Tony Benn

From a time when conviction politics and tobacco smoking were still legal...

Machete!

Some full colour Grindhouse madness with Danny Trejo as Machete. Lines in Sketchbook Pro, coloured in Photoshop.

Eric Cantona

King Eric! Apparently, doing little recently to shake off his bad-boy image...

Get Sketchin' with Sketchbook Pro - now as an App!

As regular visitors to this blog may already know, I'm a big fan of the illustration and drawing software 'Sketchbook Pro' which is created by Autodesk. For the last couple of years all my black and white caricatures have been drawn with it and all my colour ones have been roughed out with it. Sketchbook Pro has the most intuitive graphite pencil and ink pen effect that I've discovered so far and (unless it's specifically called for) has replaced old school pencil and paper in my drawing and design work. When used with my Cintiq it combines to make a killer combination. It's very reasonably priced, making a professional package affordable for amateur and professional alike.
I had an email recently from the nice people at Autodesk who'd picked up that I'd mentioned SBP in my posts and asked if I could mention a new web page of theirs covering all their creative design apps, which include many funky products for your smart gadgets - all to create cool designs and fx. I'm more than happy to mention companies that produce great products that have helped me in what I love to do, so, if you're into this kinda tech, and you want to know more, then hit this link which will take you to their apps page. Keep creatin'!

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Phew! Bit of a late upload - but I wanted to push through and get this finished. So here is the great and rather marvellous astro-physicist and science communicator, Mr Neil deGrasse Tyson; of whom which I'm a big fan. Thrilled to hear he's hosting the recently re-vamped 'Cosmos' series - taking over (many years later) from that other great science communicator; Carl Sagan. If you like popular science but aren't familiar with him then check out his talks and interviews on YouTube. Not dull.

John Kerry

Mr Kerry - beseeching divine guidance? I learnt a trick a long time ago from studying the art of the master cartoonist and caricature artist Derek Bauer, in how to represent certain lines by keeping them simple and 'patterned' - especially when juxtaposed with areas of furious detail. When I came to draw John Kerry's hair, having completed the face with all its detail, it just ended up being too much, somehow. Representing his hair using simple wavy lines gave the contrast needed and kept the comical element.

(Sketchbook Pro + Cintiq)

Ibrahim Tapa

Good luck, Ibrahim.