I receive quite a lot of questions regarding the various projects and ideas I’ve worked on and I do try to reply to all email correspondence personally. However, for those in a rush I’ve begun to catalog the most common questions below.

1. “What medium do you do your illustrations/prints in?”
2. “How did you make your growing business card?”

For the choice of an illustration’s medium, it totally depends on two variables: the time I have to do it and the overall effect I want to achieve. Ultimately, I’ve had to develop several ways of working since it’s rare to tackle individual briefs with the same illustration style.

I realised early on that I was more comfortable with my hands than with a computer when coming up with the composition or layout of an image, so all of my illustration work is directly derived from sketches. I primarly use the computer as a colouring tool since it allows a degree of experimentation that’s just not possible on paper, so I tend to sketch the image to death before scanning it in and ‘finishing’ it.

As for the pencils and pens I use, I try to use up a massive box of graphite pencils that I’ve amassed over the years, so there’s nothing special there, but I managed to bag a couple of nice fountain pens from eBay that I use in some of my drawings. A couple of good condition Parker Slimfolds and a few Pelicans do the trick.

I’ve rounded up a few of my featured illustrations with a brief explanation of the process that created them:

The Stuff Music is Made From

All of the musical objects were cross-hatched directly into Adobe Photoshop using a Wacom tablet. To nail the layout I scanned in a detailed sketch to use as a guide, and coloured the composition within Photoshop.

Missing Links, book jacket

The book’s illustrations were hand-drawn onto paper using a variety of graphite pencils, then scanned and coloured in Adobe Photoshop.

Les Demoiselles de Nike

The Nike illustration was hand-drawn onto an oversized A2 board (mirroring the final size), then scanned in pieces to be vectorized (turned into a vector file), cleaned (stray points removed etc.) and eventually coloured in Adobe Illustrator.

Carol, a flamingo with an identity crisis

To keep the illustration’s hand-drawn aesthetic, Carol was hand-drawn 5 times onto 5 seperate sheets of paper, with each previous drawing acting as a tracing guide for the next version. Eventually I was able to draw the image in ‘one take’ so to speak. This was then scanned and coloured in Photoshop.

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The card's label

The business card was put together using plastic, which used a waterproof label to hold the card’s pieces together. The label also provided the design. The cards were originally constructed from recycled credit card/membership card plastic, however as demand for the card increased I eventually laser-cut my own stock and applied the waterproof sticker to them as an when I needed.

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