Hey Everyone,

I just wanted to say a quick thanks to the wonderful Illustration & Animation Students at Bolton University for being a fab audience last Thursday!  I was invited in to give a talk to the 3rd year students about working in the industry and they all did a great impression of an interested audience ;)  I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did!

I was also shown some examples of the current students work… very impressive stuff!! The current 3rd year work is light years ahead of what I was producing at that stage in my creative development…I’m going to have to watch my tail!

Thanks again and good luck with the remainder of your final year!!

Mike.

I was rather overjoyed to see Trenches 2 featured in this month’s GAMES TM in a new feature entitled ’69 iOS titles for 69p’.  Here’s what they had to say…”A stirring metaphor for the futility of WW1 trench warfare, this tasks the player with moving between the bits of cover dotted throughout each level, and making it to the enemy base one step at a time. Its unique, its surprisingly deep and it has a great art style.”…I kinda liked the last part the most ;)

Thanks!

Mike.

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.

Just a quick message to wish the world a Merry Christmas and to let you all know that I’m away for the next 3 weeks :) My creative batteries need a turkey, mince pie and Christmas pudding fuelled re-charge.

I’ll be back work on the 9th January where I’ll start to work my way through my emails.

Thanks to everyone for a bloomin fun year, escpecially my awesome clients.

Mike.

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,

As you’ll have heard via twitter on and off for the past 6 months, I’ve been restoring a classic Sega Daytona USA arcade machine in my (limited) spare time.  I’ve become obsessed with arcade machines this past 4 years and my collection has grown from none to 5 in pretty short space of time…its damn addictive!  My two main machines were covered in previous blog posts, but more recently I’ve picked up 3 ‘dedicated’ cabs, Mortal Kombat 2, Killer Instinct 2 and Daytona.  The difference with my Daytona, as you’ll see, is that it was rather beaten up, and in dire need of some love and restoration.  With Daytona being one of the biggest selling arcade games in history, it stands to reason that this little workhorse has been beaten to within an inch of its life.

I’d never taken a project like this on before and it was all rather daunting to be honest, but I was determined!

My first job was to remove all the painted metal parts that were rusted, dented and corroding.  These battered parts were going off to a local steel workers to get shot blasted and powder coated back to their original shiny black…very exciting! Lots of folks bling they’re Daytona cabs turning everything to polished steel or chrome, but I wanted to go back to basics and return this beast to its original self.

The bits came back looking beeeeeeautiful and this was a very inspiring moment as I could see just how perfect I could actually make this machine!

Next was the time consuming, but very easy part. Scrubbing down, paint stripping, filling and re-painting! This took aaaaaaaaaaaages!  Look at the state of that paintwork!

After many, many hours of sanding and repainting (about 10 coats all in all) she came up looking factory fresh!

Now with this part done, it was time to get onto the damn scary part! sawing off the broken foot-well pieces and replacing them with new ones! This was a MASSIVE undertaking, as if I got this wrong, I would have basically sawn off a large chunk of the machine that could not be replaced…it had to be done with clinical precision.  Now, as I’m not a carpenter, I realised that cutting the replacement pieces was, well, beyond me. So I decided to turn to what I know…a computer! With a little (well, a lot) of measuring and template creating, I drafted up a mm perfect CAD drawing of the pieces I needed. With these done, I contacted a local woodcraft company and had them CNC cut. Oooooooooh this was getting technical.  Bizarrely, they came back PERFECT! And fitted like a glove. So with a bit more work (chiselling, sanding, screwing, hammering) I got them fitted.

I genuinely couldn’t believe that I managed to pull all this off, especially as 99% of this was being done for the first time with no prior experience! She just needed painting, polishing and then to have her lovely new rubber matting attached. Oh, and to screw back on all the stunning powder coated metal parts!  Wahooooooooooo!

With all that done, I then stuck on the brand new t-moulding (imported from the USA) around the edges, did some paintwork re-touching on the side art (that bit actually took an age!) and she was finished!!!!

And here she sits alongside my other two dedicated cabs!

This project was epically enjoyable and I already want to do another :) I just want to say a massive thanks to all the kind chaps over at www.jammaplus.co.uk for all their tips and advice, as I’d never have managed this restoration without them. Cheers guys!

In early 2012 Fully Illustrated is moving into a new little studio where these three cabs will be joined by my other two and the whole family will be complete! Joyous times :)

I know this post isn’t really related to design, or illustration, but it’s totally related to what inspires me and makes me tick, so I figured some of you may enjoy it :)

Mike.

P.S. The side art in these pictures looks really faded, but its due to it being fluorescent orange and I couldn’t for the life of me photograph it without it looking odd.

Trenches 2 was previewed on Destructoid last night, so I thought I fire the link up…

• Destructoid Preview

While I’m at it, here are some others too…

• Touch Arcade Preview
• Slide to Play Preview

Only 13 days to go…its almost here :)

It looks like Trenches 2 has had a slight delay and wont be released until the 15th of December now.  Sorry guys.  To partially make up for it, here’s a sneak peak of the British and German tanks :) I’ve also included an image showing how the main two soldiers have evolved from Trenches 1 to Trenches 2. As I hope you’ll agree, they’ve come on quite a bit :)

Roll on December 15th!

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,

Another long delay since my last post…nothing ever changes does it ;)

I was contacted last month by the very friendly chaps over at Start Frag to see if I’d be interested in a quick interview about my thoughts, experiences and feelings about working within the games industry…how could I refuse.

Why not pop over and take a quick read.

http://startfrag.com/from-gamer-to-game-designer-interview-w-micheal-heald-from-fully-illustrated/

Thanks for the fun interview Start Frag!

Mike.