1950s Monsters

Rediscovered in a cobweb coated corner of my hard drive this morning. 'Always really liked this sketch. I had half a mind at the time to expand it into a riotous street scene full of rampaging teddy monsters and beastly beehives.

Moonfleet

Covert art for Oxford University Press, with gorgeous design by Sarah Darby. 'Can't wait to see this classy spine on my bookshelf...

(Given the smuggling theme I'm going to pretend the typo on "covert art" was deliberate!)

Aborted Book Cover

Hey up, just dug this out of the archive. Was invited by Orchard Books to pitch for a cover last year - it didn't go any further than the above rough, but I've still got a soft spot for it.

"Dark Hunter" Preview Pics

Wow, has the best part of half a year really gone by since the last post..?

It's not that there hasn't been new work to show - I've been churning out stuff left right and centre - it's more a case of having been moving so quickly from job to job that I fall out of love with each set of illustrations within days of completing them. They've all been decent enough sure, but, you know.

Things feel a little more promising with my current commission. Some techniques I'd been playing about with separately over the last couple of years seem to have landed together in such a way that I suddenly feel I've got almost complete control over the process - which in turn has allowed me to loosen up and just let it all happen.

It suddenly feels utterly effortless, at any rate. The fact that I've finally decided that reality's a bit rubbish and that stylising the crap out of everything is much more fun than trying to draw it "properly" has also helped. And yes, the presence of giant spiders, werewolves and lots of other horrible monsters can't have hurt.

God, after all this wide-eyed waffle I'd better still like these illustrations in a week's time...

Zombies Attack

A sample piece from a few months back, for Oxford University Press. Happy to say it landed me the job proper - a hefty full colour undead extravaganza, which I'm just finishing off now. Will post a few highlights later in the year.

Monsters, Zombies, Vampires and More

Cover for a big fat book of monsters, published by Parragon. It won't look like this on the shelves, mind you, what with it having a die-cut cover, out of which the beasties will peep.

A few of the characters needed to be kept consistent with existing illustrations within the book (Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Witch, the Werewolf and Godzilla), so I put my own spin on them, and designed the rest from scratch. Working from other illustrators' designs is always an eye opener, you feel like you're getting a glimpse of how the world looks from within someone else's diseased head (as opposed to from within your own diseased head).

Out on 27th August, says Amazon. Try not to buy it from the tax-dodging bastards though.

Leopard Adventure

 



Two of ten interior pics from a relaunch of Willard Price's classic 'Adventure' series...

Adventure, animals and action in the first authorized Willard Price book by award-winning author Anthony McGowan, for 8+ readers.

Deep in the remote forests of Siberia, a mother Amur leopard, one of the rarest big cats in the world, senses danger. Something faster than any human and deadlier than any tiger. 

Meanwhile Amazon Hunt, aged twelve, is recruited from England by Tracks in America, ready to take off at a moment's notice to rescue wild animals under threat - no matter how great the danger.

Now Amazon and her thirteen-year-old cousin Frazer must brave the Russian wilderness to save the Amur leopard, before a blazing forest fire wipes out the race - for good . . .

Out on the 5th July - pre-order on Amazon UK.
 

Ghosts of Hill Hall

Gosh, what a busy year it's been so far. Lots of work, getting a picture book draft together for my lovely agents at Bright to take to Bologna last week, and somehow finding time to play all the way through Mass Effect 3. I know, I know - I'm a very robust and determined specimen.

Anyway, there's nothing that urgently needs doing today, and it's freaking me out. A clever person would go and bask on the beach. A stupid person would stay indoors and make the first new post in living memory appear on their blog. So here it is.

These pics were commissioned by Pearson Education for a trio of books aimed at helping older children with reading difficulties, thus the text is very simple and heavily interspersed with deliberately mature, dark illustrations. I guess you could say they're half picture book, half illustrated fiction - best of both worlds, for my money.

There's something about "olden" settings which automatically makes me work in an old fashioned style, in the same way as not quite so olden settings automatically make me work in a, well, not-quite-so old fashioned style. Might make an effort to mix things up from here on, 'could be fun.

Young Merlin

Cover artwork for "Young Merlin" and "Merlin and the Ring of Power" by Tony Bradman, published by Barrington Stoke later this year. I'll be going to work on the interiors soon: knights, berserkers, stone circles, gnarly old druids, dragons, you name it - good GOD it's going to be a blast...

Book Cover for Penguin

I'm not going to mention the name of the book, or the bestselling author who wrote it, as this isn't the image that's going to be adorning it when it emerges. Unfortunately it wasn't something that Penguin's sales and marketing department felt they could work with.

Short term disappointment aside, it was a hugely fun job, and having made a few friends within such a prestigious publisher in the process, I'm not complaining!

As an aside, I got the job thanks to this old portfolio piece:



The art team liked the wham-bam dynamics and perspective, and asked for it to form the basis of the new image. So it's basically a remix. Always good fun to re-visit olden efforts and see what else you can do with them!