Two covers I completed recently, one for Health Service Journal and one for Nursing Times. Both of these were commissioned and directed by Judy at Emap, who had a clear concept of what she wanted for each cover, so my role was really to work on sketches following her instruction and finish up the artwork once I had hit the nail on the head.

Nursing Times cover. I did the illustration as a linocut, the text handwritten in Adobe Illustrator.

Health Service Journal cover. This was created mostly in Adobe Illustrator. I exported the finished vector artwork to Photoshop and added my own print textures.

A detail of the HSJ cover.

Thanks to Judy at Emap for these fun commissions!

Here’s a cover I did last month for Druglink’s 10th anniversary issue. It was fun to play around with the text, squeezing all those words in there and fitting fun illustrations in the gaps. Hand-made text is something I would like to work on a lot more in my illustration work in the future.

Here’s are a selection of illustrations from a job I have been working on for a while that I’ve been looking forward to putting on here. Working under the direction of Jenn Maer at Ideo in San Francisco, I was commissioned to produce 24 illustrations for a website they have produced called bedsider.org, which is a “free support network for birth control operated by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy”. Generally, the website aims to help young women get on, and stay on, birth control. The tone is sex positive, open, casual and friendly – and, importantly, non-judgmental.

There were certain limitations, the main technical one being that, although I was producing images for web use, the client might want to use the illustrations for print use in the future, so they had to be produced as scalable vectors. We also decided to really limit the palette to the colours used on the Bedsider website. In general, they needed to be clear and informative, whilst trying to avoid letting them become boring and devoid of style.

I’m really pleased with how they turned out and had a great time working on them. It was also a pleasure working under the art direction of Ideo. The illustrations can be seen here: bedsider.org/methods (website requires registration).

And here’s a screenshot of one of the illustrations in place on the site:

These illustrations have just been published in Popular Mechanics magazine for a multiple page feature on how to become an inventor. They were used at the foot of the page to show highlights of invention. At only 3cm high, the challenge really was to keep them simple enough to be easily read, but to make them funky enough to look cool in the feature. I tried a couple of different options stylistically to begin with before the art director decided on this simple drawing style in a limited colour palette. I did these in Corel Painter.

And here are the couple of other stylistic variations I tried at the start:


I quite like both of these, but at 3cm high, they are just too subtle in their detail.

I did this illustration quite a while ago now, but what with moving home and office and all that, I never got round to putting it up here. This was a commission for Popular Mechanics for an article about lab tests by researchers at Birmingham Uni to see who draws faster in a gunfight. Apparently, the second person to draw moves faster, but the advantage isn’t enough to make the difference in a real gunfight! The artwork is a combination of ink, lino and photoshop.

I was also tasked to create a couple of icons for other small articles on the page. Initially I kept the same style so the page would work well as a whole, but the art director felt that they weren’t working, so I tried something slicker. In the end they used photographs, but I really like the two hand drawn icons so I wanted to include them here. No doubt I will use them somewhere.