Roald Dahl caricature

The wonderful Mr Roald Dahl, who would've been 100 today !

Elle Fanning caricature

Elle Fanning caricature for the Facebook page Caricaturama Showdown 3000

Keith Moon caricature

Keith Moon caricature for his 69th birthday.

Salma Hayek caricature

Salma Hayek caricature for the latest Bookface challenge

Frank Black

Hearing the news that there's a new Pixies album on the way prompted me to do a quick caricature of Frank Black (no it's not Hank from Breaking Bad).

Great band, great new single Um Chagga Lagga. Bring on the album.

Btw I love the way they always (or at least, often) say the Pixies music is "surf music".  What the hell is "surf music"? And have a look at this bloke. I'd be surprised if he cld swim 50m doggie paddle let alone get a board out the back. Never surfed in his life. That said, I love them to bits.

The Joker

The Joker

T-shirts etc @ Teepublic

 

Threadless t-shirts

Have been entering some t-shirt designs to www.threadless.com

Some are general design but some are for specific competitions. Like this latest one. It's for a competition for the band The Flaming Lips and their new tune 'The Terror'. 

I was playing around with different ideas and thinking along the lines of terror but didn't want it to be hard-core .. twin towers, executions on the internet, things like that. Somehow I got onto Godzilla, then realised with that laser beam or fire breathing thing he does he would in fact have flaming lips! Actually one thing I definitely didn't want to do was go down the road of lips on fire, lips with fire texture etc etc. Godzilla seemed far enough away from that but with a nod to it, so i went ahead with it.

http://www.threadless.com/theflaminglips/the-terror-22/

Two other designs ...

*Need to read the fine print on this one.

And then the disqualified ones. These two Star Wars ones were panned because they thought they might run into copyright issues. Hmmr.

I've half a mind to make the Arrgh2d2 one up myself cos I'd like to wear it. 

This one was for an Iron Man competition. It got brushed because the rules said not to include characters from outside the Marvel universe. I figured Mike Tyson was a real person and not a character. Turns out I was wrong - and fair enough too. Tyson's both a real person and a character.

Dead Branches

'Dead branches' is a term for young single men with no prospects of marriage largely due to a disproportionate number of women to men in that society ... 'dead branches' because the family tree won't continue. 

The article bounced off the horrible rape and murder in India recently and the rising number of similar incidents that are occurring. It says an uneven ratio of men to women often leads to violent crime especially towards women and can also lead to violent uprisings against the system ie. revolution.

Bewilderingly it was suggested to take out the weapons. Wtf?

Melofeij Awards

Just landed in Pamplona with Simon Scarr and Adolfo Arranz for the Melofeij conference and awards this week.

We're all pretty wrecked after more than 24 hours in transit but looking forward to an awesome week. Hoping to meet a lot of talented graphic designers - other than the two I'm traveling with.

We're also wondering if we'll be the group that's travelled the longest distance to be here. I guess we'll find out later in the week.

Surrogate Mothers

I'm pretty happy with the execution of this. It's clean, simple and has a few things going on. The idea is what I'm happiest about most tho.

A bit of runaround text wld have surely helped the design tho.

Illustration for the Focus page for the South China Morning Post

James Brown caricature

I'm pretty happy with the overall caricature here. I've put in a bit more detail than i often do. My thinking is that I'm going for the older James Brown and older people have earned more detail - can't explain it further than that. Also pleased with the choice of purple.

Of course my favourite part is the easy part and that's the vinyl record texture in his hair. That was going to be in it from the get go. I went for a cigarette and thought about it. His hair is such a feature, imagine the contribution he made to the hole in the ozone layer (which btw is now fixed) based on hairspray use alone? 

But the grooves of the LP record well replicate comb strokes, so that was the starting point. Actually his teeth are piano keys but probly not noticeable. Really it needs some black keys to sell that but when it was tried it just looked wrong. The keys were kept - but just for me, cos I can tell they're not really noticeable. 

His toothy smile is also a big feature. I like the idea of taking two of his big features and giving them a treatment, then working the rest of the caricature around it. 

James Brown caricature published in the Review section of the South China Morning Post.

Summer Reading

This was the cover for the Review for the South China Morning Post on the subject of summer reading.  

It actually started off a lot more complicated than this but the more i parred it back the more I liked it. In the end it's really very simple, but I like that it's bold and yet is still quite soft. The shapes are quite loose but I think it's the colours help with keep it soft .. and for mine they say 'summer'. The white for the hat lightens everything right up. 

An earlier version had more of her body and was symmetrical but i'm glad i went tighter and off centre. Tightening the crop gives more chance for the reflection in her sunnies to be noticed. I rarely like symmetry. Off centre always feels as if there's more going on since the 2nd half of the illo isn't essential a reflection of the first.

The one that got away

... and ironically it's a mousetrap. 

This was supposed to illustrate a story on a pyramid scheme in Hong Kong where they lure Mainland Chinese in and rip them off. The thing is they went to great lengths to dodge the term pyramid scheme so the feeling was we might get sued if we ran the illo. 

Shame, I was pretty pleased with it.

Bondage

This illustration was for the Review section of the South China Morning Post. The story was about bondage in literature.

Dr Robot

A Health Post cover from a few week's ago for the South China Morning Post. The obvious way to go with this wld be to have a robotic hand holding a scalpel, but I liked the idea of having the stitches as binary code instead .. bit more subtle. The argument against it was that some people might not get it. If I was to come across something that I didn't immediately get, I'd think, "but hang on, someone has published it so it must make sense," and look further. Classic case in point, Gary Larsson. Many times I didn't get Larson at first look but as we all know, with him, there was always a payoff if you put in the time to figure it out.

Health Post also went with my suggested heading, so i was pretty pleased with that too.

Internet hate

An illustration for the cover of last weekend's Review in the South China Morning Post. The story was about a film where a woman is persecuted on the internet.

Gangnam Style

PSY's in Hong Kong this week for the South Korean Music Awards. He also performed in Macau. This is an illustration for the Focus page in the South China Morning Post. 

Protest in film

This is one of my favourite Review covers. At one point it was much more complicated than this and then I started to strip it back .. the more I stripped it back, the more I liked it. I Should've opened the clapper board a bit more and have it cover the masthead a bit but overall I like the vibe. And I love the little hinge.

Vandalizing artwork

This is always fun, tweaking established artwork to illustrate a story. The first one, The Last Supper, is my favorite. The story was about a huge international christian convention being held in South Africa. 200 Chinese were all booked to go but right as they were leaving they were all detained, passports confiscated or put under house arrest, so we took Da Vinci's The Last Supper and photoshopped several of the disciples out.

This one's cute too. It reminds me off Terry Gilliam's Monty Python animations, mostly because of the lipstick in her hand, I think. (That's some serious kerning on the headline!)

Weird little photo montage dudes

I quite like these guys. Perhaps not the kind of thing to do all the time but once in a while is fun. That said, I do like to include photo elements and textures in illustrations. 

I think they suit the subject tho, film festival, rare books and a guy that tested the claim that Hong Kong is a 24 hour city by going out for a full day and night. I think he's my fav. It's got a clock as a face and for mine the alarm is a nice touch. I figured if he's been up for 24 hours he must've been wired on coffee and the glow sticks for arms - love them.