Yuki Wallpaper(here)=Yuki Wallpaper (now)

Hello there. I've not posted here since Christmas, and today its Easter which is very bad and naughty of me. So to make up for it I am doing a blog now. I have been very very busy, but its just not really stuff that Im allowed to be showing around at the moment. As soon as I can show anything I certainly will. Here is something kind of new I can post up.

The last blog I did was a Christmassy desktop wallpaper, and I dont have any Eastery desktop wallpapers, I do have some Yuki-ery wallpapers. Yuki is one of my super talented friends and I made a big picture for her birthday (see this blog post). I recently got round to sending a copy of the file and edited a couple of different desktops for her, and she said I could share them on my blog. I hope you like them. Also you should really check out Miss Nishimura's website to see her illustrations.

Cheerio :-)

Christmas Gift 2: festive wallpaper

Happy Christmas! Here is another virtual gift, a festive wallpaper for your desktop. The image is from the cover of the sadly unfinished Super Christmas 2009 (currently cover and back cover finished+a 50 page story with every page started but none finished, time has not been on my side, I need a super christmas miracle!). This image was also used by my agency on their christmas cards. Hope it helps your computer get festive.

Super Christmas 2007

Happy Christmas everyone!

As a kind of virtual present here is my Super Christmas 2007 book for you to read. I hope you enjoy it and it helps you feel festive! It is missing one page I'm afraid but it does effect it too much.

Merry Christmas you!

1 Month to go.........

Arena Illustration Agency

Although I might have mentioned it in passing in a previous blog post, I thought today would be a good day to specifically announce that I have joined Arena Illustration Agency. I chose today as their new website has launched with my page as part of it. have a look here. I have been working with them for a few months now and while Im not able to show you (yet) some of the things we've been working on, I will do as soon as I can. Hooray.

More Animations

I thought following the few animations In my last post, I'd post the rest of the animations I did at while studying Fine Art at De Montfort university.

Here are some animations from the second semester of my second year in 2002. The animations were projected on to larger sheets of fabriano paper alongside a series of similar pictures drawn on to fabriano paper to match. In these drawings and animations I was creating large detailed patterns using common elements from my doodles. This was the most successful of all my projects on my fine art degree and I'd still like to return to it at some point. Because the animations where supposed to work like the still drawings they were made of short loops so they could be constantly projected onto the sheets of paper.







The following animations are from the last semester of the third year. They are taken from a follow up project to the one mentioned above. I didn't get to project them onto paper and ended up just having a showreel playing on a tv alongside my other drawings that wern't really connected to the drawings. As a project it didn't work aswell but I still quite like the animations themselves.

Thomas Flintham vs Pixar

I recently had the pleasure of watching the new pixar film 'Up' and recomend it highly. It is swish, especially the first 15 minutes which have some great storytelling to go with the great story. 'Up's story of a flying house reminded me of a project I did way back in the second year of my BA Fine Art studies at De Montfort University in 2002 called 'The Flying house'. Below you can see both the series of drawings I did and my first brief experimentation with animation aswell.



click the area below to browse all the images full screen.




I can't really claim that pixar stole my idea as my version itself was not the most original idea ever, being inspired by books such as 'The House That Sailed Away' by Pat Hutchins, and 'Laputa Castle in the Sky' by Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. Also despite the fact that I did upload all the images onto a website in 2002 I don't think pixar would have seen them.

A couple of semesters after I did the 'The Flying house' project I created my first ever comic called 'Momo and the Little Bird'. Soon after I finished at the beginning of 2003 I started to think of ideas for another comic. One of the main ideas I liked was called 'ROBO' about a robot made by a scientist that outlives not only his creator but all of mankind aswell. So a story about a robot left all alone on earth carrying on its work all alone.......which is just like Wall-e, those pixar scoundrels!

Although apart from this detail my story was going to be quite different, but I was still abit annoyed by the similarities as I still had the idea in mind when Wall-e came out. I never got further than the cover for 'ROBO' the comic, I instead decided to animate it instead. I planned to animate the whole story to the song 'Eric the Gardener' by the Divine Comedy, matching the progression of the story to the changes in the music. I had the whole thing planned out but never got further than a very small section at the beginning showing ROBO being built. I turned the small section I did do into a small looping animation of a series of ROBOs being produced, using a sample of 'Eric the Gardener' within it. I also did an a brief follow up, another short looping animation showing lots of ROBOs called 'ROBO Parade'. You can see them both below:





Although I still like the idea I had for my ROBO story, following Wall-e I'm not sure if I'd ever do it the way I intended, but I might incorporate it into another story. Those darned Pixar people, always 120 steps ahead......

The Art Book 2010 Cover

The above image is a rough sketch/layout/doodle for an image I entered into a competition this summer, to design the cover for the 2010 edition of The Art Book. The Art Book is an annual illustration showcase produced and compiled by a number of agencies featuring a selection of the Illustrators they represent, which is then sent to a range of art directors and clients. You can look at the previous editions online at www.theartbook.com. (Just as a note the competition and the opportunity to have a page in the book is only open to illustrators represented by the agencies involved)

Im not sure if you can tell from this stage that the main part of the cover features a maze like what I did in 'The Amazing Giants Castle'. It even features the same boy and his dog. I appraoched this as a kind of re-interpretation/follow-up but at a more widely useful size.
From the basic sketch I expanded it to included the spine and the back cover too. See below:


To enter the competition you could enter an unfinished design, which due to a lack of time is exactly what I did. I sent the above sketch to give an idea of how the front and back cover would work. I also sent the image below, which is a more worked up version of the front cover, specifically the maze itself:


I was happy with the design at this stage, but I wasn't happy that I hadn't had time to finish it before sending it off, which made me doubtful of my chances. I was surprised however to find that my entry had gone through to the second stage and was one of the final six based on the voting to that point. All the judges then voted on the remaining six to choose the cover and although I didn't win in the end I did get runner up, which I was very happy with.

I was still happy with the design and decided to finish it so that I could use it on my page in the finished book. Below is the finished version:


Because the image was no longer going to have the back cover part, I decided to move the monster in the fog behind the island, as he was one of my favourite parts of the original design, and i wanted to keep him in. I also zoomed out a bit to both make room for the monster and to show abit more of the island and the sea. It was tricky to get right but I'm happy with the end result.

Below is a weird version that happened when I tried to upload a CMYK formated version for this blog post. I quite like it though!:

Postcard 1

I've not been good at updating my blog for a while and so I've got a few things to catch up with. Here are the images for my very first promotional postcard that had made up in time for my MA Final Show this July. Below is the main picture from the front and is the first ever non-Christmas Greg:


Next is the first ever Ghost Boots strip. Miss Ghost boots has a cameo in The amazing Giants maze (see here and here and here) and is a character I'd like to do more with. I drafted her in here for advertising duties. The postcards were colour on the front and the back is Black and White (and grey). See below:


Although I was happy for Ghost Boots to be Black and white I also did a colour version which most likely will not be used ever. Here it is:


I hope to do more postcards in the future they're fun to make. I hope to start posting more often but some of the things I have done can be posted here for various reasons. At least not yet.......

Happy Belated Birthday Yuki!

Here is a picture I have made as a birthday present for my very talented friend Yuki Nishimura (see her work at www.yukinishimura.com). What started off as a simple drawing to a simple poem that I wrote (inspired by her own work illustrating nonsense poems) kept growing and growing, and getting bigger and bigger until many months had passed with the picture still being unfinished. In the end I decided that I had to draw a line somewhere and I have declared it finished at last. Although I would still like to add more......

Happy Belated Birthday Yuki :-D

Click the above image or here to see a zoomable version. (sometimes you might need to click refresh to get it to load properly)

to see the swish picture Yuki made me for my birthday go here.