A pair of new prints that i can finally set free! LOST and FOUND are released through Pop Up Projects and are available as a very limited run of just 15 each. Printed on 225g Velvet matte art textured paper and measure 420mm wide x 594mm high {A2}. Each print features a host of weird characters and objects and even the loosest of loose narratives strung through them which probably only makes sense to me. And i'm not even sure of that. Fun to look at tho! They're hanging out over here. More pictures below:

See the full gallery on Posterous

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The awesome Montreal based blog BLDGWLF {Building a Wolf} asked if i'd like to contribute a wallpaper to their desktop wallpaper project. I did. It's a reworking of an illustration i did earlier in the year but with some extra elements added and seemed appropriate for the blog. And it's now your's for the taking right here. Check out the rest of their blog while your at it for more visual goodness. Thanks Frederic!

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Had a bit of time to spare and fancied giving the Estings competition a bash this year. Roughed in Flash, cleaned up in Pshop and comped in AfterFX.

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So here it is! My first foray into strictly live action. Not an animation in sight...unless you count the displays {which i don't}. I've been wanting to film something for ages but it wasn't till my good friend Zol asked if i'd like to do a film based on a new tee for his label The Affair that i figured i'd give it a shot. With each of their t-shirts being based on a literary novel there was already a wealth of information to feed off so finding inspiration for it was fairly easy. And the novel in this case was Brave New World, which i hadn't read up to this point but always meant to. Around the same time i'd been working my way through lots of behind-the-scenes documentaries on classic sci-fi films from my youth. Films like Alien, THX1138 and Total Recall and was reminded why i like these films so much. It's the craftmanship and detail thats gone into every shot and set. And that fact that you know that everything filmed existed in real life. Handmade by a skilled set builder, matte painter or prop designer. Well, what does this have to do with anything? Well stupidly i decided that for this film i'd try and make it without relying on any digital effects but based on a similar aethetic to these films. However with no budget my options were pretty limited. One of the most important lessons i took away from this shoot: with some paper, carboard and gaffer tape the world is your {flammable} oyster. With many trips to the local artshop and minus about £100 later i locked myself away in the basement studio at Th1ng in soho and made what you can see in the pictures below. 

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For something that was meant to be minimal yet hi-tech and futuristic, this is about as budget as it gets without resorting to tinfoil. One wall made up of carboard, glass and window tubing {held together with gaffer tape} to act as the wall with the consoles, which consisted of one ipad, and two iphones {also held together with gaffer tape}, and a backlit paper wall with a long stip cut out of it to act as the other rear wall. The shoot took one veeeery long day and consisted of me and my brother {he's the 'actor'} who's not an actor and his girlfriend who kindly did his makeup and brought us much needed food. The key to pulling of the illusion of this being more than just bits of carboard in a small room was always going to be in the lighting, and i ended up using just about every single light in the studio to get the desired look, constantly referring to THX1138 as i went. There were many more ridiculous chalenges and anecdotes along the way but essentially it was great fun to do. All the internal cutaway shots were made by hand and filmed seperately the next day. Also fun. Once all that was done and dusted tho the hardest part tho by far was finding someone to create some music for it....with no budget. And it took another 3 months of searching until the awesome Katherine Gillham jumped on board. A recent Royal Acadamy of Music graduate no less and friend of my other brother. She tapped into the same aethetic of the film and pulled out an amazing score that hardly changed from first draft to last. I also owe a lot to Danny at Th1ng for adding a highly professional grade to the film free of charge. And now here it is. There's so much more i'd like to have done with more time/money but as an homage to retro sci-fi films and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World i think it stands up pretty well as it is. And hopefully i'll get to do some more sometime soon.

{film is currently submitted to Virgin Media Shorts, Onedotzero and ASVOFF. check back in september to see if it makes the cut for any of them}

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Commissioned by Wired magazine to do a nice little illustration for an article entitled "How to become an authentic CIA agent". Quick turnaround and good fun to do. Keep an eye out in the August edition out soon.

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A few months back i asked The Fox is Black's Bobby Solomon if he'd kindly let me contribute somthing to his rad Desktop Wallpaper Project and this is the result. Not really sure how it came about.....just started drawing and this is what happened. 80s cartoons and films ruled and i can't escape the fact that they're still a constant source of inspiration for me. There'll be more of this somewhere down the line. Thanks to Bobby for the post and definately go check out The Fox is Black for a ton of inspiring art bidnizz. Download the wallpaper for free HERE.

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See the full gallery on Posterous

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See the full gallery on Posterous

Thinking about releasing these as a series of limited prints at some point in the near[ish] future. On second thoughts, turned them into iPhone wallpapers which you can download for free in the downloads section.

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Soooo....this is what happens when i set myself a 'drawing a day' task.  I get way too carried away. Still, i enjoyed doing it and it's given me some ideas for further illustrations. All digital.

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So the exhibition went down well! Everyone worked really hard and churned out some amazing work on a really short timescale. Good feedback and drinks a plenty made for a good opening on tuesday nite too. Sadly, today it all comes down again having only been in existence for a brief 3 days but 3 days nonetheless. Didn't manage to get any pictures on the nite but i'll post a link to some if and when any appear on the net. I think a fair few prints were sold on the nite but there are still some left if you fancy picking one up yourself. You can email monobrow@monorex.com for enquiries and all proceeds go to charity. Here's the full version of my print for the show:

The show was a great opportunity for me to do something different for a change. Having been given free reign of the gallery's projector we decided that it would be interesting if i could incorporate some animation into the show. But given the nature of everyone else's work i thought it would be even better if i could somehow incorporate the animation with some painting too. And this was the result:

and the original animation:

I only had one day to animate it but had a lot of fun in the process. It was all animated in Flash and composited in After Effects. I then painted over over all the static black lines and fills in the piece with a black marker, leaving blank gaps for the animated bits which really helped lift it off the wall and almost disguise the fact that it was a projection. The projector seemed to have a life of it's own on the nite tho and kept wandering off ever so slightly, creating a bit of an offset effect, but otherwise it matched up with the painted elements really well. It's the first time i've tried anything like this but am fascinated by the possibilites so expect more to come somewhere down the line. And thanks to everyone who came down.

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Taking part in a group exhibition curated by Monorex and Courvoisier 500 called "MONO-BROW" at the Future Gallery next week. A whole bunch of awesome artists involved and limited edition artist screen prints for sale on the night. Pop along if your free. Check the flyer for details.

In the meantime here's a sneak peek of my print:

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Soooo a couple of months ago Max and I were invited to take part in an animated exquistite corpse venture by the talented Mr Christen Bach called Animation Tag Attack {www.animationtagattack.blogspot.com}. It's featured a whole range of talented animators so far, each tackling one episode and then passing it onto the next. The manifest from the blog reads:

Each participant gets 4 weeks to produce between 5 and xx seconds of film. When the time is up, the clip gets uploaded to the blog and the next one in line takes over. It is up to each individual creator to pick the style and media they want to work in - and to decide how they think the story should evolve.

It struck us as a really cool project to be part of and we were really impressed with the quality so far so were happy to take part. And as an added bonus we had a buy one Native get one free deal on at the time so agreed to take on an episode each. It was an interesting challenge, sacrificing several initial ideas in favour of a semi coherent narrative. I decided to bring a character from the beginning back in to try and give the next participant more options on where to take it next but kept the idea fairly simple......i hope. Anyway, here's some hasty pre-production work i did on it so you can see some of my work process:

Character designs

So yeah, fun little project to do. Nice to be free of commercial constraints for a bit and up next is Scott Benson so stay tuned.

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