Playing Pirates

New Year, new ideas

This is an early mock up for a new project. The illustrations are still very rough but so far I am happy with this. Shows promise. More on this soon.

Two Great books

I received Enrique Fernandez version of 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' on Friday. I quite seriously sat and read it with my jaw dropped. It is so beautiful in every way that am still reeling. The character design, colours layout . . . everything is just nailed. So many good things to say about it but I haven't time now suffice to say if you don't already own this your next stop should be Amazon.

The other book I got last week was Dustin d'Arnault's self published comic The Half Man. It is a wonderfully inky imagining of an African myth. A tense atmospheric 'David and Goliath' tale set in a dense jungle. I can't say enough good things about his Dustin's Inks. I highly recommend this book. If you need more persuasion then you are supporting self publishing which is a great model for aspiring artists and if you are interested in producing your own one day then it is excuse to check out the service over at Lulu

J.C.Leyendecker Book

Today I received the new book on J.C.Leyendecker that I have been looking forward for ages. I am so pleased with it as it has so much more visual content than I expected and the quality is first rate. Not to mention, though it goes without saying, that Leyendecker is awesome. If you are unfamiliar go here, here and here to check out his beautiful work and be awestruck by his clean confident and graphic style. I'm too lazy to write a quick biographical note but I will tell you that the book is dominated by more than 600 pictures including all 322 of the Saturday Evening Post covers the classic Arrow collar images and lots of less familiar paintings. It would perhaps have been nice to have seen a few more roughs and some of his sketches but the book is great without them. I'm going to go back to pouring over it now.