KalonZombie on Twitch

Offline image for KalonZombie's Twitch page. This piece, based on Legend of Mana, is the latest in a long line of art KalonZombie has asked me to make based on video games I have never played.

a bunch more bear heads for RealSovietBear!

A couple more things I made for RealSovietBear's Twitch channel.

Above: The eponymous Soviet Bear in various hats for the various headers of the stream's info section

Below: Three emoticons, in three sizes each.

Check em out in action on RealSovietBear's Twitch page: https://www.twitch.tv/realsovietbear

RealSovietBear

Themed avatar, header and offline image for RealSovietBear's Twitch channel inspired by old Soviet propaganda posters.

New Commissions

Let's Play Dark Dreams Don't Die by Wottermelon

Lasers & Feelings by Six Feats Under

Let's Play The Order 1886 by KalonZombie

Three new Let's Play thread banner commissions completed this month.

T-shirts!

Uploaded some new and old designs to my new Spreadshirt shop!

Give em a look. I'll be updating them periodically while I try to garner interest. I started with some feminist designs but there's a few other things too.

Who Are You

Some concept sketches I made for Jessica Kingsley Publishers' upcoming book about gender identity Who Are You. They ultimately went in another direction with another illustrator but I'm blogging about it anyway to prove I'm not even bitter or anything! What a class act.

God of War II, Ratchet and Clank 2016

Some more Let's Play banner art, this time for KalonZombie's God of War II and upcoming Ratchet and Clank (2016) series'.

Pearla Sneak Peek

I worked on the illustrations for a new book by Rochel Lieberman, which will be released later this year from Jessica Kingsley Publishers. It is called Pearla and the Unpredictably Perfect Day and it is about recovering from your mistakes, and happy accidents. Here are a few of my favourite pieces (that won't give away the story and get me in trouble) :

Fanny Gallops

An illustration of artist friend Fanny Gallops/Lee Rey of The Sacred Obscene.

Etsy reopen!

Hello friends!

Good news. I am pleased to announce that I am reopening my Etsy store over here: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/SuperGraffiti?ref=hdr_shop_menu and will be populating it with both old sell-thru stock and with brand new items going forward. Go have a browse for zines, paintings, gifts and other great things like these:

Stamp Press

Hello everyone! Exciting news! I am now officially a designer for Stamp Press, a company that specialise in making designer stamp templates, gift tags, wall decals, coasters, door hangers and all sorts of stuff! I submitted a bunch of designs to them recently and they went NUTS with 'em! Check out http://stamp-press.co.uk/search-results/designers-lloyd-jones for fabulous designs like THESE:

And many more including alphabets, more cute characters and who knows what else! You'll have to click that link and take a look yourself! I'll be updating this thing with new designs every now and then so watch that space for exciting updates!

If you're a craftmaker or a teacher and you want some cutesy stuff designed by me on a handsome rubber stamp to stamp on your homemade greetings cards or students' work, or if you just love giving presents and want some cute unique designs on the tags, or if you're some other example I can't think of right now, go to http://stamp-press.co.uk/search-results/designers-lloyd-jones and have yourself a browse! There's bound to be something there for you. Or check out any of their other designers! There's about ten million of us so I have no idea how this is supposed to work!

Princess and the Fog book launch

To celebrate the release of my first published book, The Princess and the Fog, I will be hosting a special event in Cafe Parisien in Portsmouth on July 17th where there will be food and drinks, some lovely chats, and a chance to buy the book at a special event-only discount price.

I will also be selling leftover copies of two of my self-published precursors to The Princess and the Fog, my Hole In Chest zines and Short Term Diaries.

I will also have up for grabs a special series of paintings that I've created just for this event: (please forgive the cameraphone photos, many of these were too thick with collage stuff to scan)

I hope to see you there!

Giraffe Social Media

Got commissioned by the head of Giraffe Social Media to decorate one of the chalkboards in one of the meeting spaces in their new offices in time to be shown for Social Media Day. Its aim was to illustrate to new clients how Giraffe can take their idea or product and amplify it for a huge new audience.

We hooked up a projector to my laptop to shoot a sketch of a mural onto the board which I then drew over the top of with chalk markers.

Don't buy chalk markers from Staples. They are garbage.

Designing The Princess and the Fog

The Princess

 I chose a princess as the protagonist of my book because it is an archetypical character in children’s fiction. If you know that a picture book is about a princess, you can infer a lot about what the story, setting and characters are likely to be based on the countless princess stories you’re already familiar with. I was then able to turn that on its head by introducing new elements to surprise the reader and make the main character of the story much more relatable.

Additionally, princesses are typically revered and looked up to by the children who read their stories. They are something that a lot of young girls in particular strive to be. If a princess can get depression, anyone can. I think it’s important that the children who read my story can relate to its protagonist in quite a personal way so that they know that they aren’t alone and that this thing that they’re struggling with that they can’t explain can happen to just about anyone else. Depression can make you feel very alone, so just knowing that there is someone out there - even a fictional princess - who is going through something similar can be a huge comfort. 

The Setting

The setting of The Princess and the Fog is a strange mix of traditional old-fashioned fairy tale and modern day. A huge purple castle sits at the heart of a bustling modern metropolis. The Princess rides horses, everyone else drives cars. Television and print media apparently exist but so do knights and adventurers with swords and shields. This, again, is designed to make the story relatable on a number of different levels. Children will find the fairy tale elements of the situations as familiar as the real life ones.

In my research into writing for children I learned of the importance of metaphor. Children do not tend to like stories with aggressive morals. While the book deals with real-life problems, I have managed to avoid “outing” the children who read it by disguising the issues that young readers may be facing behind metaphors. Readers may understand that the book is describing a situation similar to their own without feeling like it’s singling them out or trying to teach them a lesson. The story is designed to be enjoyed in its own right but with a hidden depth to it that should communicate with any young readers who are feeling the same way as The Princess.

The Fog

In my early design ideas for the book I was toying with various ideas for how to represent depression visually. I had previously used the idea of a hole in one’s chest and an obscured, scribbled out face in an earlier independent project called There’s A Hole In My Chest and didn’t want to use it again as I thought it would be too grim for children. Early ideas included some kind of slow, lazy slime monster not unlike The Doldrums in The Phantom Tollbooth, a hat or helmet of some kind that couldn’t be taken off once it was put on, and a ball and chain, but none of these quite described the feeling adequately. I decided that whatever it was it needed to be opaquely black, thick, impossible to remove and in some way at least partially obscure the protagonist’s head and face to create a sense of loneliness and isolation from the outside world. 

The title The Princess and the Fog popped into my head one day and it just fit perfectly. It ticked all the boxes, I could illustrate it in a similar frustrated scribbly way as the obscured faces in There’s A Hole In My Chest, and I just couldn’t resist the pun. The exact depiction of The Fog developed considerably  over the course of making the book before I settled on how it looks in the final product, particularly after notes that it obscured too much of The Princess’s face and could be seen as scary for some readers.

The King and Queen

It was important to me to have the King and Queen both appear very physically strong, in their own ways. The Queen is extremely tall with very large legs but she’s very thin and a little unbalanced, while The King is short and squat with diddy little legs but with a very large upper body. In this way, it shows that they each have their own strengths that make them a very well-balanced team, both as parents, supporters and as the co-rulers of the unnamed kingdom in which the story takes place. Most children will look to their parents as their first port of call in times of crisis and The Princess is no different. The King and Queen are the first two characters to offer help to The Princess in dealing with her affliction. Although they get it a bit wrong at first, they are an essential part of the large support network The Princess is eventually able to put together. I hope any parental figures reading this book will be inspired to be as strong and determined as The King and Queen.

The Supporting Cast

The other characters in the story that The Princess eventually enlists for her support network all play important parts in aiding her gradual recovery. Most of them straddle that same weird line between fairy tale and reality by representing both a trustworthy adversary one might find in the battle against depressive illness and a friendly fantasy character. The Druid, for example, brews up some potions for The Princess to try to help her fight away the fog.  

With his lab coat and diplomas, The Druid is clearly a metaphor for a doctor offering to help medicate the problem. But not everybody responds to medication. Everybody experiences depression differently and no one cure exists that will work for everyone, so I felt it important that the story never explicitly states which of the many solutions The Princess uses to try to rid herself of The Fog actually ultimately works.