www.monstermonster.net

To double up for the night, here's something I can now release, although it's been on my site for a while. My mate monstermonster has just published his site. He asked if I could do a robot for it, so I did a robot for it. Please find below the robot I did for it. Check his link out for a full version of the image (yeah, I've bugged him to fix the pixellation). 

Below that are some pictorial logo's I did for him using the typographic one I'd made a while back. The idea being that they all can be utilised and animated to morph into one another. Mainly for a animated cover image for his youtube channel videos. or something... Enjoy! 

throw bugs on it.

Blahhh Sorry it's been such a long time. I've been real busyfor the last month, I'm working on my own IP atm, and I've been real busy with some NDA stuff so I've not been able to show what I've been up to. I'm gonna try and post up some new stuff soon, I feel like I'm cheating posting older stuff. I've got a couple of projects on the go that I should be able to post up which I've been wanting to do so for a while now. Keep posted! 

Either way this is something I meant to post aaaaages ago, but I'd lost all of my second yr Uni work .Which blows. However my girlfriend had a copy of some larger-res jpegs on her computer for some reason. Which is awesome. So here they are. It's a Information project I did back in second year. I wanted to design a insect spotter's guide since I had one as a kid which I loved, and I've always been keen to do my own. I recall this being quite a short project, or at-least I didn't get to spend that long on it. So its not as fleshed out as I would like it to be, and if I get the chance I probably will finish up the rough edges. I had a lot of fun with it, would be real sweet to get something like this published. 

Enjoy

p.s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q949rFuVfHM&feature=relmfu

Rune for thought.

A post or so back in the rockbot update my friend Marcel mentioned about looking into runes for their decor. After he'd mentioned it I had a flick through various alphabets and things, and thought I would spend a couple of hours fixing up my own for fun. So I decided to post them up. I was looking to create something that could actually be read reasonably easy, but still looked very foreign. I actually remembered that number code from the episode of The Simpsons where Lisa couldn't work out that the numbers were mirrored and I pulled inspiration from that. So I halved the alphabet and combined that with the similar principles from this Korean alphabet chart to create a language in runes. After creating the basic foundation for it, I pulled inspiration from Japanese calliagraphy, particularly the Gyosho style of calligraphy, which deforms the characters either to create more pleasing compositions or for the sake of efficient writing. I wrote these out by hand in a chunky marker and scanned them in as it felt more authentic that way.

I liked the idea of taking something existing, and manipulating it to create something new, but understandable. The potential for the type to actually be read/understood either for eastereggs or just pre-production fun ( I do enjoy it when studios/companies throw in little injokes into their work) or whether it could be utilised to work as clues for gameplay or storytelling is also something of a bonus.

It's construction rules, also mean others can take the principles and characters and create their own sentences with meaning and still retain a consistent aesthetic. 

Enjoy.

rockbots in the rough

Here's some rockbots. I took a little break from characters, well atleast of the Human variety (mainly after I saw my mate Phandy's last robot post a had a burst of inspiration). So I thought I'd take some of that gesture stuff and put it into something more creature based. So I popped on some FZD youtube videos and had a night of thumbnailing. I then took three of those and worked them up a little. Which is whatchu got here. 

I thought these things could be kind of bare muscle/mollusc like creatures, that live in rocky areas and they use their surroundings to form their bodies by binding to natural rocks to make an exo-skeleton type thing. As they become stronger and mature or beaten up, they depose of the smaller, crappier rocks and attach larger ones. I sorter then developed that to suggest that local tribespeople have domesticated these things, and carve more efficient bodies for these creatures to adopt. 

above ^ are the original thumbnails, these are probably about 50% larger than I drew them. Enjoy.

EDIT:  Just to clear up, as I meant to write this and forgot, and it confused Marcel (although from my experience, thats easily done). These "rockbots"actually aren't that rocky. I was referencing a mineral called Galena. So I was going for a material that has a similar structure and texture to that. The original images are just under 4000px wide, so alot of texture has been compressed/lossed. I painted them with the intention of scaling them down for printing out, so the loose details tighten up a bit when they shrink. However my blog posts are only 900px wide so thats a lotta shrinkage. I intend to develop these guys more, the above are just rough ideas, to help convey the core concept.  Hope that helps answer any ifs or crits anyway, cheers to Marcel for pointing out some bits. I can always count on that guy for feedback.

Shyguys.

Hmm.. I can't believe it's been nearly a month since my last post. Pootis. I've been working on a few graphic jobs here and there, which once they've been published I'll post them up.  So that kind of explains the delay in posts for the past month. Anyway here's a quick post on something I was working on last night as Faye was moaning at me this morning for not updating in ages. I hardly ever do characters, which explains why I suck at them, and because I suck at them,  I don't do them. However I'm hoping to change that, because I enjoy thinking up characters and clothing ideas. I've had my head stuck in Loomis' "Figure Drawing: For all it's worth" for the past couple of days and I think it's starting to click. I've just been focusing on gestures. They're not great, but here's a trio of dudes that I sketched last night. I didn't really know what theme I was putting these peeps in but. meh. Some sort of army salvage guys. Enjoy

hubcups

This was a personal project I did a while back that I found the other day. I went through a phase of drawing the hubcaps of the cars parked outside my window. It was intriguing to be able to guess the brand of car that the hubcaps were from just from the design of them. I found the patterns and designs pretty cool when they were simplified, so I vectorised them and stuck them on cups. I was going to look into getting some printed if enough people were interested in them, although I'd probably make my own original "hubcaps" so I didn't get into copyright problems. Either that or maybe they'd make for some promo gear for a car/wheel manufacturer. Who knows, I just did it for fun because I thought they'd look cool.

feel free to drop me a email or comment if you were interested or just wanted to say hey, I like getting emails. Enjoy.

Star Time Adventure Watcher

A month back Brandon Graham revised an old art-meme with his version of Moebius' Starwatcher in the hope that it would cook up like Apple Pie. It certainly seems to be. I've only recently, since my trip to Vancouver, found my love for Moebius' work. This is mainly due to Brandon, when staying at his, handing copies of 'bius' work to look at and i'm thankful he did. I really fell for Jean Giraud's (Moebius) style of aesthetics and technique and his ethereal colour and characters. Seeing as this Starwatcher  seemed like a fun thing to join in on, I was inspired to do, and no-one had done it yet, an Adventure Time tribute. Because I fluffing love that show. 

So here it is, I've been working on it on and off for the past few weeks, in-between work and things. Warcel had the pleasure of throwing in some alternate ideas after I had drawn up the line work so I'd like to go back to it and alter bits or do an alternate version with Beemo as the focus and push more of Jake's bombastic attitude into the image, but I feel ready enough to post this one.  It's been a pretty fun journey to take with this, I was originally going to go for a more Moebius or a Cell Shaded venture, but I was really attracted to the AT title cards. They bring in this crazy painterly juxtaposition of styles against the simpleness of the cartoon that works really well. So I thought, let's do that!

 enjoy.

boxes.boxes.boxes.

And we're back. None for ages, then two in a night. This is one of the mutherfudgers I've been working on over the past trio of weeks. Loading is going mobile with its coffee, and it needed some snug little boxes to contain the bean dust cans in. So here's a sneak preview of said packaging. It was a real fun little project, and a huge curve learner. I got the opportunity to design and create everything myself from the net upwards, which is fun, but having the responsibility of getting it printed professionally this time, I've been triple checking my triple checks to ensure its right. 

We went with a retro/tribute to Mega Drive™. It was great fun to do, and surprisingly personal also, I grew up with the Sega Mega Drive, Sonic was my absolute hero as a kid (alongside Earthworm Jim). I've always loved their style of aesthetics, and it felt nice to celebrate that and try to keep it alive whilst giving it a modernised, coffee related spin. I hope you enjoy it. 

To accompany the box+tin I designed a little double sided "Instruction Manual". I recreated the pictorial safety notices with game item/character related ones. Some are more abstract references than others.

Here's a little close up iconparison of the original (bottom) and Loading's game versions (top).

If you would like to lend a hand to help get these puppies born you can help Loading get funding for the print costs by voting: here It only takes a minute and costs yee nothing. And you stand yourself a chance of winning some of the powder gold known as Mega Coffee in its shiny box as well as some gaming goodies. It would be much appreciated folks.

Take it easy

hmmmm....

Well this is a well over-due blog update.  It's been a weird couple of months of moving about and doing bits and neglecting pieces. But here we are and although I've not posted anything for a while, it's been bugging me that I haven't, so here's some stuff. 

I'd like to kick start this with a tribute to a good friend of mine, Angelo Trofa. Just because he's a radical italian dude and a great designer. I've had this batch of post-it notes depicting the incredible Football tekkers of Luke illustrated by said rad-man from when we were at college together. I've been meaning to .gif for a while. It's sentimental, so I thought I would share it for you college peeps of the past. 

gun red and hidden links.

I've been meaning to post again for the past few days. I've still a back log of stuff I want to talk about and show, but we'll hold on for another time.  

Here's some guns I drew. I was trying to experiment with keeping shapes as simple as I could, while keeping them interesting. I did about a page of ideas for pistols, pushing how simplified I could get them, then I took my favourite design, and tried to apply the same aesthetic to other types of firearms. I'm going do this sort of thing more often, As I learnt a ton, and it was real enjoyable to do. Enjoy.

periodical remixes.

I thought I'd try out something different lately. I'd like to post up random crap I've done outside of work, or stuff people have bought/made me, or just random awesome bites people have shown or I've found. A sort of Jon Schindehette / Brandon Graham blog baby.

So i'll kickstart this thought with a visual remix I did the other day for myself of a Periodic Table of Game Controllers that I wanted to use as my desktop to match the one on my other comp of a Periodic Table of Typefaces by Cam Wilde (to which I did a similar thing).  The original PToGC image is by Mike Vasilev, he's got  some awesome design stuff up on his site so definitetly check it out.

I take no credit for this image, the genius is all from Mike, I just made it black and purple for what I wanted, I find black desktop images more sexy for some reason. Which I hope he doesn't mind. Sorry its not in a higher res. The Flickr plan failed because i'm not pro enough to have it larger than 1024 pixels.

Links to both the originals for Mike and Cam are in their names, their work is certainly worth perusing.

hi-res version

drink.relax.play

An advert for Loading's second in the series of, Latebit . There's a big A1 poster version being printed for the event. This is just the web graphic for their site info it just looked sexier on the new layout I've decided I'd do. The old one didn't fit the new aesthetic.

check out Loading online, i'm real glad I get to do the occasional design work for the guys, and not just because it gets me, more often than I probably should, free coffee. <links in the title>

Also, I think I may have to invest in a flickr, them hi-res versions ain't that hi-res...Thanks Photobucket you're awesome.

bots.bots.bots.

hi-res version

if in doubt. add mountains.

I think i'll chuck out some of the stuff I'd done and worked on before the America/Canada trip before I do a post on the actual trip, so things are more chronological. A big dump update so to speak.

This and the purple mountains in the post below are environment studies exploring painting processes. I was aiming for something graphic/painterly. These are pretty old, and not very interesting, but were really useful for me. I'm starting to feel I'm finally getting somewhere. 

Something speaking to the guys at ArenaNet on the trip that really got me focused on was that I want to explore techniques and styles more, not search for one exactly, as I'm a believer in the style finds you, but I'd like to help it out by experimenting with techniques and media that I've not really pushed yet. So I'm pretty pumped to have the time to really push my image making. 

hi-res version

it's been time, and things have certainly changed.

Where to start? I can't believe my last post was January!? Damn. So much has happened since; tough stuff, awesome stuff, nice stuff and exciting stuff. Uni is over, which is crazy nuts as certainly doesn't feel like three years has been an gone, I feel like the journey has only just started. Which is semi-right as one has. The sheet scary one of getting a job and working for a living. But I had the amazing opportunity to meet a load of crazy awesome people in Seattle and Canada, I'll dedicate a post to that trip because what I got out of it was invaluable, it was so worth the money and effort, I really can't thank those I met and spoke to enough. It really put things in perspective for me, it was an incredible experience and I'd recommend it to anyone.

So basically, expect some massive updates over the next few days. Now I've finished my uni work, and the couple of live jobs I had to do as soon as I finished, I'm really focused on making something out of this opportunity that's in front of me.

I also want to put out a thanks to my 'rents for helping me out with the trip, I hope I can return all the help you've given me over these years to get to where I am. I do love you guys.

hi-res version