Artwork: Cows, Zombies and Koi

Been real busy lately with commissions, here are a few recent ones...

Zombiekatsu!
I've always wanted to draw a BJJ zombie but never got round to it, plus it also seemed like a bit of an over-used horror genre. But when Zombie Kimonos got in touch asking for a design, I jumped at the chance! I mean for a cartoon artist like me, zombies are so much fun to draw, how could I resist?

I'm not sure when the patch will come out as it'll be a while before they get delivery of their new stock, but I'm hopeful it will be fairly soon. I'm quite chuffed with the way it came out as it is a slight advancement in detail and colour from my usual compositions.

Here is an early concept sketch - the client mentioned the hair was a bit 'clown like' so you can see I changed it in the final version.

Bull sheet
The Hereford BJJ Open is a very popular tournament held in Hereford, UK, several times a year. It is run by Dave Coles (BJJ black belt under Braulio Estima and also a senior dan grade judoka). Hereford is known for its impeccable organisation and precision running order. Each event gets bigger and better and yet they still manage to post ALL the results within minutes of the final match completing. So when Dave Coles asked me to come up with something to celebrate their 10th event, I wondered what could I possibly draw?
Dave suggested something that the Hereford region was famous for. Well, there is that line from the film Ronin, but in the end we plumped for the famous Hereford Bull - a massive white and brown beast bred seemingly for the sole purpose of displaying ginormous muscles at cattle shows!

And here's an early sketch...

Oh, and it is one of my first attempts to use half tone in order to create a graduated shadow effect without having to use a new layer of colour - which makes it cheaper to screen print the t-shirt:

Feeling Koi
Koi carp are cool. I mean, they have mouth tendrils, swim really slowly like they don't care, have awesome scales and crazy colours, it's easy to figure why folk like to imagine them as mini chinese dragons!

This design was made for a Japanese ju-jitsu club run by Mark Thomas. I met Mark at BJJ class and was impressed that he was keen to learn BJJ and get his own club students to train grappling sparring as part of their syllabus.

Mark still wanted to maintain the Japanese flavour in his new look fight team logo, but add a grappling inspired modern twist. We talked about several animals but settled on koi, mainly cos he keeps koi in his garden and I was keen to do it.

Here's an early draft sketch...

and this is what Mark plans to make with the design!

:)