Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Happy Christmas!


Here's me and some of my family (my dad was taking the picture), on the beach on Christmas Eve.... I\m the tall one on the right with the short person on my shoulders...

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Animation


Jago's Animation from Jago Silver on Vimeo.

Here's an animation I made during a two day workshop with fantabulous animator Chris Stonehill

Friday, November 07, 2008

Friday, October 31, 2008

Photoshop for Beginners - Week Five



Using text, Layer Styles and Filters

To download as a PDF, click the Scribd button on the top left and then click the Download button on the next page.

Photoshop for Beginners - Week Four - Extra!



This week we're looking at how to fake a depth of field effect.

To download as a PDF, click the Scribd button on the top left and then click the Download button on the next page.

Photoshop for Beginners - Week Four



This week we're looking at making a photo collage, Contact sheets and how to age a photo.

To download as a PDF, click the Scribd button on the top left and then click the Download button on the next page.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Digital Polaroids





Just found a great app for Mac OSX that lets you turn any photo into a Polaroid, get it here, it's free.

Interview with me, about the Jesus Storybook Bible




Sarah Short from the Short Stop blog, asked to interview me last week to accompany an interview with the Jesus Storybook Bible author, Sally Lloyd-Jones.

Here's an extract, to read the rest go here.

How long did it take you to complete the illustrations in The Jesus Storybook Bible?


In total I worked on the illustrations for around 10 months pretty much full time, although I did also manage to fit in buying my first house, moving house and having a baby (with some help from my lovely wife)... There are 180 illustrations in the book and I had to produce rough drawings for each of them before moving on to the final coloured artwork. I work digitally so each of the drawings was drawn initially in pencil, then again in ink and then scanned in to my Mac. I then created the colours and textures in Photoshop. The whole book fills up about 75Gb of space (150 CD's or 16 DVD's!) and I had to keep several backups while I was working on it so that I wouldn't lose it if something catastrophic happened to my computer. Once the artwork was finished, Sally and the publishers had to approve it and suggest any changes that needed to be made.

How did you come up with the vision for the illustrations? How would you describe the style of these illustrations?

I'm often asked this and the answer is very simple, but often suprising to some people: the text. This is where the inspiration always comes from first, I simply read the page and see what pops in to my head. Then I draw it and see if what I've drawn would look better viewed from further away or closer up, or from above (like the city of Jericho in the book), or from down low (like the spread with Goliath). That's it in a nutshell, the really tricky bit is getting the pictures on the paper (or screen) to look like the pictures in my head!




Saturday, October 18, 2008

Recent Sketchbook pages






I've been trying out some of the techniques my current A Level students are using...