Woofer

Peepshow at Monster Truck

My entry for Peepshow, an exhibition of erotic art at Monster Truck Gallery. Etching, 16 x 20cm.

Wrestler

Been hitting the lino lately. It's much faster to complete now that I have the etching press.

Breast Health awareness leaflet

odopod sketch

Monoprints for Kubrick show

A couple of monoprints made for a show in the Lighthouse Cinema in Smithfield. I'll only be showing the top one.

The Black Sketchbook

Absolut Original embroidery

Now showing in town here:

The Red Sketchbook

I travelled around the world for ten months in 2005. I kept a few sketchbooks of the trip, making portraits of some of the people I met. Approaching people in parks, on trains and trams, people in bars, people I was teaching English to, fellow travelers, it wasn't hard to get people to sit for a while. This is one of the books I kept, an Indian pad of handmade paper.

Duchess

Guinness beermats

I painted 33 Irish pubs for this Guinness beermat campaign. That's a LOT of painting...

Vampires

Frankenstein, Jonathan Harker, Mina Harker

Polidori

Alice and the Hatter

Monoprints 2

monoprints

Petria

January etchings

Bob and Bob

Jimi

Monkey batman

Cambodian etching

New etching

First hard ground etchings

Etchings

War artist

These were for a recent pitch that never happened. Sometimes being an illustrator feels like being in World War One: you're asked to go way over the top, only to get shot down.

Boom boom.

Linocuts

Candy Karaoke

Brown paper sketches 3

In progress

Brown paper sketches

I spent the evening drawing these: each is about five foot tall. Nice to go large again.

Oddness

Sweeney Among The Nightingales

The previous Menagerie image reminded a friend of the character Sweeney, of Irish folk tale fame, which then reminded me of Sweeney Among The Nightingales by TS Eliot. The description of animal markings fitted nicely with my first sketch, so I thought it would be fun to flesh him out a little.

"Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe."

Sketchbook project

This is my first entry for one of a series of sketchbooks that I've sent to 36 illustrators around Ireland. So far I've just been managing the project, but now I get to join in! It's a simple idea: ten sketchpads, each with a different theme, circulating by mail amongst the group. Each book comes with stamps and addresses: you receive it, make your entry and post it on to the next person. We're hoping it'll build into something quite nice at the end, even if only a small show and a glass of wine. Unfortunately three books have already gone missing - but that's the risk you take with this kind of project. Anyway, we have some extremely talented people contributing, so I have high hopes for it. Go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/64092812@N00/ to view the work so far.

Oh screw it

I've been so bored with my recent advertising work that I decided to throw up some sketches that I had just a little bit of fun doing. It's funny how quickly a blog that sets out to be an honest dumping ground for whatever you might be playing with soon turns into a very dull place indeed. These doodles may not reflect any great skill, but they would be a better indication of how I'd like to work for a while. I'll bang some more up as they appear.

The day job

Here's some random storyboard frames from the last couple of years. Some of these ads were made, some not. You tend to generate an awful lot of stuff doing these things... I've left in some of the pencil work and different versions of the same frame.

Renault Twingo ads

Nudes

Some recent life class sketches.

Today FM billboards

Some recent 48-sheet billboards for Today FM, a local Dublin station. The idea was to show the essential character of each DJ. I passed the 'joker' one on a billboard the other night and it looked mighty creepy to me. Darker than my original illustration, but hard to ignore.

Spiegel Club poster

Peacock Theatre poster

I submitted a few other options for this job, a few of which you can click on below. I like to play around with an image, and tend to give the client a range of solutions. The brief on this one was to give it a painterly feel. I threw in some crows at the end, loosely sketched in sepia ink, and the client went with it. The woman was done at a life drawing class, a one minute warm-up exercise.

Abbey Theatre poster

A recent piece for the Abbey Theatre. Poster design by Stuart Bradfield of Red Dog.

World trip portraits 3

This Vietnamese village girl sat patiently for 40 minutes but was less than happy with the result. She asked me to make her look prettier, which reminded me of my days drawing tourists in Leicester Square. I thought I had.


The village chief's wife. I had dinner with the chief one evening while I was going nuts on malaria drugs, dining on store-bought spring rolls and fried intestines. I don't think she was too pleased with her picture either.


Rob from Manchester, in Siem Reap near Angkor Wat.


I took the Trans-Siberian Railway across Russia, Mongolia and China. This is Karin, a fellow passenger. A calm Swede.


Karin and her boyfriend.


A man from Hong Kong.


Mem, a Bangkok barmaid.

World trip portraits 2

More portraits from the trip. The first three are from photos in Hong Kong, the last is of Gino, a very world-weary traveller in Pushkar, India. He hadn't been home to Italy for 15 years.

World trip portraits

I got around to cleaning up a few of the portraits I did on my 2005 world trip. This is Eric, a French guy in Tahiti who ran his own tattoo parlour back in France. He looked a little intimidating and aloof at first, but turned out to be very easy going.

Becky was a Manchester girl who was travelling around New Zealand.

This guy hung around the campsite in Tahiti and was as strange as he looks. He would stare at people with a glassy expression and pad about the kitchen in his flipflops.

Florian (German in NZ), Elizabeth (English in NZ), Phil (English academic in Tahiti, cycling around the world).

Moleskine pages

A bunch of sketchbook pages. I often like thumbnails more than the finished article.

Copper book

The copper book, an old student project that still looks pretty good. It took about ten days to complete from brief to finish. I was more energetic then.

Postcard

One from ages ago that I still quite like. The old handwriting is fantastic - it doesn't really need anything else.

Messing around