We Can Be Heroes, Right?

Two super-powered beings,
just before they go do their super-powered things:

I celebration of their new Comics Unmasked exhibition, the British Library teamed up with Arts Thread to host a comics competition. This is my entry, taking on the theme 'We Can Be Heroes'

Cos those two, they're the good guys... right? I'm not sure either.

D&AD: Little White Lies

Back in March I entered the D&AD Student Awards Illustration brief.
This year it was Little White Lies, and the task was straightforward - illustrate a Little White Lies cover based on one of their 5 favourite films of 2011.

I chose Black Swan.

'Black Swan' [Acrylics, Inks & Pencil on HeavyWeight Paper]

The image represents Natalie Portman's character Nina's transformation from the White Swan to the Black Swan, showing how the Black Swan was always within her, and the shattering of her face matching the shattering of her psyche.

Ok, and here's on super-dynamic photo of the cover
on an actual little white lies magazine, pages and everything:

Unfortunately my submission was unsuccessful. Looking back at the painting, I can see some things that probably didn't work in my favour, mainly the sidelining of the lettering, oh well.

I remember, I saw one of the eventual Black Swan winners on the internet before I even started this painting, and it's amazing I managed to convince myself to still take part after seeing it.

If you see it you'll know what I'm talking about.

Birdy, Birdie & Al

Back in January I designed a book cover for William Wharton's 'Birdy'
as part of a live brief set up by HarperCollins.

This is my final design.
This went through a lot of changes, way after the brief was over, and it's way better for it.

If you read the book, this cover shall hopefully make some sense.
It's somewhat literal, yet somewhat metaphorical.

PCP (Print Crowne Plaza)

Here's a series of screen prints I created for a Crowne Plaza Hotel Competition. The students of CSM were challenged to create illustrations with the London Blackfriars scene as the theme.

Wow these are old, seriously, I did these back in March...







Unfortunately I didn't win, and as far as I'm concerned I didn't even come close (although how am I to know? I had no insider knowledge of the voting panel). I believe this because this project was extremely rushed, as I was horrendously pushed for time, I'd just returned from Rome with just over a week left to work on the project, found myself a week behind work wise, and had 2 other projects and another live brief to work on alongside this one. The plus side was, I became a little bit more competent at screen printing.

But, as a minus every other part of the project went wrong, and I may have screwed everything else up. A few years ago I wrote in the 'About Me' Section; 'I have a problem, I want to do everything at once causing me to treat time & fatigue as the greatest of enemies.'

I'm not sure what to think about the fact that nothing has changed.

Basking in Perplexity

February has been a busy month, I've been preoccupied by various projects (of which I am yet to show you), along with the prospect and mental event of turning 20. Now to start revealing what the hell I've been doing this month:

I always mean to do extra projects, but always get struck down by my unintentionally lethargic approach to work, and run out of time. But not this time.



Dazed & Confused magazine had an Illustration project/competition which ended earlier this month. They wanted people to illustrate one of a chosen 10 covers from the last decade in their own way.

So I did an illustration based on this September 2002 cover, featuring Maggie Rizer:



The winner will be commissioned to do a piece of work for a later issue of Dazed, which sounds pretty awesome. You can see my entry page here.


Test can be enjoyable:


'Eye Test Delight' [Inks, Acrylics, Pencil & Gouache on HeavyWeight Paper]

It naturally took me far too long to figure out how I was going to do the Dazed cover, in the end I chose lady 3.

Next Time on the BTBS: Animation Returns!