In the meantime, if anybody wondered what a day in the studio here is like, this is about as close as we can get to conveying it to you in audiovisual form. Picture the scene, its 9.00am, the wrought iron gates of Studiospooky open, and in we come…

Tee graphic

This is a piece that is part of a larger body of work in progress at the moment for a particular cause. More on this later!

Citizen Journalism and the Photographer's quest

I’ve been invited to resent at Pecha-Kucha and I wanted to illustrate a thought about the cynical side of citizen journalism in the hands of creative people with fancy cameras. This is a sketchbook rough and I intend to expand on the topic in large format artworks.

Where have all the real writers gone?

Single page editorial illustration for Syndicated Writers Group of America. The piece accompanies an article describing the business shift in publishing which pretty much ensures we’ll never get another Hemingway, Bukowski or Mailer due to the need to appeal to the largest possible consumer sector.

Personal work. The last in a series of decommissioned droids.

Agree / disagree

3 colour print for Technology Ireland

Last thing before we broke up for Christmas, Horp created this retro-style graphic art for Technology Ireland.
The article was about the imminent arrival of ‘Nanotech proper’ and evoked a sense of us being on the cusp of
a brave new world. Horp decided to approach it as though the stuff of comic book science fiction… after all, it
isn’t here yet… and to evoke the graphic style of the 50’s, a time of great scientific excitement.

Deliberate mis-registration and crude edging with coarse screenwork achieved the effect of magnifying a detail
from a comic book.

Artwork in position on spread

The latest in a series of drawings inspired by pub names.

Below: Orbit has been at it again. First he broke his allegiance to the pencil and started working in pen, now he’s started using paint.
We are worried about where all this might lead and anticipate his arrival in the studio one day wearing a beret and black turtle neck.

Editorial piece for The Retail Trade Guild's members magazine

Below: Various sketchbook pieces that Orbit has noodled up over the break
using his brand new set of paints that he got from Father Christmas.

Sketchbook noodle

“Not For Sale” For sale

^ Orbit says:
I actually saw an item similar to this on sale in an antique auction in Lewes a couple of years ago.
I was there to bid on an old dentist’s chair but there was this job lot of 150 mahogany, bakerlight and stained glass
“Not for sale” signs from the 30’s. They had these tiny little lights, like fibreoptics, that illuminated the coloured glass
slab on the back of which was etched the lettering (filled with gold leaf or paint). Presumably you could slot in different messages.
It struck me how beautifully engineered and sturdy these things were, as though to enforce the exclusivity of whatever item was not
for sale, and yet here they were, years later, themselves on sale. I really wanted one but they were only selling all 150 as a job lot.
I couldn’t even take a photograph as I didn’t have a camera on me.

Below: A few tiny watercolour paintings I did in my Moleskine over the Christmas break.

Super tiny watercolour paintings.

Super tiny watercolour paintings.

Below: Ranger Roy is a long-standing joke between my friends which amounts to little more than asking ‘What would Ranger Roy do?’.
Ranger Roy was originally based on Roy Schneider who once cracked us up in some film we have long since forgotten, but Ranger Roy
has evolved over the years into a character who doesn’t give a damn about anything. He’s our excuse to misbehave.

Ranger Roy, not to be messed with.

Below:
This is a very old piece of work that was never finished, but I thought about it whilst painting over Christmas.
It was originally done for an exhibition at The Conningsby Gallery London entitled Voxpops, and was entitled
“You distract them while I pump them full of junk” and was a comment on the way colourful graphics and
illustration is often used to dazzle and distract people while they are fed a branded sales message.

It was an early attempt at painting but I didn’t like the result so I abandoned it and did something else.
I may re-work the piece with my new-found love of paints….

From the archive: A concept piece for Voxpops @ Conningsby Gallery 2005

From the archive: A concept piece for Voxpops @ Conningsby Gallery 2005

From the archive: A concept piece for Voxpops @ Conningsby Gallery 2005