rip frd

Free Radical Design is no more.
The games studio that gave me my first "proper" art job has closed it doors. It feels strange to say that I'm sad about the break up of a company, but frd gave me an opportunity when many others wouldn't, and I learnt a hell of a lot in the 7 years i worked there. Timesplitters 1-3 are probably the most fun games I will ever work on, to the point where they spoiled me to the rest of the gaming industry. What other games would give me the chance to build zombies, robots, gunslingers, fetish angels, pinups, giant-headed paedos, cactus men and top heavy cops?
Hopefully T.S. will be resurrected one day (and i'll have the chance to work on it!)
good luck to everyone.
:(

The last update of 2008!
see you next year...

I've been really busy lately and haven't had chance to do much personal art, but that no excuse for not putting at least SOMETHING up here for so long...
So here are a few sketchy bits of nonsense that I may or may not ever get around to finishing.






::edit:: i've been playing around with a couple of these, so i've updated the ones that have come along a bit. Thanks to everyone who's commented!

I finally got around to finishing this pic I've been working on in fits and starts for the last couple of weeks;

I thought as well that I'd write a bit about the process for anyone that might be interested; if that's not you, just look at the pretty pictures!

I'll normally start off with an idea (obviously). In this case I saw a clown on telly, which got me thinking about circuses, which got me thinking about freakshows. I fancied the idea of producing something that looked like an old poster, and because I'm a perv it had to feature something a bit twisted! So, that was the idea. Here are some progress shots:



1. The initial sketch, done in photoshop. I often work out rough posing and composition in photoshop, because its so easy to move elements around and mix stuff up. I did about about ten of these quick pics before settling on this one.

2. Using the sketch as reference I drew out a more final (but still quite rough) pencil version on A3 paper. There was no point me getting too carried away at this stage, because I knew that very little pencil would be left by the time I was finished with the image. When that was done I took a digital photo of it and brought it back into photoshop and tweaked proportions and composition.

3. Chucked on some basic colours, trying for a fairly earthy/autumn colour palette.

4. From here on in it was mostly a case of refining the shading and a bit of tweaking. I decided to add a bucket of fish to add to the story.

5. More shading, added the letters and starting to finalise the background. I like coming up with names for characters, I think the right name can add a lot of personality; it must come from reading too much Mervyn Peake as a kid! I decided to call the whole thing Futtocks sideshow because it sounds rude even though it's not.

6. Done! I added some texture overlays, torn edges and a drop-shadow under the paper to make it look more like an old poster.

and here it is in hypnotising .gif form!

I've got a couple of other ideas that I'm going to get started on soon, but I'm also working on something a bit more time consuming at the minute, but hopefully I'll have new stuff to show soon. bye.

I won the Bizarre competetion! Yay me!
I knew a couple of weeks ago that I'd won the Art category, but I also won the overall award, which came as a complete suprise. The Ball was a great night, with loads of cool acts and dressed up people, so thanks to the Bizarre team and partners for organising it. I didn't end taking that many photos, although you can find more on their own site: www.bizarremag.com

This has to be the strangest site of the evening; a woman in an inflatable pig costume being flogged.
Random ball-goers.

Rope tricks in the "dom corner"

Me collecting the award.

And here is the pic I won with "dorothys itch", and the first pic I sent to Bizarre of red riding hood.

I thought I'd stick most of my more finished pics in one post so that people didn't have to trawl through all my other junk to find the goodies (although you can if you want to of course!)

"Suggestible"
I did this one specfically for the Bizarre competetion, although it turned out not to be the one they liked best. This pic took me ages, mainly because of the amount of different elements going on. Personally this is one of my favourite pieces.


"The Devils Harp"
I found a load of cool contortion pics and decided to do this pic based on them. Something about the snail-like shapes of her folded body visually appealed to me, and having her strapped down just added a bit of extra kink. I was imagining a field full of these strange humming contraptions in a raging storm, like a modern day wind-farm.


"Daddy's Girl"
I was trying for cute but disturbing at the same time, but I can't decide if it worked or not. I wanted people to think "Hmm, she's pretty attractive; wait a minute...she's got tentacles coming out of her eyes!". But it's probably obvious straight away to most people... I still like it though.

"Eeny Meeny"
I think this is probably the filthiest of all these pics. I like watching peoples reactions when they work out what's actually going on. Always make me smirk!

"Goldilocks"
This ones fairly self explanatory. It was nice playing around with the shadow elements in this one, something I should probably pay more attention to in my drawings.

"Lie To Me"
I wanted the girl in this to appear really predatory in contrast to pinochio's innocence; she's got one thing on her mind and she's determined to get it! I was going for a dingy back-alley feel to this one but can't tell if I pulled it off or not.

Ok, that's it for now. I should be updating with a couple of new pics soon.

Ok, so I've got nothing finished to show (again!), although I at least have a good excuse this time;
I've spent the last couple of weeks getting my outfit ready for the Bizarre Ball!
I'm hoping it's going to be an amazing night, and i should have some photos to put up here next week.

Until then here are some details of my current w.i.p.

ok, not really a proper update as such... I've been super busy with work recently, and after finishing all those pics for bizarre its nice to have a bit of a breather from drawing.
Although saying that, I might have a Tinkerbell pic in the works...

for now here is a photo of my dog Titus; he does love the mud!

a collection of images drawn from screengrabs taken from old grindhouse films; just colour practice really...



i should have more next time!

speedpaint from reference.

another month, another unfinished pic!
I've finally got all my freelance commitments out of the way, so i can go back to drawing what i love the best: rude ladies! I just wanted to do something quick to shake the cobwebs off before i started back on my other pics, but i quite like this one and might come back to it later.
next update i should have something -shock gasp!- actually finished.

wellll....
i'm a bit busy at the mo, and haven't had time to do much personal drawing, so instead i've trawled my backlog of sketchbooks for some more crap for you reprobates to look at.
hopefully some more "proper" art soon...

oh, and here's some more older stuff.

AARRRG!
I'm working on so many different things at the minute, and never seeming to get any closer to getting any of them finished! I guess this is a lesson to me to only work on one pic at a time... but that would be dull. So here's a WIP detail from one of the next fairytale pics. No prizes for guessing which one it'll be...

whew.
seems like ages since i last posted, with a lot happening in the mean-time; most of it bad.
i've got a bit derailed from drawing at the minute, but heres a quicky to keep my hand in.
hopefully i'll do a more substantial update soon.
ben

another wee detail pic...

I found out this morning that the pinup of Cammy I did got accepted to appear in the tribute book, so I'm in a good mood today! The Bizarre competetion entry is coming along, but i reckon it's going to take me ages to finish, so here's a detail section of the work in progress; i'll probably stick up a few more of these as i go along.

Here's another quickie, an hour and a half this morning. There are other things I should be working on, but sometimes I just get an image in my head that needs to come out straight away; its like lancing a boil, once its done i can stop thinking about it and get on with something else!

Eggcups. Don't ask.
I seem to have spent the last couple of weeks working on bigger pics, which is why the blog hasn't been updated for a while. The fairytale pics have taken a bit of a back-burner (sorry to those waiting for them!) and I've spent more time working on a piece for the big Bizarre competition which'll be coming up soon. except plenty of tounge in cheek rudeness!

Happy Easter!

wooo, shiny red butts!
this is a pic of Cammy from Street Fighter i've been working on for a competition. The chosen winners get their art printed in a "Tribute to Street Fighter" artbook, so i thought it was worth a try.
keep your fingers crossed for me!

Whew! I didn't think I'd ever get this one finished!
I'm not actually entirely sure it IS finished, but I'm going to leave it up here for a couple of days before I decide; often I can only see the problems in a picture when I've put it where other people can see it.

Number three in the series is well on the way, although I'm going to do some other stuff for a few days to give my pervy brain a bit of a break.

bloosh!

ok, thats all the slighty older stuff out of the way.
here a fairly sketchy speed paint from this lunchtime; a few of my friends do this fairly regularly, someone comes up with a topic and then you've got twenty minutes (in theory, i was take longer!) to knock something out.
the brief for this one was "machine gunning devil babe"
enjoy!

okay, just a few more left now.
hopefully i should have some more of the naughty fairytale pictures up here very soon!