I've been doing a lot of actual proper sketches lately (on paper and everything!). So rather than cluttering up my house, which already contains lots of my drawings, I thought I would offer them to you. So I've opened the Doodle Dojo Etsy store. This is my opening selection, as you can see I'm in a bit of a Doctor Who mood right now. I did have a Boba Fett picture up there too but its already sold so I won't bother to show that to you guys.
All these sketches are on nice thick A5 cartridge paper and hand drawn by me with a rather nice India Ink brush marker. I will be adding more as I get time to do them and of course if people show an interest in owning them!
Sci-fi and music in the same illustration. When I first heard the Beastie Boys I was very small indeed, much like when I first saw Star Wars. They left a bit of an impression, especially the iconic cover of Licensed to Ill. I'm not really sure how this mash-up made it into my head, but once it was there I had to see what it would look like. The Rebels and the Beasties are both pretty anti-establishment and there is no better symbol of the Star Wars establishment than the Star destroyer. Unless maybe its the Death Star, but then what would the destroyer have to crash into?
If you think it's time to get ill then you might want to get over to Redbubble or Society6 and check out some of the T-shirts, iPhone cases, posters and stickers available. All the details are on the Doodle Dojo Store.
Most people daydream about being able to fly, unless you're terrified f heights I guess. I do anyway so I drew this up as a nice dreamy vision of soaring about through a futuristic city. One day I might get bitten by a radioactive pigeon and get super powers, but until then, I'll just have to keep on dreaming!
If you've been hanging around here for ages, (there's bound to be someone!) you might remember that i submitted this design to Threadless. It scored reasonably well (thanks if you voted) but it didn't get printed. Now that the hold period is well and truly over its time to see if anyone else likes it. Goodjoe looks like a great site with lots of nice designs so that that's where its gone. If I could get a few votes over there, and with a little bit of luck, it might get printed!
So I've let my Sci-fi nerdiness get the better of me once again! I finished reading through Philip K. Dick's classic, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (also known as Blade Runner on the big screen.) And I just had to do something about it. Luckily I just happened to see a great design (Circuit Bots by Seven Hundred) based on circuit diagrams and suddenly there was this design staring me in the face, from inside my head obviously! Its quite a literal interpretation but who's to say that's not the best way sometimes. A bit of doodling later and I've got another one to show you. Hope you like it.
Bill and Ted, the two most excellent time travellers, need a bit of help to defeat their evil robot counterparts. So they enlist the help of the two-part alien Station to build them some good robot buddies. Not only do they totally defeat the evil robots, they also make pretty good backup dancers for Wyld Stallyns.
Time travel, rock and silliness combined into two awesome movies? What coud be better? Not much if you are me so I thought it was time to add a bit more Bill and Ted to my doodle collection. The robots never seem to get too much attention, which is a shame because I think they look great. Especially in full air guitar mode.
I was looking at my son's Where's Wally books (Where's Waldo over the water) when this little idea hit me. I had to get sketching! After trying (unsuccessfully) to do a full page of finding the wookiee like inside the books I had a better idea and tried making it look like a book cover instead. This version worked out a lot better and, after drawing more Star Wars charactersin one go than I have since school, I came up with this. I'm pretty pleased with the end result and so far lots of other people seem to like it too, which is always really nice to hear!
Urk Urk is the Tusken raider equivalent of Hatori Hanzo. If you need a quality Gaffi stick, he's the one to get it from. Just head out into the Jundland Wastes and follow Beggar's Canyon. It's just behind the big rock, you can't miss it! Plenty of bantha fodder is available for all our patrons, just make sure you come in single file to hide your numbers.
I don't think its possible to run out of ideas for Star Wars designs. Urk Urk is the way I refer to the Tusken Raider that knocks Luke out. I thought that they must have shops and stuff and why wouldn't they have an Emporium as well, I'm sure they aren't just savages!
"Who you getten bratty, Goggly Gogol? Johnny Zhivago? The Heaven Seventeen?"
"What you got back home, little sister, to play your fuzzy warbles on? I bet you got little save pitiful portable picnic players. Come with Uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones. You are invited!"
I might have mentioned in passing that A Clockwork Orange is one of my favourite films. Well the Disk Bootik scene is one of my favourite bits of the film. I've always wondered what the bands and songs are on the chart, so with the help of a pause button and slow motion I figured it out. Sadly (for me) it just makes it even more interesting. What sort of band are Bread Bros? Is Jelly Rock a dance? Is any of it any good?
Invented by Dr. Cavor in H.G. Wells First Men in the Moon
As you might have spotted, I'm a bit of a science fiction geek. So for this one I've gone back about as far as its possible to go in the genre and taken some inspiration from one of the originals. H.G. Wells had some amazing ideas and wrote some incredible books. One of his best ideas was Cavorite, which featured in The First Men in the Moon (Its free! Download yourself a copy). If its possible, his character reasoned, to have materials which are transparent and opaque to different forms of energy, why shouldn't it be possible to have a material opaque to gravity? It still seems like a pretty good idea today, so I thought I would have a go at designing an ad for just such a material.
I had a good look at some victorian adverts to get a feel for the style and made sure I got the copy in period too. The illustration shows the cavorite spacecraft which the heroes of the story use to visit the moon. That's where the main part of the story takes place, but as usual I got sidetracked by how cool it would be to fly around space in this contraption!
When I added this to Redbubble, I got a nice mail from Synaptyx (of Synaptees) asking if I would like to add some of my work to a group he admins called Corporation Inc. Of course I said 'yes please,' and they have been kind enough to feature some of my stuff on the group's main page. Thanks very much!
As always this design is available on all sorts of T-shirts, iPhone Cases and Stickers. Just go through the Doodle Dojo Store to find all the links.
Maurice Moss wants to get an iPhone without paying any money to Apple. And if he could just get his arms free he might be able to get it. This illustration is based on this scene from the IT Crowd. One of the best sitcoms in a long while from the creator of Father Ted. Its looking like there will be a fifth series sometime soon, can't wait. I wanted to get some nice geeky toys in the machine with Moss so I've used a little imagination rather than copying what was actually in there. No prizes if you spot them all, but I'll be impressed anyway!
The Death Star can be a dangerous place, the clue is in the name really. But no matter how dangerous it is, it can always be made a bit safer by those wonderful people from health and safety. Even Darth Vader understands that good men are hard to train, so he doesn't want them lost to avoidable accidents.
Star Wars is the film that got me into all the other sci-fi in the world. Its probably the biggest single thing to turn me into the geek I am now. So it had to happen that one of my ideas was Star Wars related eventually. Well here it is, so what do you think?
Obviously, this is available on T-shirts from Redbubble over at the Doodle Dojo Store. There is also a version on their brand new iPhone cases and of course there are stickers too. So get yourself on over there and take a look!
Highlander is one of those classic movies from the old days that is sure to be remade very soon. A great premise, superb music and great action. There isn't much that can compare to immortals trying to hack each others head off with large swords after all. Then they had to go and make a sequel that had nothing to do with the original story and spoil the whole thing. Still we can all pretend that never happened and carry on with our lives.
But what if the Kurgan took his love of fried chicken and tried to make some cash from it? This is what I like to think that would look like. You can even get some good tag lines out of it: There can be only one. It's a kind of magic. Don't lose your head, etc. etc. I wonder if there's a gap in the market?
My choice of lunch the other day inspired this one. I think I was probably humming a certain Queen song to myself as the local KFC came into view. Once I remembered that he was called the Kurgan it was a done deal. I couldn't quite believe that nobody else had made the connection, so I thought I better had and here is the result.
As usual, if you head on over to the Doodle Dojo Store you can get yourself this guy on a T-shirt.
This is one of my latest works of weirdness. I don't really know why, does a cow need a reason to be evil beyond beef burgers? This is obviously a very rare carnivorous cow that has probably developed a taste for human flesh. I kind of like the expression of pure nastiness, and of course the hypnotic evil eyes as well. Sometimes I guess you just have to go with what pops into your head!
As usual the Evil cow is available on lots of products, including T-shirts, hoodies, badges and bags over on the Doodle Dojo Store.
Presumably there are people in the world who think clowns are funny and nice and friendly and all that nice stuff. I do not think this way myself, I just guess that there must be some of these people, otherwise clowning as a career would have died out a long time ago. I guess its partly Stephen King's fault, with a bit of help from Scooby Doo and Batman, but I think clowns are a bit weird. Slightly scary even. So when I decided to draw a clown, this is how he ended up. To me this is what clowns are all about. Trying ever so hard to be fun and jolly, while actually ending up being scary and slightly evil. Come to think of it this guy is probably quite a lot evil. But I'm sure you understand what I mean.
Just a quick edit to say this has been submitted to Illustration Friday as a 'scary' drawing. Hope you like it!
As usual this picture can be put on many items of your choosing if you visit the all new(ish) Doodle Dojo Store.
Craft Guerrilla is a website and Zine based in East London. They organise craft events and support Artist Makers. Recently they asked if anyone would like to do any illustrations for their zine and so I offered my services. The theme was obviously summer, so I thought of a good old Punch and Judy show. Its a little old fashioned but still a very traditional sort of summery, beachy type of thing so I thought it would be perfect. Luckily they agreed and so my picture was chosen to be printed in their latest issue.
As this is for a craft Zine I thought I had better stay traditional and so I stuck to hand drawing with my trusty black pen for this one. The crocodile scenes are my favourite part of Punch and Judy so thats what I decided to draw. I really enjoyed doing all the little detail bits on the stage and getting the texture and shading just right.
The best bit though, was getting my copy of the zine and seeing my work in print. Especially when I saw that my drawing is opposite a recipe for a cocktail called the zombie. I'm definitely going to try that one out! You can get yourself a copy of the zine if you visit the Craft Guerrilla website and go the shopping page. They have it available as a downloadable PDF and of course you can have a paper copy mailed to you if you want.
