All hail the new prints!

That sound you hear is my sweet heart breaking...

Don't have nightmares. Unless you want to...

Self portrait. God help me.

Above are my new babies, three new A3 size pieces I created thanks to my mate Simon having a bigger printer than I’ve got. After a couple months of rendering all manner of complexity at A4 size,( yes, I’ve finished inking Cherubs! Book two! Only the tones and covers to go…) it felt great to splash ink around on something foolish and non- sequential. I have wrists again! The top two are for a book I’m thinking of pitching around detailing the looong terrible history of the sadly non-existent Hocus-baloney publishing concern. The bottom one is my part of the Orbital self portrait show, which will be up in September after the current damn fine Stool Pigeon show comes down. Hope ye dig ‘em. There’s more where they came from, if simon plays ball…..

Congratulations! I think…

Aww. Think I'm going to cry now...

This is the wedding poster I knocked uo for a couple of Circus of Horrors fans, commisioned by a friend of theirs. Can finally reveal it now that the day has come and gone. Think it came out looking pretty cool. That text at the bottom is the spiel the Circus of Horrors have on their stuff, in case ye were wondering. Nice little job.

the Mutton Dressed as Lamb show!

meet ye at the crossroads at midnight...

Hoodieland

Three old portfolio pieces given a digital makeover for your pleasure. Top was an unused cover for a music zine.  Middle was part of  ‘Hoodieland’ a nasty story I wrote and illustrated for a Scar comics anthology. Bottom, a bit of nonsense, though I’d like to read that story….

Diary of a Madman

Poster/ promotion image for ‘Diary of A Madman’, the Gogol short story, about to be performed as a monologue by me mate Matthew Jure. The character writing the diary is obsessed with sharpening quills, so I decided to break out the scritchy old nibs for the lettering. Looking forward to seeing what Matt does with the piece.

it's all about the nostrils

Realism in comics (1)

C.B. Cebulski  from Marvel comics was due to come over to this side of the pond for the Kapow convention,  I knocked up this piece to drop into his lap, based on an idea I had a couple of decades ago. Have no great nostalgic love of superheroes, or any massive desire to work for The House That Jack Built. But anybody who’s picked up a brush has gotta love Kirby and Ditko. C.B. never made it. ah well, mailed it to the editor of Strange Tales, who knows…

could easily create more pages of this. Hmm...

The Fate Of The Black Oak Minotaur

Another  piece from the Orbital show, dig it.

Dead Hillbillies; A series of unhealthy paintings

The Fate of the Black Oak Minotaur

Acrylic on canvas, 2008, 300 x 240mm.

Dan’s story was that the blasted thing just came out of the woods whilst he was

 out hunting with his brother Matthew, and that the both of them just opened fire

 without thinking twice about it. He denied actually searching out the beast or

bearing ill will towards it. But by the number of shells involved they must have

reloaded those rifles a couple of times apiece, and damn sure nobody forced them

to drag that  corpse back into town and string it up for all to see whist they posed

away and that photographer took his pictures.

Everybody cast knowing glances at each other and nobody said what was on

 their minds, but nobody was surprised when Matthew broke out in boils and

came down with fever the very next day. And no-one was surprised when he

died the day after that, about he same time that Dan, his wife and children and

their whole damned house was swept away by a flash flood that came out of

nowhere on a clear day. If they hadn’t known before then, the people of Black

Oak sure as hell knew now that you don’t do nothing to piss off your mythical

 creatures.

Wheeee doggy! Acrylic on canvas

El Dios di Luna!

Another piece from the Orbital show. Sold this one to me mate Stagger Lee Fisher of Randy and Earl’s Old Record Club, it’s one of the first of my Hocus-Baloney series, depicting artwork from non existent films and books. Think this one’s the cover to some kind of Mexican Narco comic produced by the CIA for strange reasons circa 1978. Probably…

Versus Diabolo-Christo! Acrylic on canvas

Enoch! (on canvas)

Current progress on Cherubs! book Two: All pencilled, half inked, One quarter fully toned and finished, looking damn fine. Did this lil’ painting of my favourite Cherub for the hell of it, ended up in the Orbital show. Awww, he’s kind of anti-cute.

acrylic on canvas. Not-so stupid cupid.

Dead Hillbillies (1)

Just scanned the canvases from my Largely Unseen show at Orbital, so here’s my first Dead Hillbilly work to reach the web. Enjoy

aint she purty?

Dead Hillbillies; A series of unhealthy paintings

“Damned if she didn’t raise that thing like one of her own.”

Acrylic on canvas, 2010, 300 x 420mm

If any of the O’ Keefe’s knew what it was or where it came from they weren’t saying. Luke pretty much climbed into a bottle after it turned up, the first son Joseph just didn’t talk anymore , both avoided anybody’s gaze, just moped around with their sad moon faces looking more and more unfed and neglected as she spent more and more time with the thing she called her “moonchild.”

If  Hilary was aware that that thing was anything other than the most beautiful baby in all the world she kept it well hidden. Anyone who cared or was supposed to care tried to make her see reason, tried to take the damned thing off of her, but then the headaches and the bleeding would start in on them and they had to stop trying whatever they were trying and get the hell out of there, whilst it sang that chittering song to itself and laughed at them with it’s one good eye. Soon everybody stopped visiting,. The O’Keefe house was left well alone for near enough a year. Until finally curiosity overtook horse sense and a posse of well armed concerned citizens went to call.

The place was devoid of life, Luke had clearly hanged himself in the workshed some months before, whether he had taken Joseph’s life beforehand, or whether the poor little bugger had starved or died through other means was impossible to discern, given the condition of his body. Of Hilary there was no sign, and the house was in good order, save for an overturned chair, and the presence of several foul smelling glistening trails, like those of a slug or snail, but measuring from one to four feet across, that covered the walls and floor of the back porch and kitchen . Rain had washed away most of the trails after leaving the porch, but with hounds they were tracked to a sinkhole near 100 yards from the back of the house.  The sinkhole was dynamited in short order, and the house burned down a week after that. As for the O’Keefe’s and the “moonchild”, well, Marthasays that’s what you get when Baptists marry Catholics, but don’t you pay her no mind.

urban poetics

Just produced a couple of pages for a friend of a friend, ilustrating a poem called “Cinderella,” Apparently somebody’s going  to insert live footage of the man performing the piece into the empty panels. Hope it works, but here’s one of the pages sans text. Or poet.

second page of cinderella.

Nut of the living dead

Lil’ piece for Piers, my sister’s bloke. she commisioned it based on a conversation they’d had. I have no idea what it’s about. Ours is not to wonder why, ours is just to paint zombie squirrels…

nut of the living dead

And more paint

Here’s a detail of the xmas thang I made for me sister. Cover to her first novel, as I’ve informed her. Get cracking, Jo! Sure fire bestseller, I think…

Calamari de L'amour!

Season’s Paintings

Damn near everybody I know ended up getting a li’l painting from me for Xmas, because I’m cheap. here be the one for me mate Sue.

happy happy joy joy

Popcorn and Tribulation

Jesus ran my projector.

Just produced these illustrations for the upcoming Electric Sheep anthology. The article’s about the apocalyptic christian films produced by the MarkIV company in the 1970’s, which depicted the end-times and all their polyester and formica horrors on low low budgets. They were generally shown to doubtless traumatised children and clap happy parents in a tent near you. Think I’ll copyright She-sus, there’s gotta be a few stories in that dame…

Just call her... She-sus!

Lovecraft Sketches

Just sent off the last of the artwork for an anthology of Lovecraft adaptations being put together by Self-Made Hero. I’ve rendered the Colour Out of Space from a script by Dave Hine, and it’s been stygian, crepuscular fun fun fun! These are pieces from my sketchbook that I drew after reading the original story but before reading Dave’s version. I was just trying to sort out my approach to the story in my head, and get down some of the images that emerged whilst trudging through H.P.’s deathless prose. Enjoy, if that’s the right word…

Nahum Gardner

farm and fauna

twisted trees and freaky fruit

The Gardner family

first pass at the effects of the meteor

The thing in the well

Library mural

One of the best damn gigs I’ve ever had. The library mural for the John Harvard Library in Southwark, representing graphic novels. Each panel depicts a genre within the worlds of Manga/Comics/BD etc, with a character reading about the exploits of the character in the panel before it. Being as it as for a public library there were to be no guns/knives/flagrant pornography, but other than that I was left pretty much to my own devices. Money wasn’t all that, but seeing your work five foot tall and twenty across is a blast.

Gallery