Wishing You a Spooky Animated Halloween!

I’ve been rather enjoying putting my animation hat on again & having some fun with it. I recently made a video for my band Cult Figures which has been selected to screen in competition in the Music Video category of the London International Animation Festival (LIAF) 2026 which was a nice surprise when frequently making new work feels like bashing my head against the wall!
 

More spookiness!

 Some more before & after illustration stuff left over from Halloween for you illustration nerds

The original is drawn on A4 300gsm watercolour paper drawn with a dip pen (with a Leonardt 256 nib) & Winsor & Newton ink & a Kaweco fountain pen with Rohrer and Klingner Dokumentus ink.

I scanned the original then coloured it in Photoshop using a mixture of scanned ink textures & a couple of Kyle T Webster watercolour brushes & a couple of custom brushes I made myself

I then decided to get my hands dirty & have a go at hand colouring (using Derwent Inktense pencils) this was then scanned again - here's the initial scan.

My scanner works really poorly with orange so I adjusted the orange to match the original inage & did a little bit of adjustment of brightness & colour et voila!

'Treat?'

 

A bit of Halloween fun for you all!
I thought I'd include some of my process here from the original drawing to the digital colour. 

With this one I drew it with a dip pen & indian ink  (Winsor & Newton ink & a Leonardt 256 nib if anyone's interested!) 

With this piece I didn't draw a rough I just drew it from scratch - mistakes stains & all - on horrible cheap paper! Cheap paper is extremely liberating but makes it less desirable to sell the original drawing to to anyone! 

Next step is scanning it & using Photoshop to lose any unwanted marks & occasionally a couple of alterations although I haven't done much to this apart from shift the signature down.

After that I use Photoshop to colour the image using a mixture of custom brushes & some scanned ink textures 

Halloween cat

 It's been a funny old year but I love drawing Halloween-y things at any time of the year really so here you go!

The Knückle Crüshers

Celebrating Halloween & the 'unnëcessary hëavy mëtal ümlaut'!


(from an idea by Rachel Delahay Lefever)

Diana Ditch (Boris Johnson's drag name)

(from an original tweet by Mark Gatiss)

Why witches have black cats...

The Haunted Pipe & other stories...

Just in time for Halloween (what do you mean you've never read the Haunted Pipe?!?!)

Halloween garage band!

Happy Halloween!

BOOO!

Happy Halloween folks! (& yes guitar geeks, she's playing a Vox Phantom of course! ; )

Pumpkins, the disappointment...

Pumpkins were always one of my big childhood disappointments. '70s Hastings seemed to be fairly bereft of them, the only ones impinging on my existence being in American picture books. Therefore I had imagined from their beautiful rich orange colour that they'd taste like an incredible magical mélange of peach, tangerine & melon or somesuch. Of course the reality was far duller...

Marks & Spencers Halloween

Designed these for Halloween 2007 but they're using them again this year to fill people's kids up with weird crisps & sweets - here's a selection of some of them - will put some packaging photos up if I can get my feeble ill arse out of the house to take some