This is pretty much the most recent thing I have done to date having completed it only yesterday.

It is a depiction of a character from Chinese folk lore called Monkey or Sūn Wùkōng taken from the book “The Journey to the West” and it’s for a project that I’m working on at the moment.

I grew up watching the TV series which was dubbed into English and I would be sure to be sat crossed legged, watching BBC2 at 6pm on a Tuesday (as I remember).

If you don’t know it follows him and his companions on their journey to India to fetch some Buddhist scriptures and I still watch it with my own kids on DVD today.

He was made to go on this “Journey” by Buddha in penance for his behaviour in the Kingdom of Heaven (He smashed it up a bit, ate all the peaches and peed on the Buddha’s finger).

How’s that for disrespect?

While all the other kids at the time were into Superman or The Hulk, Monkey was my hero and still is.

He was a sort of anti-hero in the fact he was mischievous, arrogant, self centred and refused to do as he was told.

Can’t imagine why I like him so much:)

If you’d like to download it as a desktop (1920×1200) you can do so by clicking HERE and the iPhone wallpaper HERE.

Monkey Magic:)

It’s always nice to stumble across your work on the net and extra nice when someone else put it there.
Whilst looking at the design portal DesignYouTrust I found THIS.

It’s a site that I provided the graphics for and put together by the talented designer Mohsin Amjed

I also made the site mascot based on the owner of the academy.

Mohsin told me he liked it so much he was having a full size cut-out made.

While I was off line recently I wasn’t able to update my blog in any way and one of the things that happened was one of my designs won the title of “Mojichamp”.

It always means a great deal to me when this happens as the people that vote are themselves members of the Mojizu community and are character designers.

Gumbo is the little girls imaginary monster friend and she likes nothing more than to play at tea parties but Gumbo always gets carried away and spoils things. Jemma doesn’t mind so much but she knows that the way out sucks.

You’ve done me proud guys:)

Depending where you are in the world it’s Blog Action Day and bloggers across the world are blogging around the topic “Climate Change”.

I’ve already seen many contributions by other illustrator about this subject so I thought it was time for me to add mine.

Okay I didn’t create this especially for Blog Action Day as it’s from another personal project that I’ve been working on but as it’s a good cause I’d use it as a sneaky peak.

Mine is called Ride a Panda to Work Week. It’s to encourage alternative and less polluting forms of transport. In this case a Panda. I think it could really take off although I don’t know how happy the pandas of the world would be about it.

I recently did an interview with Gareth Coxon who runs Dot Design and keeps a brilliant design blog.

If you fancy a read then you can take a look by clicking here.

While you’re there check out the rest of his blog which is full of articles and interviews.

I was recently asked by the nice people over at VectorTuts+ to write a tutorial about putting an overview together about the process of designing a mascot for a web site from the brief to the finished article.

I admit to underestimating the amount of work these things involve but I enjoyed it none the less.

The tutorial shows how I created the VectorTut’s+ guy and I’ve included some tips into character design for the web and also a number of links to further inspiration on the web.

As an added bonus the original vector files of the mascot and his nine poses are available for free download for your own use.

If you want to check it out it can be found here.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I occasionally frequent the character design community over on Mojizu.

Mojizu is derived from ‘Moji’ the Japanese word meaning character and if you’re not familiar with the site it is a community where character designers can post their creations and the best are chosen to compete in the Moji War.

The winner is decided through several rounds of voting by the other designers and the two top Mojis compete in the Super Match to decide the champ.

Above was my own entry “Ice Cream Angel” in which a little girl cries for the loss of her ice cream as it’s soul drifts off to Homogonised Heaven as it often does.

Well, she walked the walk and did me proud to come in as the Moji Champ.

I’m now off to the freezer to celebrate with two scoops of vanilla flavoured fatty goodness.

Yum!