Video Game Art Exhibition!

Some of my video game based prints will be displayed at an awesome exhibition as part of the London Games Festival in October! Lots of other talented peeps and game developers will also be exhibiting which should make it a really great show. Team 17 are also part of it which made my 11 year old self squeal for joy and want to get my Amiga out of the loft so I could play Alien Breed. Unfortunately (not too unfortunately though), I'll be at MCM on the weekend of the show itself so I wont be able to see it, but hopefully some pics will make it out! All of the work will be auctioned off to charity so get along to it if you want to own some amazing video game art and donate to a worthy cause.

Art Show!

My self and the omni-talented James Stayte are part of PixelDrip's Six Seasons and a Movie art show over in L.A! The show is based on Community; I went for a picture of the Dean and his secret love.

Jurassic Dorks: The Book!

I'm pleased to say that the Jurassic Dorks' first exhibition was a big success! We all had a great time and got a great response from the people who came to have a gander. For those of you who couldn't make the show, we're selling copies of the show book. It's an epic 32 page, A4, full colour tome signed by all the artists. If you'd like one, they're £12 each and that includes postage and packaging in the UK. For overseas peeps, the price is £16 postage and packing included. Please Paypal myself at venkman(dot)project(at)googlemail(dot)com.

The A-Z of The 80s! PREVIEWS!

With less than a week to go before the Jurassic Dorks show, let's have a look at some of the awesome artwork you can expect to see!

Please spread the work and come along if you're able - it should be pretty darn cool!

WarGames Sneak Peek!

Ulysses 31 sneaky peek!

Ulysses 31 still remains one of my favourite 80s shows; the idea of setting The Odyssey in space is still genius and I think the cartoon still holds up, concept-wise, if not animation-wise! No-one can deny that the theme tune isn't awesome either...

Here's a small peek at my Ulysses 31 piece for the upcoming Jurassic Dorks exhibition.

My Brain Go Splaboom

I'm a tad bogged under with work at the moment; I'm enjoying myself a lot but I'm also very very tired! Above are a few of the things I've got going on at the moment; the good news is 2 of the 4 kid's books I'm drawing are very nearly complete (so much so I invoiced for one of them this week) and I've started finals on the third book. I had a lovely email from the publishers yesterday about my work and attitude which was brilliant to hear and hopefully I'll get some more work with them after these books are done. The artwork on the Jurassic Dorks show is slow but steady on my end and the work the other guys have done is fantastic - getting very excited now!

I've booked a week off my part-time job in November just to try and blitz a lot of artwork and get organised so I'm looking forward to that. For now, it's getting up at the crack of dawn and working before work, then working some more when I get in from work! :P

Jurassic Dorks Presents: The A-Z Of The 80s!

It's official! The Jurassic Dorks have an exhibition coming up! Tell your friends, invite your family whether they want to come or not, prepare to have your nostalgia buds wangled and buy awesome prints and stuff. Your dreams will LITERALLY come true if you attend this show.* But seriously, we're all pretty excited; expect the following weeks to be full of giddiness as we all prepare for our first, and hopefully not last, show at Centrespace in Bristol!

*Your dreams may not literally come true if you attend this show.

Jurassic Dorks!

I'm delighted to announce that I'm now part of an awesome illustrative collective called Jurassic Dorks! The collective is made up of myself, John-paul Bove, James Stayte, Mark Pearce and Dylan Cook. We have our first exhibition in December, more of which I'll post very soon. Hopefully this will the first of many projects by Jurassic Dorks!

Research is Fun

If anyone knows whether Skynet has created time travel yet, please let me know - I'd love to be able to fiddle around and get some extra working hours in! It's been a hectic couple of weeks and it's only going to get busier over the next few months. I'm in the middle of the kid's books at the moment; 3 are roughed, 1 approved and most of the work done, 2 waiting to hear back on and currently waiting for details of the fourth book. It's a lot of fun so far and I hope the publishers are pleased with what I've done.

Hopefully in the next week I can finally reveal the awesome exhibition the collective I'm now part of are putting together for December. We're just working out some information details and then we can reveal all! Just to tease, I've been playing this game as research...

I've got 2 big cons coming up too which I hope to get some new work made for, it's just a matter of getting the time to do it all! :P

More Exciting Things In Art Town!

Well, no-one can say that this last month hasn't been eventful! I've just found out that as of next week (hopefully) I'll be starting on a series of 4 children's activity books for Carlton Publishing, the lovely people I worked with for the NRM activity book I illustrated at the end of last year. The books are aimed at younger children and sound like a lot of fun. I'll be able to post more info when I hear from my awesome art director later in the week!

Another rather exciting piece of news is that I will be taking part in an exhibition in December, organised by myself and the uber-talented James Stayte and featuring four other amazing artists. We are just getting things sorted at the moment, including promotion, but the show will be held at the Centrespace gallery in Bristol. No doubt I will be pimping this like nobody's business as soon as we get started!

Work in Progress Paintings!

Here are some pics of paintings I'm doing at the mo for the Six Artists Twelve Words Exhibition. My words were Experiment/Repair. I'll let you decide how I chose to interpret them!

What Were You Before The Experiment?

Zine page for the exhibition!

Attack of the 50ft Guppy!

Another zine page for the exhibition. Infusing my love for bug-eyed fish monsters and cheesy sci-fi art! Out of the radioactive brine he rose to wreak havoc on the scientists that unwittingly created him!

Six Artists Twelve Words!

This is the awesome little exhibition I will be taking part in at the beginning of September! I'll be alongside some awesome artist/friends, including Katie Green, James Stayte and Callie Mowatt. As the title suggests, we were all given 2 random words and had to base our work for the exhibition around those. I got Experiment and Repair which I have twisted to my own sci-fi inspired needs! We are producing a zine especially for the project too which is awesome and will be for sale!
In the meantime, here are 2 of my zine pages loosely based on two of my favourite films (possibly three when I think about it). Can you guess what they are? :P

Fly Boy!

A quick painting I did today as a lead up to a small exhibition I'm participating in at the end of the month. More on that later!

Design Festival aftermath!

These are terrible pictures I took of my display at the design festival so apologies for that; it looked a lot better in real-life! I won a 2nd place award for best 2D Design on the opening night which was a huge surprise! Well, the Festival is over for this year and I have to say, it was so much more awesome than I thought it would be. I joined a bit last minute so wasn't really sure what to expect and how much space I would have but it was a really decent space and I could've made a lot more of it. Next year I'm going all-out and will hopefully have a REALLY awesome display! The BDF Blog wrote a very cool little snippet about my display here ; it's been so cool that people who haven't seen my work people really responded to it at the Festival; apparently, my stand went down a storm with all-ages which is a fantastic thing to hear!

Packing up yesterday, I had a stack of comments left on my notepad from people who liked my stuff and I was really chuffed to read some of them! One in particular from a 13 year-old called Lucy was so nice!

I also received an email that could potentially be very exciting but I'll say more about that after next Tuesday if anything comes of it. Fingers crossed!

Bristol Design Festival!

This last week has been a flurry of activity to get ready for the Bristol Design Festival which opened last night. It was really awesome; a lot of people turned up and my display had a great reception. An unexpected surprise turned up in the form of a second place award for best 2D Design! The stands were judged by six professional designers (I'm not sure who) but to have people who had never seen my work before give me an award for it was a great boost. I'll definitly attend next year and now that I know what to expect, will make a really big display with lots more stuff! It's on until the 11th of June so if you're about please drop by as there is some awesome work on display.

Bristol Design Festival and other bits!

I'm in the middle of sorting out my exhibit for the Bristol Design Festival which runs from the 5th - 11th of June. I'm really looking forward to it; it'll be nice to display my work for people who may not be familiar with my stuff and who knows, I may even get some commissions from it which would be cool!

I'm also psyching myself up to send out more samples to publishers and agents. I always hate doing this as I never know if what I'm sending brings across my personality and work and if it even stands out at all. I think I just have to do it and not dwell on it too much!

This morning I was thinking about what I want to work on next as a personal project as the last few weeks I've been a bit stuck and have been doodling, reading and playing on my DS more than anything as I tend to get into a bit of a fluster if I try to work when I'm in a bit of a uninspired mood. I like working on projects that involve lots of images in a set format (like my Thingies and Kiyarakuta) as my brain starts spitting out all kinds of things and my momentum picks up very quickly. So I thought why not do something that be used as promotional material, something collectible and kind of quirky so I'm going to make 100 images that will be printed as business/trading cards that can be handed out and also promoted as kind of collectible artwork!

More on this when I've had a doodle...!

Two Shows Coming Up!

Well, between now and July it's going to be a tad hectic as I'm participating in the Bristol Design Festival at the beginning of June and The Japanese Art Festival in mid-July. I'm doing a load of new work for the Japanese Art Festival and exhibiting existing work for the Design Festival. All I have to figure out is what the hell I want to exhibit! It'll mostly be printed stuff; I may get hold of some strong Velcro so I can put up a few paintings too.

I'm looking forward to both of these as the Design Festival means I could get a new audience outside of the demographic I usually aim for, whereas the Japanese Festival is a chance to make some all-new Japan related images. Whoot! I'm going to be busy busy busy!