The project was to create a female superhero to represent the new battery recycling company they were launching.

After the original brief, I went back to my client with a few suggestions of ways to approach the design. The original concepts started off in my normal cartoony way, though after some serious developments the outcome was a little different to my current working style.

Below are the original (very rough) concepts:

After the intital feedback we developed the character to this next stage

The client had been brainstorming names whilst I started the project and had decided on the name Battery Babe. With that in mind, these designs became redundant as we needed to start looking at a younger and sexier character.

I went back to the drawing board and designed this…

This was signed off and Battery Babe was born…

The riddle was pirate themed and went as follows:

“A pirate ship was anchored at Smuggler’s Cove with its rope ladder hanging off the port side into the water. The ladder’s rungs were each spaced one-foot apart, five rungs were above water level. With the tide coming in from the starboard side at a rate of six inches an hour how many rungs were still visible four hours later at high tide?”

Whilst I know my background and object work is gradually improving, I do feel my strengths lie in character design and so for me it was crucial to try and squeeze in as many as possible, whilst not distracting you from the key point of the riddle.

For me including characters into something like this helps to draw in the reader and even though they may not attempt to do the riddle, I am hoping that the illustration has at least raised a smile with them.

I was really pleased with the final outcome and hope that this will be a good launchpad for future magazine commissions for me.

For those of you that don’t know, scamps are basically just very quickly drawn visuals of an idea that you want to pitch to a client.
Over the years I have done less and less of these, as generally (from a personal point of view), the client prefers to see digital visuals. I believe they feel it gives them a much greater idea of what their final product would look like.

If budgets are tight it can be a good way to portray your idea without having to go into the effort and cost of creating an artworked visual.

Recently I have been fortunate enough to create scamps for pitches to Coke and Warner Bros, but unfortunately I don’t have any scans of those, though I do have some I was working on last week which was based around a tennis publication.

It has been something I have wanted to draw for a little while now and after a busy beginning to the year, I managed to find some time to work this little guy up. Trying to get a bit of life and character into something like this can be quite tricky, especially when I was so conscience of not making him look like the gingerbread character from the Shrek movies.

Overall I am really pleased with the final result and how the texture experiment I was toying with worked out.

This character is something I would love to do more with in the future and so keep your eyes peeled for more gingerbread men in the future.

The image is of a rather sad bear looking surprisingly sad. Why surprisingly? Well, would be sad if you had a jumper as snazzy as he is wearing? I think not.

In this time I have been involved in a varied amount of  branding, communication and POS projects for some prestigious and diverse brands.

Just click on any of my work samples to open up the lightbox where you can look through my portfolio.

Since January, I have worked across London for some fantastic design agencies, working on a variation of dynamic and exciting projects.

As well as this I have been working my way through a series of commissions. They include one which involved me drawing a series of black and white characters from different social backgrounds and another which was based on a character design for a South African company.

Over the winter period I was also fortunate to win an Illustration competition for the royalty-free stock site iStock. Each month they set a competition based on a different theme. I used to enter this competition quite a lot when I first started using the site, but as things have got busier for me I  had to stop participating. Over the Christmas period I had some spare time and thought I would give it a go. The theme for that month was noise and you can see my entry in an earlier post by clicking here.

Below I have included some samples of the projects I have been working on.

Finally, these selection of portraits are just a few of some that I have produced for a London-based client I have. They wanted to move away from using photos on their website and so contacted me to illustrate them.

The illustration is based on the concept of  a young girl playing with her imaginary friend.

Below is the complete process, from the original sketch to the final illustration.

At the moment, only the untextured vector file will be available to purchase, but the final variation will be released soon.

Growing up as an 80s child meant I was able to see first hand the huge impact these little reptiles had on the world. To say I was obsessed with them would have been an understatement.

I collected everything that had even the slightest glimpse of their little green faces on; from the figures and comics, to the more random items such as toothpaste tubes and shoelaces (all of which I still have – gross huh?).

I was forever drawing them and it even got to the point where we were banned from doing so at our school, the world literally went Ninja Turtle mad.  Since then though, I haven’t ever really taken the time to draw them again. I’ve done the odd doodle, but nothing I’ve ever put my heart and soul into… Until now!

Below is a drawing of Raphael that I have been working on. He is based on the original comic book character design, rather then the more jolly cartoon style. In time I would like to produce all four characters, but for now I will leave you with this one. Thanks for dropping by!

You can also find and rate him on my dribbble page.