I used to draw a little when I was a kid, although back then it was mainly limited to pictures of little guys fighting each other (usually robots, but sometimes not) and bad fan-art of various videogame characters. I was never particularly serious about it. I certainly wasn't much good at art at school, although my only memories of art classes are making hats out of cardboard boxes and shoes out of bin-bags... or maybe it was the other way around.
A few months before I started university, I played Final Fantasy 7. I fell in love with the setting and characters enough to decide that I wanted to have a go at learning to draw "properly" (presumably so that I could make fan-art, because there just isn't enough FF7 fan-art in the world), and spent a good while thereafter churning out pretty awful renditions of the FF7 cast. I seem to recall thinking I was really good at that point in time. It's all quite embarrassing really.
Thankfully, with a good balance of people telling me that I could draw half-decently, other people telling me that I was really pretty awful, and a whole lot of doodling during my lectures, I ended up getting quite a lot better at it. I drew a bunch of pictures for promotional posters for various clubs and societies while at university. I remember making posters for Nottingham Forum and the Anime & Manga Society, and I also remember the LGBT Society "borrowing" some of my art... was never quite sure what to make of that. I'm sure there were a couple of others that I've forgotten about. In any case, it was quite odd to see my shoddy old art staring at me while walking around the campus.
Since then, I've drawn pictures for various books (including covers and interior art), convention badges and T-shirts, and I've been involved in a couple of workshops at galleries and given a few artsy tutorials at various anime societies. Despite all that, I'm happy to say that my ego is now a lot less inflated and unhealthy than it was when I started out - I guess it is a case of "the more you know, you more you realise you don't know" or something like that.
At this point I have to shamelessly point out that, in addition to providing art for a few books, I've made an art-book all of my very own! It's published through Lulu; if you'd like to check it out, you can find it here.
Anyway, in this section of the site you can find a whole bunch of my pictures. Rather than recycling this section from the art-based waffling that I had displayed on the old version of my site, I've remade it all from scratch. I'm still not sure what the best way of laying everything out is, so things might end up moving around a bit in the future. Hopefully it works well enough for now, at least!
Some pictures have a "details" button, like the one shown to the left, placed near to their thumbnail. This button will take you to some additional comments that I've written about various aspects of the picture. Unlike on my old website, I haven't written comments for every single picture I've posted here. I like it better this way, as I can post up a picture and add some extra comments later if and when I feel like it.
- Colour Pictures, in most cases inked and shaded to some reasonably polished standard, but there are also some sketchier coloured pieces here.
- Mono Pictures, most of which are decidedly sketchy, though some are fairly clean and kept to a single hue for reasons of speed or style.
- Junk, which is where I've thrown everything that I now tend to find painfully embarrassing. Some people allegedly like my old pictures, so I've put them here for posterity.
- Wallpapers, which should be fairly self-explanatory; this is where I've put designs that are suitable for use as desktop backgrounds.
- Tutorials, some guides on how to do random miscellaneous stuff that probably will never include "how to draw".
I also have a gallery on DeviantArt, which might be of interest since there's bound to be some pictures there that I've forgotten to put here.