Facial expressions are tricky things to get right, although the quirkier the better. Personally, I find attractive, sensible faces almost impossible to draw to my satisfaction, certainly less interesting, but that’s me. I do find myself pulling silly faces in the mirror as an immediate and convenient source of reference although it has to be [...]
Category > Illustrations!
The Viking webcomic
The start of a regular weekly webcomic to keep me on my toes. It’s called Viking, and this one’s about Dragonsheep. I hope you like it!
Step By Step…
I thought I’d let the pictures do the talking this week. Here is a short sequence showing how I go about illustrating the witch from The Totally Terrifying Three.…yep, the picture book I keep banging on about. It occurred to me it might be interesting to stop and scan my way through the painting and [...]
Wibble before WARBURG
Dell identifies the image below as “The Antichrist riding Leviathan, a Flemish 16th-century miniature from a manuscript of Lambert de Saint-Omer’s Liber floridus (c.1448).” As we poor trapped authors know all too well this picture was, like Nesbit’s, drawn from life. However, contrary to first appearances it does not contain two creatures, but one: the [...]
Deadlines come and go…
Working round the clock to meet my deadline on this picture book The Totally Terrifying Three. It’s not going well (the deadline not the book). I believe it was Douglas Adams who once said something like: “I love deadlines, I like the swishy noise they make as they fly past.” I think that’s what’s happening [...]
Work in progress
Following my post last weekend about my current project: a picture book called The Totally terrifying Three by Haiwyn Oram I thought I’d show you the stages of an illustration from thumbnail through to finished a/w. Unfortunately, I’m limited to an A4 scanner so my choice of a/w measures around 54cm x 38cm means I’ll [...]
A Totally Terrifying Dragon(?)
Although I usually write and illustrate my own picture books I’m open to the idea of illustrating stories by other authors. At the moment I’m doing just that, a picture book called The Totally Terrifying Three by Haiwyn Oram. The text is excellent and tells of three characters: a Dragon, a Witch and a Giant [...]
Tremble before NESBIT
OK, let’s start with this guy: Dell identifies him as a ‘demon from The Temptation of Christ,’ as portrayed in a late fifteenth century human manuscript illumination. Looks harmless enough, doesn’t he? Even – you might think – friendly. But that, dear reader, is precisely the problem. Nesbit (as we know him) is one of [...]
The Truth Is Coming
Look what I got for Christmas… To anyone else, Monsters by Christopher Dell (published by Thames and Hudson) is a gorgeous, glossy, gleeful romp through some of the finest monster art that humanity has ever produced, compiled from a wonderful variety of cultures and periods of history. To myself and my fellow members of the [...]
TARZAN – the new cover!
One of the joys of being an author is when you receive the cover that is going to grace your precious pages. I can now reveal the final cover art for my new book – TARZAN: THE GREYSTOKE LEGACY – out June 2nd. After, literally, years of work to get this project off the ground, [...]
