A couple of gift commissions

Here are a couple of simple gift commissions done recently, one a birthday surprise and one a caricature for use on a designer's website.

If you're after anything along these lines, please drop me and e-mail!

The designer caricature was done for Ola Anderson of Olango Web Media :)

Aubrey McClendon for the WSJ

This I think is one of the better pieces I've done recently, and it might have been because I was put under a bit of time pressure - this was started about 5pm one day and had to be finished by the same time the next day. As it turned out that wasn't a problem, but it got the nerves tingling a little bit!

I was sent a really good quality photo of the subject (who's a CEO of an energy company in the U.S.), but as I wasn't familiar with him at all I looked up a few more photos to get an idea of his face structure etc. It took a few goes to get a sketch I was happy with:

I got the go ahead to carry on and quickly blocked in some colour:

Then the following day I painted for 5 or 6 hours roughly to reach the final you see above. Here are a couple of details. After finishing I added a little bit of noise to the image with a Photoshop filter - I've seen other artists use it a lot and never really got it, but I used it for the WSJ in the previous post to knock the background back a bit and tried it on the painted face and it looked good, I think maybe it's to do with the size and level of detail in the painting being enough to take it.

It was great to have to turn something like this around in a short time, I'm really pleased with it and I hope it'll help get me more work like it in the future. Onwards and upwards!

(here's a link to the WSJ article with my illustration)

Stephen Byrd for the Wall Street Journal

Another caricature illustration done for the Wall Street Journal - this one is of Broadway producer Stephen Byrd, who is doing a new version of A Streetcar Named Desire. It was a lot of fun doing the streetcar, I must admit I had no real idea what they looked like beforehand!

Gift commission

A quick post to show a recent gift caricature commission that I had a lot of fun doing, took me a while to figure out how to caricature kids! This one came out really well and the scene was a blast to do :) If you're looking for a gift caricature of someone for a birthday, anniversary, retirement, wedding... any reason at all really! Just send me an e-mail for a quote.

Quick digital painting - Roy Batty

Love this film and this character so I did this just for fun really, just to get it out of my system and practice being a bit looser with brush strokes. Took about an hour and a half.

John Larroquette for The Wall Street Journal

Very pleased to post this new caricature which was done for The Wall Street Journal and was in the paper yesterday (and online here). Really exciting to see my work in such a well known publication. The job went really well and I'm hopeful it might be the first of many. I probably stayed a bit safe with this, not being too sure what they might want from me. Could've exaggerated a lot more, but I'm happy with the likeness (although I'm not very familiar with the subject) and most importantly the WSJ were very happy. Pleased with the pose and values also, could perhaps have gone further with detail but I didn't want it to look too photoreal.

Christopher Hitchens for The Skeptic Magazine

This started out as just a piece for myself, I'd seen some really wonderful portraits recently (many of Steve Jobs who also died recently) and so I wanted to do something along similar lines for Christopher Hitchens who died last December. I sent an earlier version to The Skeptic Magazine to see if they might want to use it if they were doing a piece on Hitch any time, and they thought it good enough to be the next cover. It needed a fair amount of work (in fact it probably still does if I'm honest), mainly to fit the magazine cover layout, but now I'm pretty pleased with how it looks :) If anyone would like an A3 print of the painting I'll make them to order for £15.00 inc p&p, so just send me an e-mail if you'd like to get a copy.

The new copy of the magazine also comes with a poster of Crispian Jago's amazing Modern Science Map!

Rough Lemmy painting

Just a quick rough digital painting of Lemmy, will probably do some more on this when I get the chance :)

Sigourney Weaver/Ripley oil painting commission

This is the first larger scale painting commission I've done with oil paints instead of my usual acrylics and I'm pretty pleased how it turned out. I certainly learnt a lot from painting it and now I can't wait to do something similar as soon as possible! I'm a huge fan of the Alien franchise movies (well, the first three at least) and have been for many years, so I was excited when I got a commission to do a traditional painting of Ripley and surprised when I realised I'd never even drawn her before, let alone painted her. We quickly settled on an A2 size for the painting and one particular image from the first film was mentioned. This is my rough sketch (scribbled very quickly in Photoshop) that became the starting point:

I transferred the sketch to a prepared illustration board, but rather than jumping straight in with oils and risking a disaster I decided to do an underpainting in acrylics to get the values I was after, roughly at least. That dried very quickly and then I immediately put a thin oil wash over the whole picture, just to get some oil on there and to put a bit of colour on. I waited for that to completely dry (a couple of days)and then over the next few days I painted the final piece. Here are a few pics of those stages so you can see how it progressed:

After making a correction to a very wonky iris in one of the eyes it was finished. I toyed with the idea of putting some kind of reflection of the alien in the helmet visor but in the end decided that was a bit corny and would take focus away from the face. So here's the finished painting:

Looking forward to the next oil painting now (I think Blade Runner might be the next target) - and I'm always looking for commissions so please feel free to e-mail me if you'd like an original oil painting from me ;) EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention here is that I deliberately didn't use black paint at all in this, all the black areas are done with mainly mixed cobalt blue and alizarin crimson, with some purple and other colours in other areas. I was really surprised how well that worked out.

BBC Science Rocks!

This design idea arose when I was trying to think of something to pay my own small tribute to the great science programmes being put out by the BBC. Series after series of amazing stuff; Frozen Planet, Wonders of the Universe, Cell, The Story of Electricity, The Human Body, Are We Still Evolving?, The Story of Maths and of course The Sky At Night (and that's just to name a few). There are many other BBC science presenters I couldn't fit it also. You can buy the t-shirt here. Let's go to work ;)

Galileo 'SCOPE t-shirt design

Thought this was a bit of fun - another geek t-shirt to add to the list! Galileo 'SCOPE t-shirt

Fight Club t-shirt design

You can buy this new t-shirt design here: Tyler Durden 'SOAP' Fight Club t-shirt

Practice with oils

Did this little A4 size oil painting today of my wife, from a holiday snap.

New t-shirt design 'Four Horsemen 2012'

Available to buy right here: Four Horsemen 2012

Commissions and feedback

It's always great to get feedback from customers on my gift caricatures, especially when it's from someone for whom it was a present or surprise gift. This one is a corker:

Good morning Neil, For my Christmas present this year my girlfriend commisioned yourself to complete a caricature of me and my stock car and this is just a quick email to say what an amazingly awesome job you did!! I was shocked and stunned by what my girlfriend had managed to find and the work you did was truly amazing, the detail of the car is just immense and so accurate its untrue! To say I was and still am impressed is possibly the biggest understatement ever!

Below is the caricature, which was a really fun one to do and I was pretty happy with the look when I finished it. It looks even better now the customer has framed it!

And here are a few other recent jobs that were good fun to do:

Oh, and Happy New Year! Here's hoping 2012 is a cracker for all of us.

RIP Christopher Hitchens

Skeptic Magazine cover - Jon Ronson

This illustration was FUN.

The team from The Skeptic Magazine told me they wanted Jon Ronson on the cover and that his new book The Psychopath Test was just out (it's a really good book, grab it if you can). This idea came straight away an I did a sketch, thinking that they'd think it was a bit 'out there' and I'd have to tone it down or come up with something else. Nope - they liked it and so I went for it!

The idea is pretty simple, Jon is in a school classroom having just taken a 'psychopath test' and the teacher is handing him back his score sheet with a 100% mark. The slightly mad bit is that he's dressed AND made up as The Joker from The Dark Knight - it was a bit of a challenge to caricature someone and then give them full face make up of someone totally different. I was worried the likeness would vanish under the white make up and red lipstip. I think it came out ok though. There are lots of other little things in it too which I really enjoyed putting in. Can't wait to do the next one if they still want me!

Caricature commissions

Here are a few more recent commission jobs - one of the fun things about this job is you never know who you'll be doing next! The group one I'm very pleased with, the mobster theme was a lot of fun and I loved doing the car :)

A sketch of a day

I know I'll never stick to a 'sketch of the day' regime, but I do need to work much harder to be drawing ALL the time as opposed to just some of the time. So here's a sketch for today (Scarlett Johansson) and who knows, maybe there'll be more...



...and so there is! Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock ;)



One more quick one - Stanley Kubrick.

Picking up a brush again

I haven't painted anything in 'the real world' for a while, so I want to see if I can do a few acrylic (and maybe oil) paintings over the holiday period - if I can remember how. Starting with this one which is a portrait rather than a caricature. Here are the stages so far, it may well end up on a fireworks night bonfire - we'll see! Looks at lot worse in photos than in the flesh :(

(It's on canvas, 1m x 50cm - feel free to comment!)

EDIT: Update - just that hand to paint now. Terrible. Still, it's practice which is the point - have to think of another subject to try :)

One more quick gift commission

This was a fun job, obviously the client wanted a James Bond theme for this chap, but also wanted to include their company logo in somehow. I was pleased with how I managed to include it... ;)

Some more recent gift commissons

A host of new stuff, all sorts of people, all sorts of fun - I really like the one for the real-life brain surgeon! Contact me if you'd like to commission a caricature from me like these :)

Prof. Richard Wiseman for The Skeptic Magazine

Finally I can show you this cover illustration for the new issue of The Skeptic Magazine! It's Richard Wiseman who is Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, and famous for many TV appearances and books about the mad things our squishy brains get up to.

The interview in the magazine partly promotes his recent book Paranormality (which is great), so the idea to put him in a Ghostbusters outfit came pretty quickly. I must thank Crispian Jago for his great idea for the actual pose. Really pleased with how this turned out, hope you like it!

I'm offering prints of this illustration for sale, they will be A3 size and cost £15 inc p&p. Click below to buy through PayPal: