I had to rustle up a quick illustration using Painter, and here it is!

I'm pretty pleased with it - I like the general tone and colours, though I think it needs some extra bits of detail here and there. I used oil pastels and the 2B pencil (and some graduated fills).

All in a day's work! (Well, about an hour or so).

Polar Bear Design Sketches

Here's a series of sketches where I had to design a Polar Bear character.
At first I thought it might be quite tricky to come up with enough variations of a polar bear, but done in a simple cartoony style, a long line here and a shorter distance there made all the difference and completely transformed one design to another! It's quite hard to do simple drawings too quickly, as a slip of the pen can alter the look of something too much and end up not looking like the image you were going for.
But I was really happy with the way these turned out, and am getting really comfortable sketching straight into Painter.

My Team Your Team

Have had loads of fun playing this game which I was shown from Kevin Cornell's excellent 'Bearskinrug' site (http://www.bearskinrug.co.uk/). Basically you play with another person and try to come up with superhero types that beat the previous character's skill or power - the more ridiculous the better! This pic is a run of heroes my girlfriend and I did recently.

I found it a nice way to relax and doodle, and you tend to come up with characters that you wouldn't otherwise think of doing. Give it a whirl!

First post!

Well here we go, my first post to my new blog! I've chosen a piece I'm currently working on in my day job as a designer and illustrator. It's for a series of books telling recent significant events in history (first car to the town, huge storms and snowfalls, that sort of thing). Anyway, I did it all in Corel Painter X on a Wacom tablet (as is most of my stuff these days), and is the first time I've illustrated anything like this - it's come out pretty well, methinks!

Any comments welcome, more stuff to follow soon!