The Graphic Cosmogony Launches this thursday the 25th November!

If you are in London this thursday eve head on down to the Nobrow Gallery where along with the fantastic looking Jon Mcnaught and Rob Hunter exhibition 'Murmuring Landscapes' there will be the very first copies of 'The Graphic Cosmogony' for sale. Word on the street is it's as good as it smells. I have yet to smell it but I reckon it smells lush. I think there will be a fair few of the contributors there to sign copies and to enjoy the rum cocktails too. Head to the Nobrow website for more details and to their facebook page to RSVP.


I will explain more about my story in the Cosmogony when it's out in the shops but until then here is the first page for yous.

*Gosh! Since I posted this this morning Nobrow have done and gone posted pictures on their website head here to see them and head here to see what Mr Ben Newman has to say about it!

Bloomberg Businessweek Cover - Coke In Africa

Last week I was lucky enough to illustrate the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek over in the U.S of A. The cover is based on Duane Stanford's article about Coke in Africa (as you may well have been able to tell what with the big red and white writing.) The piece looks into the fact that Africa is the last place for Coca cola to conquer in terms of sales and the subsequent plus points and minus points of this. Obviously I had to show both these sides as well as making the cover intriguing to the viewer but without it looking too much like a Coke ad. I think I pulled it off and am real pleased with the outcome. I had some great art direction from Richard Turley the creative director at Businessweek who knew what he wanted but didn't say "now draw this in that corner and put some red here...' rather letting me come up with my own solutions that fitted the brief.

The Combination of... November and December 2010.

The fine fellows over at The Combination Of... are back from hiding / hibernation / holding ham sandwiches with two more fantastisch nights of live musical entertainment for people with ears and eyes and mouths and hands. To both celebrate and promote these evenings of splendor they asked me to create 2 posters which I done gone and did. Here they be.

As you can see for the November poster I took my inspiration from this inspirational piece of artwork from Ben Newman and included circles of varying colour and sizes.


For the December one I just turned a picture of a kid's torso upside down so his jumper made a face and his hands became feet and had stuff jumping out of it. Yeah, believe it.

That's Novel! That's a Comic!

Nobrow will be exhibiting excerpts from the forthcoming 'A Graphic Cosmogony' at 'That's Novel!' a comics exhibition at London Print Studio and I am lucky enough to be one of the 6 artists whose art work is featured. The exhibition opens Thursday the 21st at 6pm and will run from 22nd October to the 18th of September. It looks like it will be real fun and very yellow.

Beatrice & Virgil / Man or Monkey

A wee while ago I was commissioned by the LA Times to do an illustration for a review of the new Yann Martel book 'Beatrice & Virgil'. As the two namesakes from the title of the book are a donkey and a monkey I was asked specifically to draw the head of a donkey and the head of a monkey. Normally when an art director asks you to draw something specific it can be somewhat frustrating as it's much more preferable to come up with your own idea. But this isn't the case when asked to draw a donkey head and monkey head. In that case it's usually ''How many do you want?'' As you can see from the following roughs I got pretty carried away with drawing these heads and so numbered them up so one of each animal could be chosen.





Even then I ended up handing in 2 versions of each. In the end they went for the more 'donkey looking' Beatrice rather 'horse -looking' Beatrice and the not so sad Virgil.

A couple of months later I was approached by Anorak the foremost kids magazine to contribute a game or puzzle for their upcoming activity book. I decided to make a classic game of 'Man or Monkey' whereby I could draw some more monkeys and some men too.


Although my spread won't be in the first Anorak activity book it will be in the second one which is coming out shortly.


I then thought ''Yeah that game of Man or Monkey would make a sweet limited edition screen print, printed in various colours on A3 paper and sold at the reasonable price of £10!'' So that is what I am doing and here is what it will look like in yellow. I'll let you and everyone else know when it's up for sale. Yeah.

'Baked'

I recently did this illo for the LA Times for a review of 'Baked' by Mark Haskell Smith. The book is about cannabis, a special kind of cannabis called 'Elephant Crush' and gangsters. Hence the gun, the cannabis leaf and the elephants in suits. (Wow I am clever.) For a more thorough review head over to the LA Times.

It made me think as to whether this was really the first time I had drawn a cannabis leaf. Surely I must have drawn one with tippex on my school bag as a 14 year old boy? Or if I told the 14 year old version of myself that in the future - you / I would get paid money to draw a cannabis leaf coming out of a gun would I believe the future me? Would I be impressed? Should I be impressed? I suppose I'm having these thoughts as it is a ridiculous thing to draw. Isn't it?

All I know is that the 10 year old me would probably be slightly impressed with the gun at least. Though perhaps would recognise that it's not even a proper hand gun but an air pistol. Not that I was obsessed with guns as a child but when my brother and I first joined the library next to Safeways in cheltenham the first books we got out were two giant books about guns that contained hundreds of pictures of guns. We then took these books home where our mum was hugely unimpressed with our dad for allowing us said books while we snuck off and carefully reproduced these guns in pencil in our sketchpads. I think I cockily started to copy a large, meticulously detailed photo of the insides of a hand gun and then subsequently gave up when I realised I hadn't left enough space for the trigger or something. So in actual fact I think Rich and I were only obsessed with guns for a weekend at the most and probably went back to copying super heroes from Marvel comics. My mum was even less impressed when she had to take the mostly unread books back to the library where she was greeted with substantial late fines.

Graphic Cosmogony / Never show Knees In Public

I recently finished my 7 page comic for the upcoming Nobrow published "Graphic Cosmogony". Which looks to be another wonder of printed goodness from the artwork I have seen from a couple of fellow contributors. I am mainly talking about Mr Newman and Mr Best. Who as it happens were also incredibly helpful with the editing and colouring of my comic. So a big thank you to those two. More on this when it is published later on this year!

However rather than posting pages from said Comic I am posting some pages from a book I made a couple of weeks ago called 'Never show knees in public'. I decided to make this book so that (a) I had something to sell at the recent E.L.P summer fete and (B) as a warm up for the cosmogony and (3) because I wanted to. Ok? Sheesh.

But like I said it ended up being valuable project for the 'Cosmogony' as I developed characters and ways of working that then fed directly into my comic. As well as creating some images that will end up as screenprints.

I only ended up printing five copies of the book before my printer ran out of ink and so am now looking into other means to make the book as well as working on a few more pages that I'd like to add.