How I work.

If you are looking for precision and a controlled approach, I am probably not a good fit.

This might sound a little off, but I know what I am good at and the sorts of project that I work best on.

If you want a loose, energetic illustration style with bold line work and colour, we can have a chat.

I work first-take.

I generally find that my first sketches on any commission are the strongest, so it’s these that are provided for consideration.

I work using Sharpie markers, Papermate Flair fibre tips and a chunky pencil for the initial work.

Due to my style of illustrations and work, endlessly faffing about over fine details is seldom something you will find me doing: I find it kills the energy of the illustration and I prefer things a bit rough-around-the-edges.

If this all sounds a bit ‘creative’ for you, don’t worry – as I work fast, I produce a lot of initial sketches (depending on the size of the piece) so there will be plenty of room for fiddling about.

Amends and alterations.

If I have to amend something, I have to redraw the whole thing, unless it’s small tweaks we can get away with in Illustratior (see below).

For larger commissions I work in pencil first to get the composition (very loose), then I draw out a final composition before I ink it.

Amends have to be done at initial composition stage and final composition stage: once the ink goes down, making significant changes to the illustrator are more complex (I am a bit of a whizz in Illustrator, but I am not a magician).

Artworking and colouring illustrations.

This is done in Illustrator, with the selected hand-drawn illustration vectorised for fine tuning and colour.

When we get to this stage, it’s tweaks-only and colour as, again, pushing things around too much takes the life out of everything.

All final artwork is vector-based, so if you need it the size of a house, it’s good to go.