So apparently, the 29th of Sept is National Coffee Day in many parts of the world and October 1st is considered International Coffee Day. Well today is September 30th, so I figured I'd tell you all about the relationship between my art... and coffee!

Turns out instant coffee is a great painting medium if - like me - you enjoy splodgy gross brown stains and uneven textures in your art. Unlike tea, which is way better for staining, instant coffee can be made as thick as paste and settles in little globules, whilst real ground coffee will leave grainy specs everywhere. It's pretty cool for making textures.

This pair of skyscraper drawings are from my first year at uni, from around 2008-2009. The backgrounds are coffee.

This illustration featuring two magpie skulls from 2008 sometime also has a coffee background. This artwork is available as a print from my Etsy store!

I take photographs or make my own textures a lot. I keep them on my computer as stock for when I need a bit of grunge or something to add to digital illustrations. Sometimes it's just a photo of a wall, or some brush strokes or spodgy watercolour on paper, but here's a couple of my coffee textures!

The Problem - a book I collaborated on with a friend whilst at Uni, uses too many layers of found and made textures to count. Every page uses coffee somewhere, some more obviously than others.

With some of my works, I use a texture just to lift it a bit. Sometimes I'll end up erasing most of it out, leaving just a tint of colour or grain.

Even the background of my main homepage is a desaturated coffee texture. :)

Hope you've found this post somewhat interesting! Happy Coffee Day!

Squad! This one is from the start of the month, experimented with shading colours a bit.

Forced myself to draw some humans from references today. Not happy with them AT ALL but oh well.

Drawn from references collected on deviantArt.

Here's some of the drawings I made for the commission mentioned in the previous post that weren't used in the end. I may develop one or two for personal projects.

Few months back, I saw a tweet from Feral Interactive (a Mac and Linux games publisher) looking for someone to work on a T-Shirt Design for them. I responded and they got back in a touch!

Here's some of the roughs and final design that they choose.

It's not often I get to share professional work on here due to the nature of the stuff I predominantly work on. Most of the time it's concept work that takes a long time to be realised, if at all. So it's nice to be able to share this. :)

Had been a while since I'd drawn a dragon so I wound up tonight with a quick sketch.

I have a cool print I made of a VHS tape from uni days, figured I'd play around with it a bit. Thinking of developing the graphic into t-shirt designs. 80s aesthetic!

A bunch of DBZ fan works from this month so far. :)

New t-shirt, this one was an Etsy commission. The buyer requested the giganotosaurus design on a navy kids tee.

I expected this to bleach white, but it actually has that orange tint that bleaching black fabric gives. It's mostly white, but it's definitely a little orange, which is definitely something to bare in mind with dark non-black fabrics in future. Luckily with the dino skeletons, it kinda adds to the affect.

Another challenge with this one was how small it was. I was too careful when I painted it and didn't bleach it enough at first and had to go over it, which was a little time consuming. Sometimes it can be quite hard to tell if you've done enough. It's not an exact science. Happy with how it turned out in the end though!

You can find out more about my bleach painted shirts here and see what's for sale on my Etsy!

A vegeta digital sketch from the end of August. I thought I was getting pretty good with anatomy until I actually looked at some refs the other day.

 More practise from reference stock photos found on deviantArt.

So, a while ago I thought it would be cool to reimagine the creatures from various roller coasters! 

Here's my take on the Swarm monsters. The ones featured on the ride at Thorpe Park are more robot like, but I went for a more animal crawling bat-bug thing...

Got more free time in the evenings, so I'm going to try and push myself to do more observational drawing. I made a folder on deviantArt full of human references to work from on the spur of the moment.

Dragon Ball Z fanart of Vegeta killing Goku with a ki blast. Uh oh.

Apologies for the lack of posts, there's not a lot that I can show right now. Here's a couple of quick sketches of Splat 'n' Morb!