You may remember these characters from a previous post, the Power of Three have been ripped and upgraded from the Showstoppers artwork and are available now as t-shirts and prints and many other things on my Society 6 page.
I had a lot of fun designing these characters, and drew them in such a way that the illustration could be used in pieces like this.
The East Lancashire School of Dance’s Showstoppers 2013 is looking to be a really exciting show. I would normally shy away from combining too many elements into one poster. Two years ago I did a nice, minimal, Mary Poppins design for the show, but this year’s combination of Phantom of the Opera, Sound of Music, Bugsy Malone and Thriller was a mash-up I couldn’t resist.
My first sketches were all based on Phantom of the Opera, I was looking forward to doing some Batman style, cloak swirling poses. But then I started thinking about what a jerk the Phantom is. He’s a kidnapper. Showstoppers is essentially a celebration of young female talent (there’s not many boys at the dance school) and it seemed an odd choice to highlight this obsessed, creepy man, in the publicity. Of course he had to be there, as he’s the iconic thing about that musical, but I’ve purposefully had him hide behind Tallulah, who (in my interpretation at least) is an up-front, splurge gun-totting heroine, alongside Maria (who has God on her side). The best the phantom can do is strike a pose.
There’s a strong comic book influence to the composition; it has the feel of a team book and I would love to hear the banter between these characters. Imagine Maria and Tallulah on a road trip, chased by under-age mafia and with a reluctant passenger, the phantom, hiding in the trunk of their stolen car.
Tickets are on sale now from the Burnley Mechanics website.
The workplace is a dangerous environment and this set of health and safety posters are here to highlight the four major potential hazards of office life.
Of course there are many more dangerous things in an office. There’s no protection from an overly sarcastic colleague, for instance. But that was outside my remit.
These posters were produced for Burnley Council. You can find lots more work done by the council’s graphics unit at creative-council.net
I’ve been inspired by snow. It’s been a long winter* and I feel like my personal work has been under a blanket of the stuff. Certainly it’s been a very long time since I wrote anything, especially anything like a story.
This week was the Artists’ Hangout, and I’d been inspired by the theme of this month’s meeting to produce a short illustrated story on the theme of snow. I’m also inspired by fellow hanger-outer, Ashley, who’s just re-started his blog and hosted a writing workshop at the hangout. I enjoyed doing more story making and hopefully this flurry of creativity will continue!
* aside – it’s a been a normal length winter, but for the sake of the opening paragraph I chose to embellish…