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It was the early 90’s at my Nan’s house as I recall when my cousin and I first created the dog wrestling federation loosely base on the wwf at the time. We were both mad on wrestling back then so in between watching it on the box we decided to create our own version spin-off base on my Nan’s three pet dogs. The first stage in creating dwf was to rename the dogs - Judy the black Labrador became Judy the Undertaker, Prince the collie became Paul Prince and Barney a mix blond dog became Big Boss Dog. After weeks of watching and taping commentary on the wrestling events we thought it would be a good idea to take the dwf to a magazine format out came the pencils and felts for double page spreads and write ups on all the latest happenings in the ring and out.
Numerous projects came and went dwf was just one of many. Another was The Skellys started after I bought a figure size skeleton from my uncle’s corner shop for 10p at Halloween. After showing my cousin of my pocket money purchase she then got her own called skully together skelly which was my one and skully became The Skellys (a dysfunctional skeleton rock band). The Skellys went on many drug-fuelled tours around town, which would need promoting through poster artwork. There sound was like guns and roses meets nirvana so the posters were based mainly around guns, skulls and a lot of black felt tip. After years of hard rocking The Skellys past away only to be remembered in memory, if you ask me they were before their time.
Now a bit on present times
During my time at Liverpool John Moores doing a graphic arts degree I regrettably chose to mainly use the computer to produce artwork in the first two years there, which often went down like a bad Skellys gig. This prompted me to go back to the old skool approach of using pencil as my main medium before taking artwork on to computer to enhance them.
After University and many crap jobs I have been contributing my work mainly to fanzines (mercy), magazines (Amelia’s) and all sorts of websites (wallspankers). I have also started to blog my personal projects online for people to view and comment on. I now feel it’s time to move my illustration style into a more commercial setting. |
