News

I was recently asked by The Milken Review if I would be interested in producing a piece titled, "Computer Chess and the Future of Artificial Intelligence" - a story about chess and how AI is now dominant within the game.

To make the images more relevant I was asked if I could collaborate with AI to create the art. The irony of which was quite appealing. The brief was essentially to depict the opposing forces of artificial intelligence vs that of humanity within a chess/board setting.



Interesting process! To those unfamiliar with using AI to make pictures, let me just say that the technology has now reached the point of being extraordinary good at producing high quality imagery with minimal input from the user. What it is not so good at however is delivering anything with the more specific requirements of a conceptual image. Accordingly many images were generated before I could find anything that I considered even partially usable.



The creation process itself is actually very nuanced, much more involved than the current media view would have you believe, and I often found myself thinking how much more straightforward it would be to simply make my own illustrations! Having said all that, the tech did come up with things I would never have thought of and opened up different approaches to how the images could work. Eventually the illustrations developed almost collage-like so these end results are actually a blend of many generations - specifically a blend of the man-made in tandem with the machine-made.

Kathryn at John Hopkins University Arts & Sciences magazine asked me to create a cover and interior illustrations for a major story on humanity's debt to the lowly fruit fly. The article explores how scientists use fruit flies in their research which could potentially help cure human disease.

It was requested that the cover image and interior spread should be related in both look and feel so I maintained the same scientific elements and took different views of the human character. One of the influences coming into play for the main image was Da Vinci's Vetruvian Man although it was scaled back so as not to be too obvious.

The colour palette evolved via experimentation during the working process. Once I had the combination of turquoise and olive green then everything else fell into place.
The finished illustrations were very well received and the magazine published on November 15th.



These are the initial two approved sketches.

Save

Save

Save

Save

This is an online illustration for Middlebury. A story about firefighter who has created an app for use with large-scale wildfires. A way to keep track real-time of resources during fighting fires for both personnel and supplies.

I was asked by Mark at Deloitte Services to produce a number of illustrations for their Technology, Media and Telecommunications brochure, Deloitte Insights, Predictions 2020. Subjects ranged from smart-phones, wi-fi and robots through to audio-books, microchips and cycling.



Image content had already been agreed on the clients side so this was a case of realising the images rather than conceptualising. Twelve illustrations were wanted in total with plenty of background area to facilitate any additional uses.

George from Think got in touch with a cover assignment for STEP Magazine, based on a piece about digital assets, security and the cloud. This was quite a straightforward job because in this instance the client already had a concept they liked - a cloud of data, being held down by a group of people, including a padlock to emphasise security. I worked on some pencil variations and then sent in the best one for approval.