Get to know Neil:

Hi everybody!

I’m Neil Hanvey and I doodle things.

You might have seen me around on various sites like deviantArt and slashThree. If you haven’t then let me introduce myself.

By day I’m a web developer, by night I work as an illustrator for personal and commercial gain. I like to think of myself as a mercenary with a sketchpad, doing commando rolls from brief to brief while switching styles at a seconds notice…ok maybe it isn’t that interesting in real life but that’s what it feels like sometimes. I’m one of the senior artists over at slash Three and I run my own art blog over at www.neilhanvey.co.uk

I got into the whole digital art scene about seven (7) years ago but I’ve probably only taken myself seriously in the last year or two. Re-designing my site www.neilhanvey.co.uk has helped a lot along with some published work in computer arts projects, digital arts and digital artist magazine. In addition to this I’ve also tried to promote myself by releasing some tutorials on vector tuts+ and just generally trying to get my name out there.

If I were to describe my style I’d like to think that it was distinctive enough that my pieces could be attributed to me. I think that building my own unique style was less important to me when I first started drawing but as I’ve grown I’ve tried to work on a sense of individuality in everything I do.

I got into digital art during the whole forum sig era but totally bypassed all that as I’ve never really been an avid gamer and I think I was a bit too old for that at the time! I was browsing the internet and had been creating art using my computer but didn’t really know there was much of a scene out there. I’d seen a few things created by the artist Bert Monroy and was really into photorealistic vectors but my computer at the time was too slow to run illustrator. I showed some of the crappy things I’d done to a guy called Colin Smith who runs photoshop cafe and he suggested I post some stuff in his forum. After that I got asked to post some stuff over on another forum and from there I started learning illustrator. I had already learnt Photoshop back in college so it was quite easy to pick up.

Fast forward a couple of years and I’d got into a bit of a routine of doing vector girls and other cliched images so I ditched illustrator and got back into sketching on real paper with a real pen. It was at this time that I started getting into people like Jon Burgerman, JeremyVille , Pete Fowler and other similar illustrators. I also started looking into what got me drawing in the first place and realised that I still liked Richard Scarry books and that I should spend more time doodling what I wanted to do rather than seeing what was popular and trying to emulate it.

If you’ve never read Richard Scarry I recommend ‘Busy Busy World’. It’s basically lots of animals wearing clothes doing everyday things like working in shops, cleaning castles and cutting wood. It sounds crazy but it sparked something In me and I’ve been doodling whatever comes into my head ever since. Pieces like Brain Vomit and Atomic Circus are direct results of this frantic doodling, canvases packed with lots and lots of characters all doing their own thing.

I’m also a big fan of Heironymus Bosch, an old Dutch painter, and I think his influence also shows in these type of pieces, check out his triptychs to see some seriously mental paintings.

My workflow for pieces like Atomic Circus is as follows – doodle, scan into Photoshop, colour, shading, highlights and finally texture. The hardest bit is probably the colouring stage as a lot of the time I end up using my netbook so that I can sit on the sofa while using the trackpad to block in colours on my tiny 1024×600 screen! It’d probably be easier to sit at my desktop and use my Wacom but I’d have to crane my neck to see the tv at the same time!

In addition to my doodle style I’ve also worked hard to create my own vector style that mixes some raster elements like textures and photoshop brushed shading.

The No Blood and Guts No Glory piece below is a good example of this. All the separate elements foreground, background, heroes, baddies, etc) are drawn on paper, scanned into photoshop, transferred to illustrator for line work and block colouring and then transported back over to photoshop for shading and highlights and texture overlays. I hope to do more pieces like this in the future.

Here’s a selection of some of my favourite pieces and the story/inspiration behind them.

No Blood and Guts No Glory

This was a personal piece inbetween artpacks for slash Three and commercial work. For some strange reason I always end up drawing zombies to unwind. This was my take on the baker street detective featuring Shotgun Holmes and Doc Watson.

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Tricks

Another personal piece. I’d been doodling this while on my lunch breaks at work and decided to turn it into a tutorial for vector tuts+. I think it’s good to take time out to do personal artwork because you get to try out new techniques on your own schedule.

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Go Get Help

This was yet another personal piece. I was experimenting with a different style and some new textures. I like a lot of the cutesy stuff out there but I wanted to make it a bit more gritty.

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Tron

This piece was done for a competition on dontPanicOnline.com. dontPanic are a uk based site that provide informational packs for student, clubs and independent music stores. They’re famous for releasing collectible posters from some of the worlds top street artists and illustrators (banksy, pete fowler, blek le rat, jeremyville, jon burgerman, etc). The brief was to design a postcard promoting the new Tron Legacy film. I was allowed to use images from the film but I had to put my own spin on them. The entire piece took less than 2 hours to draw and colour. It was worth it because I won the competition and I’m now the proud owner of a new MacBook and I have 80,000 prints of it being distributed throughout the UK.

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Vinyl Toy Tutorial

I started collecting vinyl toys about a year ago, I now own about 150 of them.This was created for vector tuts+ to show that taking your artwork into the real world doesn’t just have to be prints or clothing. Vinyl toys offer artists yet another blank canvas to showcase their work.

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Atomic Circus

This was created for slash Three. It’s probably one of the most detailed pieces I’ve ever done and is actually two pages of doodles stitched together and coloured in Photoshop.

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Birdo

This was one of the first pieces I created for slash Three. I killed a few pens drawing this thing!

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Hope For Haiti

This was created for a poster project to raise funds for the Haiti earthquake. Sadly the poster project never got off the ground but it did get featured as wallpaper of the week on Abduzeedo. It sounds cheesey but projects like this help artists to make a difference by keeping issues like this in peoples minds.

To see his latest selected works and find out where his images are currently on display visit his portfolio at www.neilhanvey.co.uk.