Hey hey, remember me. Still don’t know what the story is with the comments is on the site so I really should take this opportunity to admit to lots of things without getting slagged. Lots of things happening, mad busy with illustration work and an nice little animated short.

Here’s a recent one for Topps, I love this kind of stuff.

Lashing rain the past week here in Spain and my studio is freezing. Hard to recall the sweltering summer where I just wore a pair of shorts all day and slept with a fan on. I’ve slept with a few fans before. ZING! No I’d have to put the fan that I assembled right beside my bed and I could never relax thinking that it would come undone, fall on me and chop off my mickey.

Heh heh, if you’ve read this blog for any amount of time you will know how much of a dope I am, getting dates wrong, not knowing vital contemporary topics etc but check this one out. I drew a piece for what I thought was called ‘Everything that I wanted’

And now just finding the link I read it’s called ‘Just what I always wanted’ and it has to be about a toy you wanted. Ah well, I suppose a meat grinder is a toy. It’s all for charity. I’ll probably bid on Phil’s or Chris’ if I can. Fair play to Craig and Liam for organising this and hopefully they can get their ‘press photos’ into the Metro on the back of this.

I don’t read emails I just glance over them so I miss things, and when they’re written with ‘flair’ I just zone out. An example of flair would be this, written by me:

“Hey all you groovy go getters, Just slinging an old e-mule into the inbox to drop the lowdown on those of you who aren’t privvy to whuz ‘appenin. If you have not had a chance yet to peruse my previous mail, we here at Twisted Pepper towers are proud to announce we have secured a new dining station!! so be sure to swing by and kick back with a Corona and lime.”

When it could just say:
‘Hello, we bought a new table. We close at 11 during the week’
See,all the info you need. I fucking hate this ‘perusal’, ‘privvy’, ‘we here at Clamnut Towers’ shit. Grow up. It’s 2010 in a month

‘There was always that one toy you really, really wanted.

www.thecomiccast.com

Slammed these out in record time on Saturday. They’re for my girlfriends project, yes she is 8. Nah she’s setting Little Red Riding Hood to jazz music as part of her thesis and needed some pics. I love the wacky and tenuously linked esoteric subjects picked for thesis’s. Theres a lad in the states doing his on Amperduke…

I write to request written permission to reproduce images from Mister Amperduke in my dissertation, ‘We Are Disghosted’: Changing Conceptions of Modern Ireland in Twentieth-Century Irish Fiction. I would like to include a textual analysis of your work alongside two of Sebastian Barry’s novels [The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998) and The Secret Scripture (2008)] in a chapter entitled “Éire! Éire! Éire!: Colonial Consciousness and the Specters of Empire in the Work of Sebastian Barry, and Bob Byrne.” As is customary, I would reproduce no more than ten percent of the entire work, and in fact would need to reproduce only about five percent as a way to provide evidence for my arguments. All references and reproductions would be attributed to you using documentation that adheres to the Modern Language Association (MLA) guidelines.

My analysis centers on the importance of Mister Amperduke to developments in Irish literary historiography, mainly in the ways in which it provides a post-colonial perspective of policies surrounding ‘The Emergency,’ and particularly how you does so in an emerging, non-canonical medium.

Ohh lah de dah! No, it’s a big compliment

This has been the easiest, wedding caricature yet. I’ve just set up a new site for my caricature pictures here, presenting ….Caricature Gifts.ie

I bought the basic Manga Studio last week and it’s fucking deadly. I’ll deffo do the 24 hour comics challenge this year in about 8 hours with this.

Aw what a wicko cutey pie

Opted to practice colouring on Friday night instead of playing that awful video game. It’s good but to the trained eye you can see where I mess up and all the amateur mistakes.. The values are all wrong, I should have painted it in greyscale first because the blacks aren’t consistent. See the sickeningly detailed version here

I began work on a new Amperduke story over the weekend and it’s a gem. Lot’s of posts this week!

Been messing around with skin the past two weeks to try improve my caricatures. I have a new method that’s really quick to do and looks good.

Some makey up face

A wedding one in progress

The maniacal leer of my esteemed colleague Mr. P. I’m doing a family portrait for him.

I still struggle with digital painting. There’s just too many options! Figuring out how to apply tones and colours to my comics was a breakthrough though. Below is my first ‘coloured’ page done with Corel Photopaint 6 back in 1998. Man half of Amperduke and all the MBLEH’s were coloured in Photopaint with a mouse! If you’re anyway serious about messing with colour you need a Wacom.

Beautiful

De-Deh! Churned this out last night.

I’ll get back in illustrated blogs next week with a few new doozies from my painfully interesting life.

Yep yep, here’s the finished line art for the RiRa cover.

Hewwo my lovely little pal fwends! Back in work with a boner for life. Just a quickie to start off the year. I’ve been honoured to be asked to draw the cover for the first issue of RiRa, the new Irish comic for kids as Gaelige. The first issue was kind of a free promo and it featured one of my pages in Irish.

So, here are three of the designs I submitted to Editor Aidan Courtney. Just roughs but I did a quick colour job on them.

Gotta love them cute little wormies!

Much more in the Buster/Whizzer and Chips style. I liked this one too.


Twiddleyboing!

He picked the right one. Can you? I’m nearly finished the final artwork which I’ll put up tomorrow.

PS: Fuck Israel