Hey Everyone,

Happy New Year!!!  I’m a little late off the mark with that comment, but hey, it’s the thought the counts right!

I’m massively excited about 2012 as there is SO much going on here at Fully Illustrated. Loads of new releases, announcements, you name it. It’s going to be a majorly busy 12 months.

Part of my new year resolution is to get back to the two things I love, fitness and photography, and in view of this, I’d like to share a photo that I took today on a cross country lunchtime trek!  It’s such a still day today so I thought it would be great to get down to a local forest/reservoir and get some great reflection shots around the water’s edge.

If this little shot takes your fancy, I’ve also included a fully functional iPad & iPhone wallpaper of it too. Enjoy :)

Here’s to 2012!

Mike.

Hey Everyone,

With the 15th of December only days away, I thought I’d throw out a quick freebie for any Trenches fans eagerly awaiting the Friday launch.  I’ve turned the massive poster art into dedicated iPhone and iPad wallpapers! So you can adorn your iDevice with some rich WW1 artwork to get in the mood :)

Enjoy!

Hey Everyone,

Well, I’ve been tweeting about this project for about 8 months now, possibly even longer and its now been announced! The worldwide AppStore smash hit Trenches now has a sequel!!!! Trenches 2 will be hitting the AppStore on December 1st and is being published by none other than EA!

I’ve been working on this on and off for the best part of a year and let me tell you, it’s probably the biggest war/action/strategy game on the iPhone…by a LONG stretch, it’s MASSIVE! I’ve been drawing, painting, airbrushing, vectorising and designing for this puppy for soooooooo long and every second has been insanely awesome!

First up I want to cover what has to be my biggest creative accomplishment in my entire 12 years in the industry, the HUGE A1 promo poster that I created recently.

I was blessed with a 2 week budget to create this poster and was basically given something that as an artist you almost never get…the right budget!  As I’d been given such a generous project (as part of the much larger project) I wanted to make this my show piece, the one piece of art that would allow me to take my next step up and genuinely improve my abilities. Needless to say, I spent a significant amount of time sketching and ran through an entire sketch pad putting this together!  Once the sketch was roughed out, reviewed, amended and put into its final state, I was VERY, VERY excited!

My goal was to create a cartoon image in my personal style that reflected the stunning Udon/Capcom character collages that adorn the stunning Udon comics and posters, and while I know I’m no Alvin Lee, I was determined to make this MY take on such a composition.  I started with the star of the show, the German soldier and wanted to create a story around him that portrayed the game.  The overall vision was to tell the story of the Germans out weighing, out gunning and standing terrifyingly tall over the allied forces of WW1. Trenches 2 now has multiple nationalities, so I had to include each of these within the poster, each one displaying his own very distinct character.  All very tongue and cheek too which made it even more fun :)

With the sketch completed it was time to get into the colour rendering…this was going to be fuuuuuuuuuuun!

As I had the time to do so, I had chance to lay down some colour schemes before getting started and after a few iterations I settled on the warm glow of a fiery, war torn battlefield.  This just seemed fitting, and all the browns, oranges and yellows just made for a really indulgent palette that soothed my eyes :)

The scene just seemed to explode to life as each drop of colour adorned the screen, it was a spectacularly rewarding illustration to be working on and I simply couldn’t wait to move onto the next bit as the current part was completed.  My mind was so focused on the final image that I was almost dreaming about this poster whenever I was away from it.  And without further ado, here it is…

One of the other elements that made this so exciting was the final scale of the image ( A1), so my detail level had to be about a gazillion times higher than my usual ‘on-screen’ work and boy oh boy did that make for some memory challenges…

This puppy rolled in at a whopping 1.5gb as a PSD (I like my layers ;) and was quickly becoming a beast to deal with. Even with 8 cores and more RAM than you can imagine, this sucka was still loading after I’d finished making my morning espresso!

Aaaaaaaaanyway, I’m babbling.

I hope you enjoy looking at this as much as I enjoyed making it!

Oh, and here’s a couple of cheeky screenies of Trenches 2 to whet your appetite…

…now I’ll save my rambling on these until my next post :)

Lastly, and VERY importantly, I want to say a MMMMMMMMMMASSIVE thanks to Thunder Game Works for inviting me to be their lead artist once again.

Mike.

Hey Everyone,

Well, its time to announce the free app that’s in production for the iPad!

After the 100′s of thousands of downloads of the iPad Moods I created many months ago, I decided that it made perfect sense to turn those little critters into something a little more fun, something a little more app like and something dedicated to the iPad!

I’m sure you’ve got many an idea as to what the app is, or what the app maybe, but I’ll leave you to think about that just a little longer.  The design of the app is now nigh on complete, and is entering development.  So watch this space for some exciting new updates!

Oh, and did I mention that its going to be free? Smiiiiiiile :)

More info REAL soon!

Mike.

Hey Everyone,

Just a quick one to let you know that all of a sudden I’ve just recieved a whole swathe of great press!  I just had to let out the excitement somewhere :)  My dinosaur character that came to life on my iPad has been featured in .NET Magazine and Mac Format! And to add to that, Voodoo Controllers has been featured in .NET Mag too, scooping site of the month!  What a lovely contrast to all that god awful hacking and copying!

You can take a look at all the coverage over in the press section.

Oh, and I also got a rather lovely mention in the 3 Circle Studio Podcast last week too!  They ran a podcast on ‘The Most Inspiring Creatives‘ and they chose to include little old me (about 33mins in)…flattered is a bloody understatement!  Thanks guys!!

Mike.

Hey everyone,

I started playing around with my old Hard Boiled Baddies recently, and as I realised I’m probably never going to shell out the £1000′s needed to make them into toys, I thought I’d go all generous and turn them into iPad wallpapers!  So you can download whichever ones you like, stick on your iPad home screen and show them off to the world.

If you like’m, feel free to send the link around to your friends, spread the love.

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UPDATE! May 2011…

iPad Moods are coming the AppStore sooooooon!

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Enjoy :)

Hey Everyone!

Wow, things have been ultra quiet on the site recently, sorry about that!  I’ve been buried under some sersiously intense deadlines for some seriously fun projects.  Here’s a few specific updates to let you know what’s been going on…

Websites:
I’ve been working on a whole host of sites recently, all of which are awaiting release and most of which (bizarrely) are MMO related!  I’ve gone from doing almost no MMO related games and sites to working on 5! Crazy and immense fun at the same time!

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Games:

Wii:
I’m back to work on the Wii game that I started over a year ago (which was paused for about 6-8months) so there will be loads more info on that beauty as it becomes public.  I’m bloody loving this project!

Steam & X360:
For the past few weeks I’ve been working (hard…very, very hard) on the menu’s, HUD and general UI for a kick ass new game that’s due out on Steam and X360.  This is one of, if not the most amazing project I’ve had the honour of working on, its been a blast!  Again, more info soon.

iPhone & iPad:
Man, this industry is booming right now and the amount of iPhone related enquiries I’m seeing is mind boggling.  At the moment I’m working on (working on also includes completed and as yet un-released) 4 new iPhone games and 1 iPad game with a mixture of companies, all of which have been great to work on!  Unfortunetly, none of them are under the Joystick Generals as JG is on pause for the next few months until both Chris and I can settle our current crazy schedules.

Web:
Yep, I’m dabbling in some web games at the moment, actually, more specifically Facebook games on the whole, creating the UI for 3 MMO’s.  This is fairly new territory for me and has been amazing to work on.  I cannot wait to get them into the portfolio.

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Email Delays:
I know I post this message about every 2 months, but its back again.  Due to my workload there has been A HUUUUGE backlog on my email replies and I am doing all that I can to get back to everyone, so if your waiting, thanks for being patient, I havent forgotten about you and I WILL be back in touch as soon as I can.

Thanks everyone, watch this space, there is lots to be released :)

Mike.

Hey Everyone,

Well this bloomin Pogo Sketch Stylus took absolute age to arrive, but its finally here!  Worth the wait?  Absolutetly!  While its still nowhere near as accurate as a good old fashioned, well sharpened B pencil, it is a lot more precise than my chunky index finger!  It feels more akin to drawing with an unsharpened 8b I think.

Anyway, decided to have a play last night in front of the telly and this is what arose.  It feels a lot cleaner than the finger paintings (but it is still very, very rough) and has in some ways allowed for some more fluid movements as I’m not constantly trying to see under my finger tip.

My only concern with this Pogo Sketch is that while it works, I fear that the sponge nib has a limited lifespan, as while I was using it on this illustration, a couple of bits of it fell off, so I’m guessing that it will last about a few months with daily use.

I’ll post up some more sketches over the coming weeks.

Hope you like it :)

Mike.

Hey Everyone,

Nice morning, the sun was shining and birds were singing, and all the while, my 3 month old son was fast asleep on my chest as my wife got ready for the day.  During which time I grabbed the iPad and thought I’d see what can be created in the time it takes a women to get ready in the morning…but I only got 40 mins ;)

This firery monstery thing just seemed to flow from my fingers, so I went with it, kinda fun.  Again, it aint that great, as with all the other sketches so far, but I’m starting to see a level of freedom and movement in these peices that gets lost in vectors, so I’m keener than ever to persue this device and see where it takes me.  I think in many ways its actually going to broaden my skill set rather than anything else, and that can only be a good thing.

Hope you like him.

Mike.

P.S.  I’ve ordered a Pogo Sketch, so once that get here from the US, I’ll throw another one of these images together and write a quick review…presuming the Pogo Sketch is better than the cheaper alternatives on eBay that is ;)

Hey Everyone,

So, its been a couple of weeks spent with the iPad now, and in truth, its already become an essential gadget to have around me.   Its not without its flaws, but it is ace.

Before I babble on too much, here is my second bit of ‘finger art’ created last night, not too bad, but in no way great, I still need some time with this beast to master the finger…man that sounds wrong.

Drawing/Painting:

Drawing on this is pretty much as I mentioned in my last post, and little has changed, so I don’t yet feel as though I’ve improved with it, but equally haven’t fallen out of love with it either, so that’s all good.  I think my fear (being a bit of a perfectionist) is that I CANT create final art on this device, so will never truly be happy with what I produce.  I have to accept that and move on.  What it should do though is allow my sketches to be a little more polished and allow me to fire over quick concepts to my customers a little easier.

Another useful note that cancels out my previous issue about not being able to rest my hand on the device while drawing, is that if you use a Smudgeguard, it allows you to bypass this issue, VERY USEFUL!  You may look like a misdirected 80′s style reject with some bizarre one fingered glove thing going on, but it sure does help the drawing.

Ok, so, what else has cropped up since using the device for a couple of weeks…

Browsing:

I hate to say this, but the iPad is limited in this field, BUT, this could well be down to poor web programming on the whole.

The biggest gripe is accessing sites that have any form of internally built scrollbars (even the lovely javascript slider on the Apple Store cant be used on the iPad), so when you come to one of these, if it doesnt have corresponding, clickable arrows, then you cant access that menu/option, its that cut and dry.  I’ve been looking for a new car recently, and thus have been perusing many car sites, most of which (when your building a car) use some form of scrollbar within the options selection, so I’ve basically had to open the laptop to do this…defeating the object of the iPad.  Annoying.

Can this be fixed? No idea, but it seems to make sense that it could.  This current issue is probably worth keeping in mind if your creating a site that is aimed at the iPad…dont create any internal scrollbars!

Gaming:

This has only got better, playing games on this puppy is ace, I’m playing for longer on this device than I ever did on my iPhone.  Its great.  I’ve particularly loved playing Sky Smash 1918 and Sonic, both of which have seemingly become more playable (no, I have no idea why).

Ok, that’s it, blabber over.

Thanks.

Mike.