News

Working up a new sketchbook drawing.

Continuing a series of line and colour images.

Dallas Magazine got in touch requesting an image for an article about doubling the cancer survival rates for diseased kidneys. The copy discusses various methods of targeting the affected organ.

I had a request from Kathi at Guideposts to illustrate a spread about the recollections of folk who have had near death experiences. While each account is unique, those who cross over go through similar stages - even across cultures and faiths.

Not a consciously made illustration but something that more or less grew out of idle drawing. I can only conclude it's some kind of reaction to listening to too many news broadcasts - it's been a terrible year across the world, dark forces gaining ground.

Faces, portraits, head and shoulders are endlessly compelling but don't crop up too often as subject matter for the commissioned works I receive, so I tend to work on them in my own time. There is so much scope in the abstracting of shapes and features while still retaining the sense of a character. This imagined portrait image developed from a simple pencil outline of a face and evolved into a more mask-like interpretation with echoes of an actor on stage.

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The Wall Street Journal got in touch requesting an illustration for their health section about the rising costs of healthcare and how those costs are being hidden. This was the finished illustration selected from a couple of sketched concepts.

Perhaps there is nothing that affects the mood of an image more than colour. I was taught to 'use colour sparingly and only for a special purpose'. It is a maxim that has somehow stuck with me over the years despite it being rendered redundant at the merest glance at any period of art history or indeed contemporary illustration. Nevertheless I do tend to work with a restricted range of colours. This is a little graphic experiment I worked up running a simple image through different colourways to see just how differently it could be perceived.

This is the realisation of one of those images that sometimes just seems to appear, fully-formed, from nowhere. Stylistically the figure is a throwback to the kind of scuptural forms I used to illustrate over twenty years ago, gender-free and without the encumberance of hands or feet. Could probably work well in colour but I so love black and white!

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Wendy from Logistics Management got in touch to request a cover illustration for the June issue of their magazine. The cover story is about how there is a recruitment shortfall within the logistics sector and how managers are working to circumvent that gap.

Below is the finished cover with two of the initial pencil ideas, one is 'bridging' the gap while the other is a visual depiction of 'absence' within the industry.



Sketch one was the preferred route but we agreed to drop the bridge and have the figure stepping over the gap instead which was a little more interesting visually. The illustration was also repeated on an interior spread, as seen below.