One of my all time favourite games!

I love Onimusha but when I scooped up a copy in America mine had this really lame printed out cover that just looked really gross and after spending far too much time with the game I wanted to justify that time by putting more work back into it.

This cover was the result!

I have always loved this creepy little easter egg so as a warm up one night I wanted to draw up my own version of it.

This work was a banner for the band Death by Horse, a punk band from Sweden. It was an absolute pleasure to work for them and look forward to potentially working with them again in the future.

I’ve spoken a few times of my love of cosmic horror and I think a lot of it stems from being allowed to play ‘Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem’ as a child.

That game probably still stands as one of the all time best lovecraftian horror games without being directly linked to the author and at the time of playing it I wouldn’t have even realised it.

This character, Pious Augustus, is corrupted and becomes a missionary to the ancients causing him to be the main antagonist of the story. I’ve always loved his evil centurion look.

Throughout this portfolio there have been a few references to the 1964 movie ‘Masque of the Red Death’. As soon as I saw it I kind of fell in love, it was my first Vincent Price movie and as cheesy as it can be in places I think it deals with horror in a way that seems lost now. Every character has an incredible amount of presence and the visuals have kept me busy sketching for a while.

This character is the eponymous Red Death and his quotes throughout the movie have been an endless source of inspiration for drawings in this book.

“Sic transit gloria mundi”

With my work being so heavily focused on black and white I’ve recently really been trying to crack down on that aspect and find out how I can further the style.

This branches off into two paths. Working out every tone between black and white ala artists such as Bernie Wrightson or Brian Bolland or working out what details to omit resulting in a stronger piece overall ala Frank Millar or Mike Mignola.

I recently was lucky enough to meet and talk to Frank Millar in person and I think it really lit a fire under me.

Although I was already a colossal fan it got me looking at all his work all over again and especially at how he drew certain characters.

He has an incredible sense of what to leave out of a drawing as still have it show as clear as if he had drawn it all, that was a massive inspiration on these drawings.

Another massive inspiration to me at the moment is a show about manga artists called ‘Manben’. It shows a series of Japanese artists inking their comic pages, usually with a metal nib and seeing how they worked and layered their lines to shape their images really made me look a little harder into how I do the same both digitally and traditionally.

The show is also where the experimentation with screen tone has come from.

Whilst scrolling through my instagram feed one of the photographers I follow had posted a woman posing in a hood similar to this.

Whilst I’m not into it personally I thought it was pretty cool how it seemed to condense the face down to its basic features and I felt like it was something that would look great portrayed in stark black and white.

(There are four in this series, Keep scrolling down!)

I recently was lucky enough to meet Rob Del Naja, and after he looked through my work we discussed how an animation of a life cycle could be cool in my art style and it got me excited to try it someday.

The amount of animation needed to crack that at the time was a little too insane so for the mean time its serving as a healthy break for those who get sick of my more violent work. It was fun to try and draw something new though.

Inspired by a photo from ‘Nature is Scary’. This drawing is based off of the results of a coyote hunt and the photo of it was kind of staggering, seeing the head completely untouched but the body left in this state.

Those who know me know I have the worlds shortest attention span and that means I usually have a difficult time with RPG’s but there is a hideously underrated one, ‘Lisa: The Painful RPG’.

Not only was it one of the few to keep me playing right up until the end I would say that its one of my all time favourite games full stop and it was created by one guy, Austin Jorgensen.

The game is set during a post-apocalypse that has killed all the women and left behind only men and mutants. The lead character Brad comes across the last female on earth, a little baby, and the story is of him raising and protecting her in this world.

This character is one of my favourites from the game. A mutated fast food mascot who is revered as a God as he delivers food for those in the wasteland.

You can find a video of the art on my Youtube channel.

More inspiration from Nature is Scary.

I couldn’t get over how cool and creepy this photo I had found of a hermit crab using a baby doll head as a shell was. I can just imagine how unsettling finding that out in the wild would be.

I follow ‘Nature is Scary’ on twitter and its a constant stream of photos that inspire me to draw, I cannot recommend it enough.

When I saw a photo of a harpy eagle I knew I had to draw it, I love how evil they look with their crown of feathers. I also found that when eagles blink they have an inner eyelid that when it moves across the eye makes them look dead eyed and even cooler.

I think there was about a years difference between this piece and the Brexit one and it’s something I had thought about doing for a while.

It seems about right that there be a US equivalent of the UK version seeing as the crazy political climate seemed to follow me across the pond!

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me how much I love the movie ‘They Live’ and I had always wanted to draw some of the aliens from it.

With the climate as it was when I left the UK I felt that this was quite a fitting time to combine that with some commentary on the whole ordeal.

The final piece is actually animated between two drawings. You can find that on my Instagram.

This was based on a sketch I sent out to a punk band. They decided that they couldn’t go for it at the time but who knows moving forward. I was pretty into how the sketch looked so I finished it up.

“Perish, foul creatures! I am Siegmeyer of Catarina, and you shall feel my wrath!”

It’s easy to dismiss Siegmeyer as a lazy non entity in the game Dark Souls but to me I found his story one of the most interesting if you follow it through.

I think at the moment DC is catching a pretty hard break in the media. Their films have honestly been lagging behind Marvel and its sad to see. It’s even sadder to me that I’ve heard people say DC suck, solely based off of their movie presence which isn’t true at all.

I very rarely buy single issues of comics any more as I just wait for the trade paper backs and grab those instead but as soon as I heard about DC’s Metal event I tried to grab everything I could.

The Batman who Laughs immediately became my favourite comic character in recent times.

In the Metal event the story shows a range of Batmen from alternate dimensions become twisted evil amalgamations including a Batman/ Doomsday crossover called ‘The Devastator’, a Batman/ Flash crossover called ‘The Red Death’ and the Batman/Joker crossover call the ‘Batman who laughs’.

Having a villain that mixes the skills of Batman, the Joker’s absence of moral code and visual call backs to 2000AD’s Judge Death, I just immediately fell in love with this character and couldn’t stop drawing him.

I think at the moment DC is catching a pretty hard break in the media. Their films have honestly been lagging behind Marvel and its sad to see. It’s even sadder to me that I’ve heard people say DC suck, solely based off of their movie presence which isn’t true at all.

I very rarely buy single issues of comics any more as I just wait for the trade paper backs and grab those instead but as soon as I heard about DC’s Metal event I tried to grab everything I could.

The Batman who Laughs immediately became my favourite comic character in recent times.

In the Metal event the story shows a range of Batmen from alternate dimensions become twisted evil amalgamations including a Batman/ Doomsday crossover called ‘The Devastator’, a Batman/ Flash crossover called ‘The Red Death’ and the Batman/Joker crossover call the ‘Batman who laughs’.

Having a villain that mixes the skills of Batman, the Joker’s absence of moral code and visual call backs to 2000AD’s Judge Death, I just immediately fell in love with this character and couldn’t stop drawing him.

Me and a few of my colleagues run a sort of horror club in our studio where we get together and watch horror movies together.

One night we randomly came across ‘The Void’ despite having never heard anything about it before and we immediately watched it. It has ever since been one of my favourite modern horror movies. It mixes up stunning practical effects with crazy strong visual imagery to make an amazing cosmic horror story that I love.

Whilst Doom was on its way out all of the screenshots and playable betas we got were driving me insane. I didn’t like any of what I was seeing, the usually colourful game seemed to have been turned into a drab multiplayer focused game from everything we were given.

Then the game came out.

The game was bright, brutal and funny with a killer soundtrack to boot. It really felt like classic Doom brought into a new age and I wanted to draw everything from it.

A pretty decent lesson in patience!

I love Thanos. I love how powerful he is and how much he messed up the heroes of the Marvel universe and I love that at the core he seems to be a stroppy kid just trying to prove himself to Lady Death.

I’m really excited to see how well he is portrayed in the MCU in Infinity War later this month.

(Fun fact: People really didn’t seem to like that I drew him killing Iron Man... #TeamCap)

Whilst I was back in the UK I heard about a Monster Hunter zine that was being run accepting fan art entries.

Monster Hunter is a franchise I have spent an embarrassing amount of hours in over the years and so to get an excuse to draw the awesome Rathalos armour was immediately taken.

This drawing was done entirely on an iPad with the Apple Pencil and I am really surprised at how close to my usual work that allowed me to get.

This would have been for a tour banner but it wasn’t to be at the time. Again I liked the sketch too much to leave it behind and finished it up.

I’ve been told in the time since that it looks like it was designed for a video game controller which has definitely gotten me thinking about trying that out

The text comes from the movie

‘Masque of the Red Death’

After seeing ‘The Force Awakens’ Kylo Ren quickly became my new favourite character. I love his costume and I like how layered he is as a character. I heard a lot of people complain about how whiny he is but I think that’s kind of the point.

I find it interesting that instead of the dark creeping in on the light its the other way around.

This is a drawing from my last book, Ghosts.

This was an exaggerated portrait of my own arm and tattoos. I thought it would be cool to try and bring the images to life.

The two tattoos are a heart on my sleeve and a rose as an homage to my mother as her only tattoo is of a rose

During late 2017 I had Matt come visit me here in the US and for the week that he stayed we drew together constantly and played an ungodly amount of Tekken.

We wanted to work on something that showcased both of our work at the same time rather than another pencil/ ink collaboration like before so we decided to each do a side of a playing card.

You can find a video of the art on my Youtube channel.

Blasphemous is a game that I recently helped kickstart. It blends incredible pixel art and brutal gameplay and I swear I have never backed anything quicker or for as much money as I did this.

They recently ran a fan art competition for the game and this was my entry for that.

You can find a video of the art on my Youtube channel.

(The next four pieces all come together to form a single piece.)

These drawings were an absolute dream come true for me. For the longest time I was a massive fan of the Swedish band Fucking Werewolf Asso, a band who label themselves as ‘Spazz-core’.

The singer of the band is Dennis Wedin, one half of ‘Dennaton Games’, the creators of the game series Hotline Miami. He had noticed the fan art I had drawn of both of his games (Found in my earlier books Bent Penny and Ghosts respectively) and reached out and asked if I wanted to draw something for his band.

I jumped at the chance and because they are still a relatively unknown band I asked if it would be okay for me to make a video of each piece and promote their 10 year career. The video includes tracks from each of their albums over the years and Easter egg references to some of their old videos.

With a name like ‘Fucking Werewolf Asso’ it wasn’t too hard to find the inspiration for these drawings. I was asked to draw a werewolf for each member of the band holding their instrument on a throne.

I think I lucked out because we were both playing Bloodborne at the time so when I was asked if I could make the werewolves all gory and decayed the answer was a resounding “Hell yes”.

you can find the video on my youtube channel.

This cover was a bit of a stressful nightmare to create and I’m still not sure overall how happy I am with it but I like the concept. The book was called Creaking Guts. Not out of any attempt at being ‘edgy’ but more out of the weird sounds my stomach would make when I sat in silent classrooms drawing, as silly as it was its something that always stuck with me and the name had been planned for years due to that.

If you turn this image on its side its quite clearly the internal organs of the body but with it being a wrap around cover I wanted to bring it in so zoomed up and at an angle that it more becomes an uncomfortable abstraction of shapes rather than the explicit nature of gore. I’m not sure if that came across but it was fun trying to make it happen.

This image was kind of funny to me. Its actually much older than the rest of them here, the new cover definitely serves as an updated version but the fact that the idea had been there for this book for so long I felt that this had to be included in the mix.

Whilst back in the UK my mum dug out a bunch of my drawing books from when I was a very young kid and one of them showed me sat playing a Sega Master System and Alex Kidd: In Miracle world.

As funny as it was to see a drawing from baby me it reminded me of the fact that when I actually played that game as a kid it used to scare the hell out of me.

The boss fights in this game are played through Rock, Paper, Scissors or ‘Janken’ and the bosses heads were their hands. It was crazy creepy to see this horrible moving heads throwing hand signs.

Remembering this definitely made me want to draw it now and show how I must have seen it as a kid.

Alex Kidd: In Nightmare World!

You can find a video of the art on my Youtube channel.

Stereodeth is a comic I have been writing on and off for a little while and just need to find the time to draw up.

It focuses on Cabb, A sentient death metal obsessed speaker’s quest to attend a gladiatorial battle of the bands and prove to the world that death metal is the only genre of music worth a damn.

The art was heavily inspired by Sam Keith’s ‘The Maxx’ crossed with those old hand drawn Xeroxed thrash metal posters you would see put up in dive bars.

Cass is Cabb’s best friend and the quiet, collected foil to the ball of rage.

Cass is obsessed with funeral doom and

atmospheric black metal and as such is much more placid but still close enough in terms of genre to not be considered a mortal enemy of death metal. He is usually too absorbed by his cassette player to be interested in Cabb’s quibbles but is happy to tag along for the adventure.

Shin Godzilla got a super limited release here in the US but that didn’t stop me going to see it twice and grabbing the bluray as soon as it came out.

I’ve heard people say that Godzilla looks silly in this one, especially in his infant forms, but I feel like that helped really offset the moments where he really goes hard on Tokyo. Plus I love that he looks a ton more evil than regular Godzilla.

You can find a video of the art on my Youtube channel.

This was my entry for a collaborative zine with a bunch of other artists over on instagram.

Ever since I drew Saren for my book ‘Bent Penny’ I have wanted to make it a kind of diptych piece with someone facing off against him.

It had to be my favourite hero from the original Mass Effect, Wrex.

You can find a video of the art on my Youtube channel.

“Is submission not preferable to extinction?”

I’m a huge fan of the Mass Effect games and this piece was a spin off from and idea I had for a custom cover I was going to do.

In the end I decided it didn’t work so well as a game cover, but I liked the illustration too much to not at least ink it.

When I was returning to university to finish my degree I was asked to complete a pre-course project over the holidays before it started. We were asked to do a cover and a series of spot illustrations for a book of our choosing.

I knew I didn’t want to do a graphic novel as that would have been a little bit too obvious for me they have plenty of imagery of their own already. I had always heard of people my age having to read Lord of the Flies in school when they were younger but I was never made to during my time there so I decided to go back and read it around this time.

I was told by so many people that I would hate it but I think school must have had a bad effect on them because I absolutely loved it. It definitely gave me plenty of ideas to draw from.

With my love of drawing bloody horror scenes the Lord of the Flies himself was an obvious choice for the cover image (although ill leave it up to you to decided if that would ever actually get picked for a children’s novel cover) but I was pretty excited to draw the conch. As simple as it was I hadn’t ever drawn one, at least not in this style. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.

Those of you who picked up my last book ‘Ghosts’ will recognise these as the sketches for them were included there. That book itself was a project for the University course.

When I was returning to university to finish my degree I was asked to complete a pre-course project over the holidays before it started. We were asked to do a cover and a series of spot illustrations for a book of our choosing.

I knew I didn’t want to do a graphic novel as that would have been a little bit too obvious for me they have plenty of imagery of their own already. I had always heard of people my age having to read Lord of the Flies in school when they were younger but I was never made to during my time there so I decided to go back and read it around this time.

I was told by so many people that I would hate it but I think school must have had a bad effect on them because I absolutely loved it. It definitely gave me plenty of ideas to draw from.

With my love of drawing bloody horror scenes the Lord of the Flies himself was an obvious choice for the cover image (although ill leave it up to you to decided if that would ever actually get picked for a children’s novel cover) but I was pretty excited to draw the conch. As simple as it was I hadn’t ever drawn one, at least not in this style. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.

Those of you who picked up my last book ‘Ghosts’ will recognise these as the sketches for them were included there. That book itself was a project for the University course.

Back when I was living in Swansea, UK, I was approached by one of my favourite bands from the local scene, Piss Viper, to do the art for their latest single, ‘Cold Dead Grip’.

The song was about the indoctrination of people by religion so the imagery of nuns came immediately to mind.

This was an entry for a T-shirt company contest. The theme was ‘Leviathan’, that word is usually more fitting sea creatures like great whales or the kraken but the contest allowed for a wider range of colossal monsters.

Being a fan of Lovecraftian cosmic horror I wanted to take it in the direction of a Leviathan from beyond the cosmos.

Motherstone is a project that I feel like I have been working on forever. I had been kicking around the idea forever but eventually returned to it when I had to go back to finish up my illustration degree.

The story of Motherstone is about the dangers of obsession and not letting yourself forget those who are important around you. It is also tied around how dangerous the job of a deep sea diver was back during the time of pressurized suits.