Bands through the Hourglass.

Hey there, guys and girls.
Apologies for starting a blog and failing to post anything new up in months and months. In my defence, I did say that I'd only come here when boredom strikes, and BAM, it has struck. For an hour or so, so here goes.

Hey Jiggles, what's been jiggling? You may well ask. Well, I've been jiggling, let me tell you. It's Jiggles Central. since I wrapped up the first season of Deadly for Zuda Comics, I've been drawing a whole bunch of stuff. What was really nice, was the clients that seemed to wait patiently while I drew a comic for a year. Then they all struck at once, and I've been strapped to the desk ever since, pretty much.

As fun as drawing a comic is, I must say that it's been great to stretch my artistic legs and draw a whole bunch of different stuff. The main difference being that when you design something in a comic, you have to keep in mind that you'll be drawing that thing from a thousand different angles, a thousand times. With a poster, or an album cover, you can go to town with all kinds of crazy shit, and not worry about having to draw it a whole bunch of times.

I thought I'd start off with some of the band art I've been doing lately, along with links to those bands.

Troy Loakes, lead singer of the Huckleberry Swedes.
I've been working with the Swedes guys for nearly a decade, and this is my latest for them, more so for Troy.  These guys are great, Troys' voice is golden, well look at the quote on it, they say it better. If you like a bit of country, a bit of dusty melodic twang, check them out! Here are some other Huckleberry Swedes illustrations I've done over the years:

Their latest album, Suburban Dreaming. Mark and Troy had a great idea for this, the image of the painted Wheelie Bin on a suburban street. I earned my fee by suggesting that the butterflies fly off of the bins and into the night. The back cover is my old backyard. I went past it the other day and the whole place was gone, and a new house was in it's place, so it's nice to have a little arty reminder of that shithole where I lived for 9 months... The front cover was used for a billboard campaign around Adelaide, so it was nice to see them really big around town. Note the sound effect coming out of my arse.

But I think my favorite illustration for the Swedes has to be this, their gig poster. Troy gave me the instruction to make it like a gritty Western movie. And boy do I love a gritty western. Here it is:

I was really happy with how it turned out. I even hid Huckleberries, Swedes (the turnip), and a Swedish flag, to show how Aussie they are. I've got a big block mounted version in my house.

Well, that should do it for the Swedes, check out their website, or go see a gig sometime!

The next band is a group of young cats called The Belle-Phonics.  No real instruction from these guys, they allowed me to go a little crazy (which I love). I haven't met the band, but I'm sure they're all lovely... Here it is

After that came a job for James Annesley, a Jazz Master from Melbourne. I really enjoy working for James, he allows me to go a special kind of crazy with his jobs. I would call it darkly humorous. This is for his latest album, Vicious Cycle. If I had sex with my cat, this is what the baby would look like:

Here's his previous album, Idle Hands Do the Devils' Work. He sent me a little blue diagram of a red brain inside a head for inspiration, and here's what I came up with:

Here's the first job I did for him, and he sent me a really awesome simple cover sketch, in the style of the image on the television. It was really fun to turn his crazy elephant footed bird and 2-legged snake-giraffe thing into realistic looking characters. I wish I could find the sketch to post up with it, but I'm lazy...

Then came a job that had been brewing for a while, Blue King Brown. Carlo from the band had contacted me when I was in the thick of Deadly, and we threw many ideas around. The main one was their existing theme of the stripes, and speaker. Also, the lead singer Natalie has Native American roots, so we wanted something totemic to suggest that. I suggested a Wedge-Tailed Eagle, to tie it back to Australia. Can't wait to see this out and about. I drew all the images seperatley, so they can be used for all kinds of things...

And that's about it for now, I've been working on a few new comics as well, and I'll tell you all about them in my next blog, which hopefully will be sooner rather than later.

Rock out with your frock or cock out...or both, I'm not fussy....

Love Foz

xo

It's better than bad, it's Blog!

Howdy! Well, at least three people asked for it, so here it is: My Blog.
I made a title and everything.
Now, time to say something interesting...
First, I'll start with a controversial statement:

There is no Santa.

There is an Easter Bunny, but Santa NEVER existed.

He was created by Bhuddists to sell cigarettes.

It's true, because I just wrote it, and it's on the internet.

Now that I have that sorted (sure to inspire debate among Santanists), time to say something interesting:

Geckos stick to walls with millions of tiny split-hairlike things on the soles of their feet, and they use their tails and front legs to right themselves if they get blown off a leaf. They can do this faster than a cat can. I urge you to experiment if you have a gecko and a cat handy.

Onto what I do for a living: I write and draw my own comic called 'Deadly' for DC Comics' online comics imprint, Zuda. I also work as a freelance illustrator, mostly doing gig posters and album covers. Sometimes I do wine labels, and spoons with delicious soup in them. I draw lots of stuff. A good spot to look at my work is here, and my website is here.  Seeing as this is probably what I'm best known for, I plan to blog a little about process and stuff in the future, but for now I'll show you a pretty picture that I made with images from Deadly. Enjoy!

Deadly is an action/horror/fantasy set in a futuristic Australia. It was origially created after I did a series of comic workshops with some young indigenous kids.

 

This is me with the kids, Clyde Rigney and Artist/comedian Kevin Kropinyeri (Look out for a Kev cameo on screen 40 of Deadly)

Basically, the premise of the workshops was "What would you do about the Drug and Alcohol problem if you had Superpowers?" We worked on characters, and I'd do sketches of their characters, and create one of my own to sketch up and bring it back the following week as a finished illustration.

 

Original by Bayden.

The first characters I created for Deadly were the Pricks:

 The kids loved this, I think what they got a kick out of the most was a 30 minute example of how I work. I took a photo of Bayden, and then downloaded it onto my laptop and drew him while they watched.

 

Baydens identical twin asked me to draw him after I drew his brother. So I flipped the portrait of Bayden and said "There ya go!" He didn't find it as amusing as I did...

After the workshops had ended, I went to my studio, sat on my arse for a month and created Deadly.
I had previously been working on a 4 page comic called "Licked"  that had taken me about a month to draw each page, so my aim with Deadly was to speed up my process, and do a page a day, quality be damned...It started looking pretty good by the end of it, so as a drawing exercise it was successful. 

 

After that I submitted the first 4 pages (reformatted to 8 landscape screens) to Zuda, and after a month of whorish slogging, ended up winning the competion, with allowed me to turn Deadly into an ongoing webcomic. I decided to rewrite and redraw it from screen 9 onwards, as it wasn't up to my usual standard...good enough for a buch of ten kids, but not for DC, methoughts...

So, the original premise was to create a comic that answered the question: What would you do about the Drug and Alcohol problem if you had Superpowers?

 

Rather than draw a comic with a dude in a cape telling kids to stay off crack, I used the premise more as a metaphor, with the Pricks representing Heroin, and the Juicers representing Addiction. That's where it started anyway....I could go further into this but at the risk of sounding horribly wanky, I'll leave it at that for now.

 

I've got a bit of a boner for injecting Indigenous Australia into Pop Culture. Indigenous kids need a comic that they can relate to, because at the moment, the only other Indigenous comic out there is a dude that shoots condoms from his hands... 

Anyway...

Apart from that, I live with a beautiful girl called Amy who I'm marrying later this year...

...and a handsome cat called Beazley.

Yes, I also have a tiny albino called Gavin. But don't we all?

I'm busy at the moment, I get up around midday, work for a few hours, eat some stuff and hang out with Amy for a few hours, then I work until about 6am.  I'm pretty tired, but really enjoying what I'm doing. I'm working on the final pages of the first season of Deadly mainly, making sure to nail each one as best as I can, plus fitting in a poster or an album cover when time allows. Here's one of my latest, for a talented cat called Josh Bennett:

Well, that's it for now, more to come when boredom allows...reviews, recommendations and whatnot...

Love Foz.

P.S. Please stop tweeting about coffee.
I love coffee, but I hate reading about it.
Unless it's that coffee that comes from panther shit that costs $50 a cup.