Women want him. Men want to be him…

…it’s Aspirational Man! And he’s on the up!


Being both a picture librarian and picture buyer I see a lot of generic stock imagery aimed at the corporate market – the kind of photos you see on company websites featuring sinisterly happy, young and successful business types in sinisterly clean and modern offices doing things like pointing with pens or walking up stairs in ways that interpret corporate buzz words like “aspirational”, “team building” or “punch me now”.

I don’t really like those type of pictures but (and I hope I’m not being too kitsch here) there’s something about the sterile, generic quality they have. Anyway, that quality was the inspiration behind this piece, although I think I’m probably too cynical to be able to capture it completely.

I think the more cartoony, clear-line style is the way my work is evolving, we’ll see…

Idle moments

A few years back I began to get work published here and there, mostly in The Idler, the bi-annual, book-shaped magazine that campaigns against the work ethic.

Here are some of my favourites from this period. All were drawn in Illustrator and Photoshop.


This was the first one, I think, drawn for their fine line between… feature. This was the fine line between old people and trees.


This was from the same issue – an illustration for Mark Manning’s A Year Underwater. Mark Manning was probably better known as Zodiac Mindwarp of Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction fame. Manning said my picture made him look beautiful, but he was very drunk at the time.


This was for a feature on Edward de Bono, famous intelligent person and creator of lateral thinking.




These two were drawn for the fine line between feature again. They were the fine line between mice and men and the fine line between 10 years ago and now.

Man or Astro-man?

This picture is probably more typical of my general drawing style – although still more realistic than most. The figure was drawn using my trusty post office nib dip pen; the sky was a bit of a hodge-podge of india ink, markers, felt-tips and Tipp-Ex. It was then scanned and coloured in illustrator.


I was going for a kind of Kirbyesque look for the night sky, a feeling of something primeval awaiting the astronaut in outer space. The orange suit is a nod to Tintin’s spacesuit in Destination Moon.