Last weekend I took a portraiture workshop at the Richard Attenborough Centre and it felt like a bit of a paradigm shift for me I really felt that I started making the shift from drawing what's in my head to drawing what is actually there. Here's a quick charcoal sketch I drew from a photo, it's not 100% accurate but in terms of by ability to present real people it's a bit step forward. The original photo had very high contrast which made it ideal to render in charcoal - what's more it's doesn't resemble my other work remotely.

I designed these little guys on one lazy Sunday afternoon using Adobe Illustrator. You can download the flatpack design below if you'd like to make them at home.

Crazy Jim 592k PDF Document Download	Colonel Tweed 528k PDF Document Download	Norman Smith 548k PDF Document Download

I saw some really cool Fractal desktop wallpapers online earlier, they were created using Astrophysis free fractal generator.

By default it isn't able to produce large images (java is set to give it only 60m of ram). The secret to getting big images is to open the program using the terminal and send it the commands...

java -Xmx200m -jar apophysis-j-22.jar

The results a really satisfying (click on the image to view a larger version on my Flickr account).

This image started off as a doodle in my sketchbook. I've experimented a bit using the gradient map tool to give the line work a brown tint and added a slight fabric texture to the background too make it all look a little less 'computery'.

Click on the image to see a larger version on my flickr account.

This is my latest entry to Illustration Friday a homage to television of the 80's.

In the 80's there was something of a golden era of awful children's TV. On the one hand you had homoerotic, muscle bound He-Man and then on the other you had My Little Pony. It was a potent combination that encouraged children to have a healthy understanding of what it meant to be a girl or a boy.

So here's my tribute to those sickenly sweet happy lands of candy cane and lollipops where the rivers flow with sugar syrup.

I found one of my old comics 'Invaders From The Planet Earth' on my backup disk and through the magic of Flickr I have now made it available to everyone online click here to see a slideshow of the comic.

This weeks topic for Illustration Friday was 'pet peeves'. I quite liked the concept as there was plenty of freedom within the topic. As the subject was 'pet' peeves my immediate thought was to illustrate the less attractive habits of our faithful companions the cat and dog.

The illustration was done in Adobe Illustrator using an Wacom Intuos II Art tablet.

This fellow is another variation on the Ocean Man uploaded earlier, this time I have done a slight more colourful version in Adobe Illustrator. I am quite pleased with the bubble stream effect I have managed to produce with the symbol spraying tool.

Recently I've really started enjoying doing simple abstract drawings in black and white. For some reason it's really relaxing to do these simple shapes repeatedly to create interesting effects.

I showed this one to some of the girls at work they said it reminded them of Mehndi

This little guy has come right out of my sketchbook. I was listening to the Ween song Ocean Man - I suppose this is strange squid monster is what Ocean Man looks like in my head.