Pedegree Chums! Time Out

I love dogs! This was a smashing chance to get excited and run around in circles and draw all over the place!

Big thanks to Anamaria at Time Out!

Cheers! Time for Craft-Beers!

New in Time Out - Whats your craft-beer tipple? Any similarity to living people with beards is entirely coincidental, but great to hear about!

Digital ink and colour.

Thanks to Anamaria Stanley.

Your London Property Love Match!

Its great to be back in the pages of Time Out. This time its finding your London property love match!

Full figures with expressive poses. Drawn and coloured digitally.

Big thanks to Anamaria Stanley.

Last Slice

After 8 years of drawing Mr Hodges' adventures in and around south London, Time Out becomes free and the last Slice of Life is sliced and axed.

Theres been good times, bad times, drunken brawls, jazz sex, sperm fairys, hoodies, murder hounds, pavements strewn with chicken bones, angry red dog's balls, happy pink squirrel's balls, Boris Johnson in speedos, booze, dog poo, childbirth, tube bombs, art galleries, foxes, traffic jams, lunatics, ancient stone penises, spitting, poledancers, parrots, nazi art students, Darth Vader police vans, good deeds and bad deeds, Croydon riots and everything.

A big thanks to Hidge for 8 years of fabulous award winning writing - Its been brill and always exciting!

And of course another big thanks to Richard, Sim, Ellen, Anamaria, and everyone at Time Out for giving me the opportunity, putting up with my mad layout ideas and pestering.

Raise a glass of a pint of wine! 

Heres to Slice of Life, cheers!

 Qx

400

My 400th Slice of Life drawing is out now! Big ta to Mr Hodges for increasingly brilliant words that make my job easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Smeared in Chum!

And they're off! The Alternative Olympics event where hurdlers have their bums smeared in Pedigree Chum and are chased by Staffys from Battersea Dogs Home. 

A close up of the tiny background from this week's Slice of Life in Time Out.

BUY IT and read/see the whole thing!

Imitation is the sincerest form of larceny

An incredible act of prescience, Slice of Life...... 

Published a week before the riots in Croydon and Peckham and other parts of London and England. Rioters included ballerinas, olympic athletes, teaching assistants, children, and mums, all exercising their free will, and deciding to go outside and set buildings on fire, and steal stuff.

copperchopperchopperchopperchopperchopperchopper

medium: pencil, Indian ink, photoshop

slice of Slice of Life

Here's a glimpse into the weekly world of the Slice of Life illustration that I draw for Michael Hodges in Time Out London....

Wednesday is article day, when I get his words via email...

In this one Hodges finds himself in a moment of beautiful calm in a fish and chip shop along the polluted pissy road near Waterloo Station (Time Out issue April 14 - 20 2011).

My initial idea was quickly scribbled out........ I was thinking along the lines of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks painting, where the lit interior is isolated against the night closing in around. The article also reminded me of Charles Bukowski's Nirvana poem. Anyway these were my first sketches, which I scanned into photoshop. The first one is before research into the restaurant...

 ... and this is after seeing the front, and the particular shape of windows and door....

I took the little window with Michael Hodges from the first, and placed it into the other drawing, then plopped it into a page layout to show how it will look on the page, coloured it roughly and emailed it off to Sim Greenaway (art editor) and Hodges to see what they thought... I usually do this thursday or friday ...

... they liked the idea, so next, in the night, I drew all the different parts, people, vehicles, smoke, urine, blind man, etc on paper, and scanned them, and composed the picture on screen. Each element being on a different layer. Its a bit of a fuss doing them in pieces, but it means that its more flexible, and I can adjust the position and scale of each bit to just how I want it (and to fit the layout if I do something awkward with the composition). Sometimes I do it more traditionally as one single drawing. It just depends on the picture. Normally I do these inks on a saturday evening.

Sunday is colouring night. Heres the final drawing as it appeared in the magazine, with ink textures and flat colour added. Warm and nice against the choking street swirl yuppie yah.

.... and here are my original scans. You can see there are lots of passengers squished into the bus that you don't see in the printed version, and more to the buildings like the curry restaurant next door. Some of the drawings were done in pencil first, then inked up, and some of the figures were probably done straight off in ink, but I can't remember. Note my QW signature also drawn separately so it could be placed artfully somewhere! The final coloured artwork is emailed in for first thing monday morning.

There, I think thats it. Big thanks to Mr Hodges for writing such wonderful and mad articles that are a pleasure to illustrate. 

Make sure you read Slice of Life each week in Time Out London.

Any questions, please ask away!