Alternate idea for Outsiders book cover:

Below you can see my alternate idea for The Outsiders book cover competition, it got scrapped because I wasn't too pleased with it, which is what lead to me producing the new one instead based around the leather jacket idea.

All images for Heart of Darkness Competition:

In this post are all my images compiled together for the competition, I've also included the book cover template so you can all view what I've had to work around. On the template itself the company asks to leave the back page blank, as putting an image there might make it hard to print the book cover itself or make it more susceptible to rubbing, this text has been removed from my template, just because it get's in the way of the image:

Brave New World: Previous House of Illustration Competition Images

 The images below are from my previous year in university where I applied to the previous House of Illustration competition. It's the same concept as this years, except with the book "Brave New World", here are the images:

Artist: Emilie Boon

Emilie Boon is a very talent children's book illustrator, her artwork is fantastic and really captures the innocent playful feel a children's book should have. Her images have a small amount of 3D shading in them, not a lot but just enough so that the whole thing doesn't look too flat and an image that shows off this idea can be seen here:



Especially on the foreground objects such as the yellow stand, it only has a bit of shading on the left hand side, but just enough so it's not flat on the page.
Some more of her artwork and a link to her website can be seen below:





Link to her website: http://www.emilieboon.com/emilieboon.com/Emilie_Boon.html

Heart of Darkness Competition: Insert 3

More progress from my Heart of Darkness competition entry. The image below is my third and final insert for the competition, I feel it really manages to capture the dark theme of the book, showing the people carrying a make-shift stretcher through a dark and dismal jungle. Here is  the image:

Home art work:

Here's a project I worked on at home, it's basically a fan project for a group of people on youtube that I watch who have basically become famous from playing the immensely popular indie game "Minecraft" the group I'm talking about is called "The Yogscast" and below is my illustration of our of their team members:

Barbara Johansen Newman

Barbara is a fantastic children's book illustrator whom I have look at and used in previous projects to help give me some ideas on how to work about designing my own children's book and also when coming up with characters for some of my animations as well. Her work is very playful yet unreal, with characters having heads that are out of proportion when compared to their necks, looking as if they're going to have their head topple over on themselves. Some of her work and a website link can be found below:







Website link: http://johansennewman.com/

Heart of Darkness Competition: Insert 2

Below you can see my progress in the Heart of Darkness competition, it is the insert that would be seen in chapter 2. I'm extremely happy with how it's turned out and really think my style has changed on this project when looking at my work on past projects. Definitely going to keep working in a style like this in the future.

Artist: Yoshitaka Amano

This is yet another artist that has continued to inspire me, he was one of the main artists for the video game series "Final Fantasy" up until it's fourth game where he stepped down as main artist but carried on working on character design and promotional work. He is also the artist that the person from Reddit was inspired by in my previous post.

Some of his work and a link to his website can be found below:









Link to the artists website: http://www.elevenland.com/amano/amano.php3

Heart of Darkness Competition Continued:

I have continued to work on my images from the Heart of Darkness illustration competition, the competition details can be found here: http://competitions.houseofillustration.org.uk/book-illustration-competition-2014/about-the-book/

Below is my final idea for the image to be used on Chapter 1 of the book, I still have to finish up my images for Chapter 2 & 3:

Artist by the name of Randis:

This is an artist who I managed to stumble across on the website "Reddit" his artwork is greatly inspired by the game "Final Fantasy" and as such are based around being tributes to the game itself. His art work is fantastic and definitely shows off a lot of ideas that have been brought over from the artwork in the Final Fantasy games, below you can see some of his work along with a link to an album containing even more of it. This is yet another artist who's work continues to inspire me:







Here is the link to the album containing even more of his work: http://imgur.com/a/hWjnA

Puffin Children's Prize: My Design

So Puffin are doing a competition to design a book cover for the book titled "The Outsiders" by S.E.Hinton. The brief of the competition can be found here: http://www.penguin.co.uk/static/cs/uk/0/minisites/penguindesignaward/puffin_brief.php

My design for the competition is now finished and can be seen below:

Illustrator for DC Comics: Ivan Reis

Ivan Reis is definitely my favorite illustrator that currently works for DC Comics. I have admired his art work ever since I got into the hobby of collecting and reading comics 4 years ago. His pencil work is spectacular and he really manages to capture some fantastic expressions within the characters faces and shows off battle scenes fantastically using a lot of dynamic lines to show off both movement and explosions. Some of his work can be seen below:

Artist highlight: Mark Crilley

Mark Crilley is a fantastic illustrator who specializes in a lot of areas, he's also someone who has a lot of tutorials up on his YouTube channel, walking viewers through each of his speed drawings and how he's accomplished them. Below is one of his newest videos, explaining how to draw a character from the very popular anime series "Attack on Titan"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TckrQoGliRQ

I've actually used some of Marks tutorials before and found his explanations very easy to follow and immensely helpful as well. He's definitely an artist to check out if you have the free time.

Quick look at my current work:

Just a quick look into a current project I'm doing for the book entitled "Heart of Darkness" this is a work up of my idea for the book cover:

This is still an unfinished piece, only because I have yet to add the book cover to the image.

Duncan Long: Book Illustrator

Duncan Long is an artist that has once again been such a huge influence on my book cover designs, his work is fantastic and the book covers end up looking very realistic, he's been an artist I could turn to whenever I felt in a sort of "Illustrators Slump" when doing my own book covers to get some inspiration for my own work and designs, you can find some of his work pictured below:







And his website which includes his vast portfolio can be found at this link: http://duncanlong.com/

Luke Pearson

Luke Pearson is an artist than has proved to be a brilliant source of research throughout the course, he's also someone I've actually had contact with when I was printing my own book. His work is fantastic and possibly my favourite work of his is from the "Hilda" graphic novel series. Pictures from this novel can be found below:

Tim Buckley: Web-comic Artist

Tim Buckley is an artist who I've admired for a vast number of years now, his artwork has influenced more than one of my projects throughout my course and he still continues to be an inspiration to my work.

He is an artist who mainly focuses on web-comics that have something to do with the current news in the gaming world and he draws them in a way to make them either comedic or dramatic.

Here are a few different pages from his web-comic which can be found at: http://www.cad-comic.com/

Book Cover Re-do

Decided to go back and re-do the book cover as I felt it didn't tie in too well with the rest of the book pages, especially because it was set outside when none of the pages had an outside setting. I'm very happy with how this one looks and feel it definitely has a better connection with the rest of the pages.

Fourth book insert finished

Finished the fourth book insert, once again i'm very happy with this, this is the last book insert I'm doing for this current project.

Third Book Insert finished

Finished  the third insert for the children's book, pleased with how it's turned out and I'm enjoying the overall style of this children's book. The actual picture is a play on one of the sentences within the text.

Second book insert finished

Finished the second insert for the children's book, really happy with how it's turned out in the end, definitely enjoying the style.

Working on the first page insert

Nearly concluded work on the first page insert for the children's book, here's its current form:

Book Cover!

So, I've gone ahead and designed a book cover for Saul's Question, this may or may not end up being the final product for it:

Librarian Character Design

Finished designing the librarian for Saul's Question. Quite happy with the design overall, just need to start doing her in different emotions and poses.

Character Design

I decided to carry on with the character design for Saul and look at some different emotions and poses he could possibly do within the story:

New project start!

Started a new project based around the children's short story entitled "Saul's Question" which can be found here: http://www.his.com/~pshapiro/sauls.question.html This was my first design for Saul:

Concept Art for current animation project