Experimenta

These drawings were made with Indian ink & a twig!

Van Dyck

Drawings made at a Van Dyck exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1999.

Pitching

The most fun part of working on commercials for me is the initial pitching stage. It's a stimulating challenge to find a style & technique to fit each particular job & always interesting to see what others come up with too. However, more often than not the designs that seem the most original or fresh never make it!

Drunk drawing!

One way of loosening up we found is to sink a few pints & get sketching in the local pub. The drawings above were made on beer mats, napkins, scraps of paper & many ruined sketchbooks using biros, brush pens, cigarette ash & splashed beer! Apologies to those depicted (couple of fellow bloggers on there too!)

French Animation

In Paris I picked up a DVD of classic French animation Le Roi et L'oiseau by Paul Grimault. Amazing film - the background layouts are incredible & the characters quite unique. Highly recommended.

Movie Posters

While in Paris I happened upon the French version of the poster for Guy Ritchie's REVOLVER. It's a bit racier than the British version & reminds me of those great movie posters from the 70's by Robert McGinnis.

KIRAZ

Spent the weekend in Paris & finally managed to get hold of some books by Kiraz. He draws such strangely proportioned girls but they somehow seem to work. They have infantile heads & faces, no hips or busts, over-long legs & torsos but are still sexy! Kiraz's colour palette is what make his paintings pop. He's in his eighties & still working I believe, but apparently he's very reclusive.

Pink Dog

Pink Dog is the saddest creature on earth.

NUCLEAR FAMILY

Designs for a 3HG commercial through CARTOON NETWORK,Europe.

CITY OF GOD

This image is inspired by the stunning Brazilian movie CITY OF GOD.

AZTECS

Drawings made at a Royal Academy exhibition a couple years back.

BOING!

Here are some colour keys I made for the channel launch of BOING!, the Italian BOOMERANG channel.

Recent sketches

More from my sketchbook.

Another commercial

The CHEWITSAURUS used to be claymation but in 2001 I updated the design in 2-D with 3-D backgrounds for Studio AKA.

Howl's Moving Castle

Just saw Miyazaki's latest, 'Howl's Moving Castle'. It's just as inventive & imaginative as his previous films, packed full of weird characters & magical scenery.
The title 'character' is wonderful. To see it emerge from the mist & stomp across the countryside is breath-taking.

Film title sequences

I'm a big fan of the animated film title sequence & recently viewed a couple of films that keep this artform alive. 'Princess Raccoon' is a crazy, Japanese musical with an elegant title sequence that brings traditional Japanese brush paintings to life. 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang' is a modern film-noir set in a seedy LA underworld that opens with a great Saul Bass style title sequence, similar to Kuntzel & Deygas' titles for Spielberg's 'Catch Me If You Can'.

Composition

Struggling with the composition on this one. Original version at top left. I think I found the right balance of elements with the bottom right? Also included some of the developmental sketches for this piece.

Memory Sketches

After seeing Stephen Silver's & Marcello Vignali's 'memory sketches' I thought I'd have a go. I've always felt uncomfortable drawing people on the tube - it's hard to remain inconspicuous & the trains shake so much. Committing people to memory then drawing them later at home or in the studio seems the perfect solution.

More Cookie Crisp

With the COOKIE CRISP ads we try & go all out & give them as high production values as possible. I'm involved early on after Uli has made the storyboard & animatic. I'll take the key scenes & produce colour set-ups as a guide for the CG dept. to follow. I design the backgrounds, houses & any props involved. I was pretty happy with the design of the log-cabin above but the agency felt it looked too rustic & it ended up pink in the finished ad!

Death

These figures are based on a Mexican 'LIVING & DYING' exhibition in the British Museum

Illustration

These are a couple from the Euro Art Challenge. Check out the new entries for "Once Upon A TIme . . . " theme at www.ulimeyer.com/eurovision

Commercial work

Here are some of the contraptions I designed for the COOKIE CRISP commercials at Uli Meyer Animation. In each commercial Chip the wolf comes up with a different invention to grab the Cookie Crisp cereal. The bottom 'bath-boat' is the CG version of my design. It was built by computer whizz-kid Leo Sanchez. It's almost impossible to tell the difference between the two isn't it?

Oldie

This illustration is based on an old dear drinking tea in the NFT cafe.

Bigger Pi

This is a landscape version of the Life of Pi image I posted earlier (see August archive). I think this one gives more of a sense of the expansive ocean that the characters are stranded in.

Skatoony

Some backgrounds I made for an in-house,Flash animated project at Cartoon Network Europe.

Made In Europe

This character is from a title sequence I designed & directed with Uli Meyer for a German TV show. I feel this is the best example of my design style being translated into 3-D. Leo Sanchez built the character.

NYC

Some sketches from a trip to New York City in February 2004. It was absolutely freezing but the city still had an incredible energy & vibrancy. A truly great town.

Edgar

This is development artwork for a project at Uli Meyer Animation. The colour on this one was proving troublesome until I bled all the colour from the background, which left only the characters & the sky in colour. This seemed to make for a much more dramatic set up. It started off in bright daylight colours!

More from Greece

Couple more pages from my sketchbook.

Were-baby!

This character was conceived for the 'MOON' theme of the EuroVision Art Challenge.

Bangkok & Bali

These are some sketches I did while travelling through Thailand & Indonesia a couple years back.

Al Hirschfeld

We were so lucky in London this summer to have, not one, not two, but THREE exhibitions devoted to Hirschfeld.
BRITS ON BROADWAY at the Theatre Museum, Covent garden displayed Hirschfeld's drawings of British thespians on the stage in New York City. The show also included a couple of his sketchbooks which were fascinating to see - his pencil roughs are so loose & chaotic. The other exhibitions were at Chris Beetles' gallery & the National Theatre. I also managed to track down a DVD copy of the marvellous documentary on Hirschfeld's life - THE LINE KING. Inspirational to see such a long & prolific career.

Tiger!

This is one of the animals that never made it into the Nick Jr. spot.

The Clapping Song

This a job I designed & directed at Uli Meyer Animation for Nickelodeon UK.
It's a 3 minute spot for Nick Jr. the pre-school channel, so I designed it to appeal to a very young audience. I'd like to develop the zoo a bit more & populate it with more animals which I hope to post soon.
To view the spot go to www.ulimeyer.com

Sketch of the day

This old boy was a betting clerk at Walthamastow dog tracks, East London.

How much does a Greek urn?

Here's a few of the local characters on the Greek island of Kos.