Happy (belated) 20th Birthday to Shaun of the Dead!

I started work on this Shaun set last year, in plenty of time for it’s anniversary, but other stuff came up and it got sidelined.  I always like to get a creative project completed before the end of January so here we are, unfashionably late to the celebrations.

I was (and still am) a massive fan of Spaced, as well as zombie movies in general, so when Shaun came out it was a dream come true. 20 years on I think it stands up very well indeed. And like the Romero movies it pays tribute to, it says more about human nature in the face of otherworldly threats than all the episodes of The Walking Dead combined.

This is my 48th Little Portrait set (not including the Halloween ones) so I’m thinking hard about what comes next.

This is a short comic about intergalactic diplomacy that I did nearly a decade ago for the now sadly defunct app-based comic anthology Scrawl. The magazine folded before my issue could be completed, so this just sat on a hard disk for years hoping to one day see the light of day. I found it the other day and it still made my laugh so here we are.

All Scrawl comics had an interactive element to play with the digital format and this one was intended to have a sort of game-based approach to the handshake in the middle (hence why the artwork is so repetitive). I’ve had to make it more linear in this version, but I think it still works.

I was asked to do portraits of all the contributors to the first issue of The King Ink Collection, put out by the King Ink poetry group, based out of Pop Recs in Sunderland.  It’s the first time I’ve done caricatures in a while, so it was scary, but fun.   The collection launched on Friday and will be available to purchase online soon.

I hit one of my bucket list illustrator achievements when the amazing/deluded Allan Verth got my Fourth Doctor little portrait tattooed on his body. I'm sure this happens to successful illustrators all the time and most are blasé about it, but it's mind-blowing to me that anyone could like my work enough to get it permanently stained onto their skin. Absolutely incredible.

I made this print for my wife for our 10th wedding anniversary. I'm not the most demonstrably romantic individual so this was my way of showing her how much I care. She loved it, so I think I did good.

It's a 4-colour risograph print using Black, Green, Fluorescent Orange and Flat Gold. I wanted to work in a clean ligne claire style for aesthetic reasons, without thinking about the "tin anniversary"/"Tintin" link there. So if anyone asks it was totally intentional (in-tin-tional).