New Beard Fear Tumblr

 

The Beard Fear Tumblr is now live! What does this mean?! MORE GIFS! WHOOOOO!

This gif was too big to fit on the tumblr, so it's a BEARD FEAR BLOG EXCLUSIVE!

Go check it out 

Loopdeloop - BANG!

Loopdeloop teamed up with the Bang Short Film Festival in Nottingham in November to bring you, the viewers at home, the theme BANG!

The initial thought was something manic and loud and epileptic. Originally I wanted to use the backing track of Nicki Minaj's Stupid Hoe, but after deciding the copyright litigation wouldn't be worth it (and before realising that I could've just clapped my hands and made a "woop" sound), I settled on Hot Garbage's manic post rock opus Who Broke the Bang Boxxx (redux), which was probably a better (and louder) choice in the end.

I was a bit disappointed with the low number of seizures at the final screening, but I'm pretty happy with the final piece.

Check it out on Loopdeloop

Squid Life

So this totally happened.

Nathanael Scott drawings immortalised forever on some poor chump's arm.

Horror Factory Lives!

Do you like scary movies?

Over the last couple of months I've been working on a bunch of illustration's for Crime Factory's horror fiction anthology HORROR FACTORY. Along with doing the cover, I also drew up TEN pages depicting a wide range of horror fiction (some obvious ones and some deep cuts).

And it's out now!

Check out some of the samples below and then head over to the Crime Factory blog to download the issue FOR FREE! Along with some amazing drawings of Freddy Kruger cuddling up with his teddy, there's some great horror fiction, interviews with some pretty big names in the horror world and some essays on some of the best horror films you've probably never seen (including my favourite, Martin).

Go get HORROR FACTORY!

Loopdeloop - FUTURE

Captain Kirk Quirk sure has sex with a lot of aliens. This song may be the best I've ever done. Stay turned for the Band Camp link.

Download the song here!

Check it out on Loopdeloop!

Loopdeloop - HISTORY

I don't know which compulsion was greater: drawing Marie Antoinette in the bathtub eating cake OR doing a ukulele cover of Queen.

Check it out on Loopdeloop!

Loopdeloop - MAD

To celebrate a long running sponsorship by Madman Entertainment, July's Loopdeloop theme was MAD, so I dove headfirst into my own madness to create this loop. Apathy, self-depreciation, vacancy, sexual-frustration and awesome beards burst forth from my head, animated to an amazing soundtrack done by The Stealing Orchestra.

Check it out on Loopdeloop!

Horror Factory Cover Preview

Over the last couple of months I've been busy doing illustrations for crime fiction raconteurs Crime Factory's upcoming "Horror Factory". Their annual non-crime-fiction anthology release (last year they explored Kung-Fu fiction in the awesome Kung-Fu Factory).

Along with doing some horror fiction themed illustrations to go throughout the pages (stay tuned), I took a bit of a different direction and Photoshopped up a cover. The idea of course being a factory that creates and distributes horror tropes. I feel in this post-Cabin in the Woods world, it's hard to "turn a mirror" on the horror genre without treading on old ground (they're not the first to do this of course, but by far the best), but I think by keeping it broad (at least with the cover image) and sticking to tropes and not specific film, at worst we're only ripping of Scream.

Horror Factory will be released on October 31st.

EDIT: Horror Factory has been released, so you can go get it now!

Loopdeloop - ELEMENTS

This July, Loopdeloop took part in the Gertrude Street Projection Festival and adopted their theme of ELEMENTS.

While my loop wasn't the only Captain Planet themed one (nor the funniest), it was certainly the longest. If you can't make a joke funny, make it long. While I was awfully sick of my one joke premise by the end of animating, I still remember a time when I thought it was hilarious. That seems like so long ago.

Check it out on Loopdeloop!

Loopdeloop - PLAY

My inital concept for Loopdeloop's July theme of PLAY was to have two boys having a war style shoot-off using fake guns (sticks or carboard tubes) but make it hyper violent. Like how we imagined it to be when playing it as kids. Because the loops needed to be kept "kid friendly" due to Wheelbarrow's sponsership and Megaforce doing a better job at the concept than I could ever hope to do, I had to switch course.

Along the same lines of games we used to play as kids, I remembered the idea of "The floor is lava" It's a game that everyone played but didn't learn off anyone. How did millions of kids simultaniously come to the same conclusion of pretending the floor is lava by themselves? Is it a universal facination with lava that kids have? Capturing their collective imaginations the same way that something like dinosaurs do?

Regarless, this is how I remember the game to be.

Check it out on Loopdeloop

MCA Animation & Character Design Workshop

Loopdeloop - ONE

Loopdeloop is turning ONE this month, so they're celebrating with the loneliest theme, ONE.

I had originally considered doing a Highlander theme (THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE!), however, having never seen the film and a concept that started to get bigger than I cared to do in a month, I decided to change Loops mid stream. Drawing from a time when vampires were men and counting was sexy, this month's loop is a homage to Count Von Count. Counting one of things.

I tried to draw a cat as one of the things, but kind of failed, so it was replaced by a blender.

Also, I'm really in love with the song I used, In Fielder by Miro Belle. It's free under Creative Commons, so check it out. And remix it if you want.

Check it out on Loopdeloop

Sub note: I recently found out that the Count had a girlfriend The Countess. I actually remember the "Twenty Something" segment from when I was a kid, but not The Countess.

Wedding Badges

 

For my brother's wedding, he wanted to have name badges for all the guests featuring a caricature of him and his then-fiance-now-wife on them.

I did feel I could get away with a bit of artistic licence when it came to my brother (also it's easier to get away with drawing someone with a big nose if they don't actually have one), but I felt I needed to be a bit kinder with the depiction of his wife. I think I kept a nice consistency between the two illustrations and they were well received. It's easy to get honest opinion on things when no one knows who did them. Also it's easy to get a positive opinion when people are drunk.

Here's an action shot of the 150 badges made.

Freddy Lives

I made a gif of Freddy, becuase, you know... Freddy.

The only way to enjoy this gif

Loopdeloop - ROCK

I suggested ROCK for Loopdeloop's April theme purely because I wanted to animate the Ramones. So when the theme was selected, I was committed.

I was thinking of ways that I could animate Johnny onto a record and in the process came up with the slightly less destructive idea of creating the stop motion centrifuge to sit on a turn table. Sort of like a punk rock penny arcade. Some editing was needed to make it flow smoothly, but in the end I made the second best animated Johnny Ramone ever (the best of course being this one).

Check it out on Loopdeloop

Loopdeloop - LIQUID

Loopdeloop teamed up with MTV's Liquid Television this month to bring you, the viewing audience, the theme LIQUID.

Vaguely inspired by Rocketpanda's Hotel Trip, I wanted to create a series of characters expelling bodily liquid in time with fast paced music. Having already covered puke in an earlier Loopdeloop and Ivan Dixon summarising peeing better than I'd hope to, I settled on blood.

Check it out on Loopdeloop

Little Deities - The God of Time & Space

 

I was recently involved with the Little Deities exhibition where sixty artists were given a vinyl baby doll and asked to turn it into the God of something-a-rather.

My baby design stemmed from the idea of modern day fables and if we were to take these stories as seriously as they did two thousand years ago, who would our Gods be? The story of Dr Who is a story that has been told to me for as long as I've been told any Bible stories, which is to say for as long as I remember. It's perhaps lacking in the sodomy, incest and torture porn featured in the Bible, but it certainly captures my imagination the same.

The exhibiton is running from March 8th till the 18th at the No Vacancy Gallery and there will be works by some seriously talented artists there, so it'll be worth checking out.

Loopdeloop - IDIOTS

My mind immediately went to John Kennedy Toole's book A Confederacy of Dunces for Loopdeloop's February theme IDIOTS. I really loved the idiotic main character Ignatius J Reilly and his strong involvement with hotdogs, so the loop all kind of fell into place conceptually.

I'm not sure if the reference is too obscure (on the screening night I was asked "Is your loop about idiot Americans?"), however the up side is that when people get it, they love it, if only for the fact they get it.


Check out the animation on Loopdeloop

A Sonic Screwdriver Can't Fix a Broken Heart(s)

Loopdeloop - CHEESE DREAMS

When Loopdeloop ran the theme CHEESE DREAMS in support of Rubber House's animated show of the same name, I was bit short for ideas. While I tend to remember most of my dreams, none of them are particularly interesting. They're usually along the lines of "I was going to the supermarket, but then I never made it to the supermarket despite driving for a really long time, then I woke up".

What I settled on my animation was the depiction of a friend (featured in the animation) and her nightmarish combination of food, a pickle covered in vinegar, while she eats the only thing her delicate palette can handle, a single slice of white bread. This resulted in something a lot more Freudian than I was intending, but any dirty thoughts are projected upon the loop by the viewer.

Check out this animation on Loopdeloop