May As Well.

And there goes May. That didn't seem to last very long.

Haven't updated in a while due to being a bit busy on the house. Hopefully I'll have some new work up here soon. In the mean time here's something a bit different. It's the inside of a CD booklet I designed for my friend Matt Shepherd and his album Still Small Voice.

Randomly the name 'Robert' is visible on the newspaper in the background. I didn't even realise till after it was finished.

I think it's a nice image to welcome in the cold month of June.

Suburban Poetry.

There's something about comics that fascinates me. I love the way illustration, design and narrative come together in a single piece of art. Unfortunately most comics (including a lot of graphic novels) are total rubbish, aimed at teenage boys interested in very simple plots about super heroes and evil villains. I'd love to see a greater variety of graphic novels, telling more complex tales about 'real' people and that use the medium in a way that shows it's true potential as a story telling device.

This brings me to this particular piece of work. It's a single page from what was going to be my attempt at producing another graphic novel (other than the one I completed as an assignment for Uni). However my lack of ability to write or focus on a single thing for more than 5 minutes, never saw it completed.

I came across it recently and have since coloured it up so as to give it a more completed state. For some reason I quite like the end result. It's not as 'finished' as a lot of my other stuff and kind of has a 'cut and paste' feel to it. However I may wake up tomorrow and have a different opinion.

And that's my biggest post so far - man, what a big mouth I am today.

A Bit of Old Skool.

Here's something a little different (ish). This is a painting I did a couple of years ago. The outline of the figure was printed onto clear plastic. I then painted the colour on the reverse and placed it over the painted background. Pretty simple stuff with a pretty ok result. You don't really see it here, but having the background from the foreground gives the final image a unique 3D feel.

This was going to be the start of some paintings I had planned ... but they never ended up being done. Traditional painting scares me a little, there's no 'undo' and 'layers' like in Photoshop, but I do plan to get back into it in the near future. When I do I'll be sure to post some up.

Anyway, I've got something else up sleeve at the mo', so the next post shouldn't be too far away.

Grrrr PaNG.

At the end of this week my good friend Sue Pang will be leaving New Zealand and heading off on an exciting adventure to never never land. Sue is an unbelievably angry Asian girl who has threatened to consume my house (and cats) on numerous occasions. Although I will miss her, I'm sure New Zealand will feel like a much happier place with out her.

This illustration was mostly created in Illustrator and then finished in Photoshop for the added texture.

And before anyone says anything, I know the text is Japanese and I know Sue isn't Japanese. It just looks cool and reminds me of 5th form ... and it was late and I couldn't be bothered finding some Chinese text to copy. I'll try and fix this when I've got a bit more time.