Here's my card for the Magic: The Gathering Secret Lair Garfield collaboration for the @mtgsecretlair CATS ARE THE BEST superdrop!
Thank you @jacobbcoveyy for always getting me involved in such fun projects.
It feels pretty surreal to make official Garfield art!
Various video game illustrations made back in 2024 for Lost in Cult's book, The Console Chronicles.
These were incredibly fun, varied essays to illustrate. They were either the writer's memories of specific games or hardware, or facts digging into the history of specific consoles and games.
Here’s all the illustrations I created for Lost in Cult: A Handheld History 88-95 back in 2024, illustrating a variety of essays paying tribute to retro handheld gaming.
The Ghost Machine - from pencils, to inks, to digital colour.
You can see in this picture, I took a lot of bold steps early just making broad shapes for the composition, and then I’ll add shading, details and foliage as I can in the inks.
I think this was inspired partly by 80s space lego and From Beyond (the colour as much as the theme of communicating with things that can’t be seen).
Going through these archives, I can’t believe how much time slips by, and just how many different bits are on different hard drives and old computers.
I’m hoping to get a bit more time to collect everything together into a central archive.
I lost a lot of my early work around 2014ish when a computer and back up hard drive failed within a week of each other.
Process of “The Return”
This image started with a pen drawing in my sketch book with a platinum fountain pen.
I must have printed the sketch and enlarged it, tracing over it to create a more refined pencil sketch.
Then I used a lightbox to ink it using a mix of nib weights with the same fountain pen and carbon platinum ink and a unipin brush pen.
Finally I used digital colour on the scanned ink drawing.
I've been going through my archive looking for sketches and preliminary drawings for a project, and I wanted to share how I build up my images. I realise it's something not everyone sees all the time.
I make a looser pencil drawing, work really heavily into it, then use a lightbox to make an inked version of the drawing, tracing over the top, which I then scan and colour digitally.
It marks 10 years since I started making these giant drawings.
I remember starting them in a slump and they ended up becoming the thing I was most known for.
I hit a block but allowed myself as much time as I needed, making these images purely for myself.
At the time a lot was going wrong in my life and I disassociated from it all for a long time.
I had some cognitive behavioural therapy that really helped. I felt paralysed, but it helped me to start drawing again and gain control. I made the lion images specifically to cope with grief.
I was able to start layering images and to create much more complicated illustrations as my confidence and passion were rekindled.
The poster for the @greenmanfest 2026 line-up has been revealed with my work on it!
I’m looking forward to sharing more soon too.
It’s been so much fun to work on.
I'm struggling with the minutiae of colouring this image.
It's taken a long time to work on in my spare time, but it's getting there. It's not finished yet.
I don't think the start/stops have helped, but it's good practice nonetheless.
It’s great to see everyone engage so positively with the post I made about how I mark make.
I’ll have to share some more of the sheets I’ve drawn soon, but while I’m busy, some of you may not have seen these illustrations. I started making these dense, multi layered images ten years ago as personal work and they’ve ended up becoming a sort of calling card for me.
They’re sort of like building up a puzzle, I have a lot of fun balancing the imagery.
You can see my fixation on death in these pieces, with a large figure looming over everything. These are partly inspired by the youkai Gashadokuro (and also I was working through some issues!)
If you’re new to these, I hope you enjoy. I have a few newer pieces to share soon.
