Reasons to be Creative

It was a pleasure to give my talk at the Reasons to be Creative Festival

today. I was worried that I may have gone down a fetish rabbit hole

(pun intended) but I think I clawed the audience back with exploits

of my work in TV and games,

Spoiler cats

If cats could talk you know they would.

Night lights

If you are a member of the exclusive club who likes what I do you'll be pleased to see these night lights I've designed with the illumination company Locomocean.

These are the samples that were previewed for buyers at this week's Spring Fair in Birmingham.

There's something for everyone, providing they like unicorns, zombie rabbits or cup cake cats and you obviously do otherwise you wouldn't be reading this blog.

Loving how this one turned out. Ice cream meets mythical beast in the form of the Unicone.

I've been drawing the Zombunnies for ages so it's nice to see them in a physical form and these chaps are about a foot tall and the colours are amazingly vibrant.

I'll let you know when and where you can buy them when I do but in the meantime check out the Locomocean site for updates.

Tasty teaser

Exciting news on the horizon if you like cats, ice creams or ideally both.

I’ll just leave this here as a tasty little teaser....

Steven Universe Shirt

I've entered a design into the Steven Universe T-Shirt Contest seeing as I love that show and its theme tune is constantly echoing around my head.

If you could vote for my entry and make me win I'd be very grateful.
5 Stars should do Thank you.

Kitten burst

I'm back working on these chaps again - exciting developments ahead!

Long playing

 Here's a detail from a piece I created for the upcoming vinyl based show that the lovely chaps at Flatties are organising. All the canvases are old records. Remember them? Don't worry I'll keep you posted so you won't miss where and when it's on so keep your eyes on Calamari Royale and I'll see you there in the Spring.

Happy New Year

Happy new year beloved fellow humans! Here's to fifty two weeks of the same starting from tomorrow!

Cat Comic

Here's a surprise: I did a comic strip with some cats in it. It's a bit of a stream of consciousness rather than anything well scripted but what are you going to do? I hope you like it.

Ghost Pets

This was a rejected idea for a company working on a brilliant device. I'll explain more when it's out and I'm NDA free but it could have been so amazing. I'll be following it's progress with interest when it's out and see how their route goes. After presenting this I received the best email of my career (since the Greedy Ghost incident) :

"We asked for cute pets but instead you've sent over a load of dead animals." It's like they hadn't seen my oeuvre at all.

Rat Attack

We've come to the end of my little stroll down Rat Attack Memory Lane. I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have and have been inspired to seek out a copy of your own on Ebay or in your local charity shop. Here's a few images I found Googling 'Rat Attack' to save you having to do it your self. The image above is the cover of the PlayStation game version instructions. The game was really nicely packaged. Not many games feature different box art for different console releases. They didn't bother with this in the USA and just went with a badly rendered CGI cover as market research told the publishers that American gamers wouldn't understand a 2D rendered cover on a 3D game. You can decide for yourself below. We had to change the logo for American eyes too. Thus began my lifelong love of the homogenised world of market research - the biggest stumbling block creativity has to overcome.

Here is some of my early Scratch Cat concept work.

Here are some enemy concepts. I found a lot of these images on the IGN game site. Good to see they're still going strong in the modern age.

This is one of my attempts at using 3D Studio Max. Don't laugh, this was in the proposal that sold the game. Load of these original elements made it through to the actual finished game.

Another one of my fantastic models. King Scarab was the boss at the end of the museum level.

King Scarab looked a lot better in the actual game when a real artist had a go at it.

And here's a screen of Rat Attack in action. This the pinball level from the funhouse.

Control... and lack of

I like drawing cats - although I don't much care for them in real life, like any sane person and I like drawing things with two heads. Other than that I can't justify this at all.