Behind the Scenes

I sent over my submission for the new If You Could... book this morning, fingers crossed it will be acccepted.

I had been trying to sort out an image for it for quite a while but had many false starts and dead ends. The main problem was I was just drawing things for the sake of drawing them rather than having a solid concept.

One of the ideas that I eventually rejected had me selling ice creams to characters from history. Whilst this sounds good, it was too difficult to decipher this from the image. Why am I telling you this? Mainly because I was pretty pleased with how the characters turned out and rather than consigning them to the shelf I thought folks may like to see them. So freshly dusted and in various stages of completion I present some retired characters and a spot of type:



A saracen warrior, he was going to be best friends with the Richard character I posted previously. (he was also part of the ill fated idea along with the mammoth) I am particularly pleased with how his clothing turned out.



The chap is from 101st Airborne or Easy company
and appears to be missing a hand.



A very rough Queen Victoria and a Centurion.



This was a bit of type I created for the image, it still needed alot of work but there was something nice about it, pleasantly unbalanced. It's an element I would like to incorporate into more of my work. There is something therapeutic creating your own font rather than using one off the peg.





Lastly these are the 'sketchbook' bits that the other images are created from. Phew that was a big post! Update to the main site soon.