Was busy at the start of the year working on illustrating a couple of books for teenagers, based on Shakespeare stories. Just got a couple of advance copies of Romeo and Juliet in Las Vegas and Macbeth and the Creature from Hell in the mail - to celebrate, here are a few of the interior illustrations from the two books! It shouldn't tax your knowledge of the classics too hard to work out which characters are which. Trying to present such well known characters in a fresh and interesting way was actually a lot of fun. 70s flavour research also led me to such incredible finds as plaidstallions.com!

For more snippets you can check out Arena's blog post about them, or hunt down a copy once they are out!

Recently I worked on an 8-page story for the excellent comic publication ink+PAPER and last month it was published! You can find a sneak peek on the i+P site, and it's on sale in comic shops across the whole wide London (also probably comic fairs elsewhere, editor David O'Connell gets around). You can even find it in Foyles! Anyway, it's full of great stuff.

Below are a couple of bits from my strip The Fisher Girl and the Crab, including a panel I call 'man walking like a crab in a forest'.

Update: My story in i+P picked out by Paul Gravett in his best comics of 2012 article! Madness.

Halloweeney update!

These are the first two pages of an appropriately spooky short story I started for the Observer Graphic Short Story Prize.

The style is sort of an extension of what I was previously working on for ink+PAPER, and some of the results on the second page look rather nice. Another result of working fast and loose on these pages are a couple of horrible mistakes - spot them if you can! Also keep your eyes peeled for issue#3 of i+P, in which I have a story. It will probably warrant another blog post when it gets launched but, just in case, you have been warned.

Here is a little thing from the other day that is quite nice. Playing with rendering style and colour for a certain project.

Now I know that there is probably way too much sketchbook work on this blog already, but at the moment the most interesting things I am working on are at the sketchbook stage. Here are some snippets of something that may eventually grow into some graphical short stories (comics).

Hey internet. Realised that, as usual, it has been an age since the last post. In that time I have been working, really. Also realised that blog posts work much better in smaller, more related bursts, so I am about to update with a couple of seperate ones.

So the Forbidden Planet bloggers decided to run a competition to prove that there are still adult fiction illustrators out there, in response to a certain Jonathan Cape employee's comments in this article. This is my entry for it. They haven't been judged yet, so who knows, you may be looking at a winner! #falseconfidence

Been a while since the last post. Here are some rough character samples wot I done. Working on them made me feel a bit like being back in school, drawing moody teenage girls all day, but they started to get a bit more interesting towards the end.

Anyways - rough development work, away!