News from the drawing board
New artworks and projects
Twisty Tales Little Mermaid Adventures for Hodder (double page spread text to be placed at top) Line artwork, hand drawn in pencil, layered with hand rendered textures and coloured on Photoshop.
How I made this: The steps from a first sketch to finished artwork. Showing the layers, colours and textures I added to complete this Little Mermaid children’s book artwork.
Read MoreEver wondered how a book cover got made and why it looks the way it does? All go through a process, a brief, different drafts and then the final art you see. The first sketch nailed down the foreground composition, what followed was a game of place the shark.
About my process, creating drafts and going through ideas is one of the enjoyable aspects on creating art. Illustrating a cover artwork and going through this process will always strengthen the look of the finished artwork. Ideas can be tried out with a few well placed marks from a pencil and discarded or developed accordingly. Having creating hundreds of cover artworks over my professional career I have a good instinct for what works and my first sketch will often be close to what is needed. What follows is a refinement of that with the clients input.
Cover illustrations can range from the complex, lots of characters and things going on in a active environment to the simple, an object or person. The focus when illustrating the cover for Halloween Bandits was to capture some of the quirkiness of character in a dynamic action piece. After creating the character concept illustrations the key to creating a really punchy image that would leap of the cover was to visualize the energy and movement by varying thickness of the line in ink loosely and quick by hand.
All my commissions are hand drawn illustrations I prefer the spontaneity of a hand rendered artwork, quirks and splatters of ink can add a lot of expression to an illustration. Pen and ink illustrations when got down on paper quickly can look very bold using different techniques and pens and brushes.
The Halloween Bandits Cover illustration. Hand drawn illustration in pen and ink.
For more samples including picture book illustrations, narrative and comic illustration or reluctant reader story artwork, please visit my illustration portfolio.
Illustrations are divided into three galleries.
Editorial illustration and advertising artwork.
Picture book illustrations.
Illustrated books which features illustrations for comic and older/reluctant reader illustration samples.