McConkey Week at Nuts!

Wow, have I been busy... I know I always say that, but this time it's been monumental, in reality I can't show you the majority of what i've been up to as it hasn't seen print yet, but i'll share those with you at a later date.. there's lots to make their way here in the upcoming few weeks/months.

So got an email from Barney at Nuts, asking me if I fancied doing a biggie, now i've been turning down the last few gigs due to my hectic schedule or jobs not being right for me, a lot of typography stuff for lots of clients has been put my way, most of it i've been turning down, as it's simply is not something I feel that strong at.

But when Barney suggested the image above, with a deadline of less than a week.. and me with very little on my schedule, well things fell into place and I started the mini epic above.

Now as anyone that reads this blog will know, the Sgt Pepper homage is something i've done before, my original foray is an Apple themed one I drew for Mac Format over a year ago, and it's one of those in my portfolio that always gets a good reaction, generally speaking i'm not one for repeating myself, but on this occasion I didn't feel this was a job I could turn down, also who else could draw fifty portraits in such a short space of time... I decided I couldn't let the guys at Nuts down and just went for it.

With the Olympics just around the corner, this was a feature about the 50 Great British Sportsmen as voted for by Nuts readers, brief was simple, draw all the sports stars in their peak of fame in the above homage, now believe it or not I drew this thing in about 4 days, with the 5th day left to make alterations to the type and significantly resizing the drum for the purpose of type legibility.

This image proved a tiring affair as you can imagine, i've saved it extra big here, so you can see in greater detail the work that went into it.... however I wasn't finished there.. I still had more drawings for Nuts to complete.

This drawing was completed probably within an hour flat, I had to be extra quick on this, as my time was being taken up finishing the Greatest Sportsmen illo, this is a drawing of Gaz from hit MTV UK show Geordie Shore for the regular section Celebrity Kama Sutra.

Having completed the top two images, I thought I was done for the week..great, time to put my feet up and have a cup of tea I thought..er.. I was wrong, Simon at the mag got in touch and asked if I could do the above instructional illo about Richard Hammond setting himself on fire, I think this was a last minute addition to the mag, so they held back on printing an extra day, again super quick turnaround on this as I got the brief about 4-ish on Thursday, and I emailed in on the Friday at lunchtime, probably 12 on the dot.

All these can be found in this week's mag on shelves now, it was a hectic week, but a great one work wise... expect more images here soon, including some new stuff for some very big names in the magazine world!