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

Taurus

Frothy jazz

Some unpublished concept work for Guinness.

Vault

Cardinal

I did this many years ago and it kicked off an editorial style of ripped cardboard and splashy paint. I still get clients asking if I still do it, but it feels weird to resurrect something so old. This was never actually used, but I always thought it was one of the better ones.

Irish Museum of Modern Art

A lot of Photoshopping, a little drawing: IMMA's new poster. We had to approach the artists for permission to use their works in the bag so some nice elements had to be left out. It was fun to try to make all the objects sit together, but I'm not sure I'd want to make a career of photo retouching. I was happy with the stretchmarks on the bag though.

Guinness Boot Camp Ad

This was a recent one for Guinness Boot Camp. The brief was for a very stark, almost stencilled look, so we had graffiti sprays and runs coming off the main figure:

Here's the storyboard and final logo:


And here's the finished ad: