Portfolio

In spring 2019 I spent 8 days at Innside Paris Charles De Gaulle hotel creating some mural work around the hotel for them. This work came as a result of one of the managers from the hotel seeing the work I had done at the Innside Prague hotel and wanting something similar and inviting me over.

It was quite a big job at this hotel as they wanted a large Paris mural on the wall in reception opposite the lifts and then a small piece of artwork on each of the 7 floors with Paris landmarks and the floor number surrounded by doodles.

It took me 4 days to do the main Paris map mural, the wall was not painted and was stone similar to a wall you would paint on outside so it wasn’t the easiest surface but it still created a great effect in the end.

Paris is also obviously an amazing city with loads of landmarks so that was lots of fun to draw.

My artwork on the other floors took another 3 days and there were a few splashes of colours on these to highlight the melia hotels in Paris. All this work was done again using my trusty posca pens!

I was approached in February 2019 about doing some artwork at the newly opened Innside Prague Old Town. A month later I was on a very bumpy flight to Prague ready to doodle on their walls.

Compared to some of my projects this was quite a small one and not actually a map. This was to be a landmarks mural of Prague at the main entrance to the hotels reception.A detailed drawing of the hotel would be at the front of the design and then well known Prague landmarks would underlap behind it to create a 3D effect.

This was one of my favourite murals to work on purely because the buildings were so beautiful and such fun to draw.

Once the buildings were all drawn on the hotel management decided they would like some of my trademark doodles and roads around the piece to fill the wall out a bit more which I was more than happy to do.

So after I had already done mural work for Innside Manchester and Innside Hamburg Hafen I started looking at other Innside by Melia hotels to approach re work. One that stood out massively was Innside New York Nomad so I gave them an email and was really excited when they emailed back and said that they wanted to work with me.

We spoke about artwork for a few different areas for the hotel but in the end we settled on a digital design that would be printed onto vinyl and would go on all four walls of the four lifts in the hotel creating an immersive map experience.

I received a brief from them of places that they wanted to go onto the map and I got to work. New York is one of my favourite cities to draw, the shape of it makes it quite difficult but there are just so many iconic landmarks and fun places to draw that it is always going to look good.

I finished the map got it digitised and send over to them. In late 2017 I got the first pictures of the map printed onto the walls of the lifts and was blown away with how it looked.

At the hotel they run a competition for guest where if you take a picture in the lift and put it on Instagram with the hashtag #innsidethemap you can win a prize. Its always good fun looking at the latest additions to this.

I was able to visit the hotel in 2018 and see if for myself, whilst I was there I did a second mural in the hotel. This was of the Chelsea area of Manhattan and is in one of their meeting rooms.

In the Autumn of 2019, Marks and Spencers approached by to create a mural in their flagship store, found on Manchester’s bustling Market Street. The experience not only introduced my work to millions of shoppers but also allowed me to develop my ideas with local communities. 

At the time, the store was going through a major refurbishment and my work would be a focal point of that. Over several meetings my ideas were fleshed out and the piece began to take shape, but there was something missing. 

We needed a local touch, something that made the artwork a true Manchester original.

That meant speaking with the store’s longest serving staff members who suggested new additions and personal touches to the map, from landmarks which survived the IRA bomb in 1996 to the Mitre pub where staff meet for after work drinks.

This all culminated in a map that was close to 20 metres long, took a full week to complete and spanned the length and breadth of Greater Manchester, from the suburbs of Stockport and Bury to Tameside and Salford. Looking back, this piece was a testament to a city that is as diverse as it is inspiring.

In 2016, I was approached by Manchester Arndale to create a unique, one-off artwork, but for a while couldn’t figure out what that should be. Our initial ideas stemmed from a student map of the city for freshers week to another that celebrated Manchester’s musical legacy.

What felt the most exciting was to create a welcome home map of Greater Manchester that celebrated the success of Team GB’s Olympic and Paralympic athletes returning from Rio 2016. 

This map included all the usual Manchester landmarks and a few surprises  – the Manchester velodrome, the Aquatics centre – but as a nod to the athlete’s homegrown roots I decided to add the name and professions of all the medallists in the areas that they are from. But as the Arndale is ordinarily a hustle and bustle of shoppers and fast-paced diners the work had to be completed across several night shifts, a tiring experience but probably the most rewarding I’ve experienced in my working life.

The icing on the cake came when I was able to unveil it with Paralympic and Olympic medallists. It was probably the closest I’ll ever get to winning a medal myself and, in a very small way, made me feel a part of Great Britain’s record breaking success in the 2016 Rio Olympics.

In the winter months of 2018 I was commissioned to create artwork at the Manchester, London, Liverpool and Edinburgh offices of Kin + Carta, a software company with offices across the world. Edinburgh was the last one I did and probably the one I was looking forward to most – I thought its gothic skyline and rich history made it an interesting subject. 

I wasn’t disappointed. On a grey, curved wall near the entrance I was able to recreate the Edinburgh castle and the Scott Monument in white pen which really made the mural pop. 

For those unable to take the trip across the border this mural is available to buy through my store.

Bee in the City was a city-wide art trail that took over the streets and shopping centres of Manchester. The project brought together 120 artists and challenged them to create their own interpretation of the famous Manchester worker bee, a symbol of Manchester’s resilience and independent spirit. 

Each artist was given a large bee sculpture to decorate with a design of their choosing. For me, I decided to do what I do best and created a Manchester doodle bee, but the challenge was harder than expected. Firstly, I’m used to drawing on walls and paper, not five-foot tall plastic sculptures, and doodling a map of Manchester on gigantic wings is a surprisingly difficult task.

After two days of work with my trusty black Posca Pens the work was complete and off it went to be varnished and put in place. The next time I saw it was upon its unveiling outside Manchester Piccadilly Train Station, an ideal location that I frankly lucked out on how many people pass through on a daily basis.

Easily the most rewarding part of this project was in how much money this project raised for local charities. In total, £1.1 million was raised for the We Love MCR Charity, with my piece alone selling at auction for £16,000. 

A mural commissioned by the Lexicon Shopping Centre in September 2018 proved to be the biggest piece I’ve ever done, a 20m wide, 18m tall work all hand drawn in black and green pens.

My largest piece to date at 20 metres wide and 18 metres tall.

The brief was to create a piece of work dedicated to the area around Bracknell and its many landmarks, from the hallowed turf of Ascot and Legoland to the royal houses of Sandhurst and Windsor Castle. 

There were some difficult times during this project, namely the cherry picker breaking on my third day leaving me stranded 10 metres in the air for several hours. But everyone has to suffer for their art...

I was first approached about doing a mural down in Brighton at Unity 3D’s offices back in 2017. After several discussions I thought it wasn’t to be until I was approached again in spring 2018.

Not one to pass up a week at the beach I had no hesitations in jumping on a train for my first ever visit.

Over three days, as I doodled everything from the Brighton Pavilion to the pier on the Unity 3D walls, I found that Brighton is a city of endless colour which, naturally, made it a dream to draw (even in black and white).

Aside from my beloved Manchester the city I’ve doodled the most is London. Over the years I’ve drawn the city’s skyscrapers on walls across the capital but my favourite came in late May 2019. 

At Hyland Software’s new offices in Fitzrovia I was given the opportunity to recreate the entire city in black marker.

From the gates of Buckingham Palace and the towers of Canary Wharf to the bustling St Pancras Station and the bumping Ministry of Sound nightclub, I was able to showcase all of London’s eccentricities in what was previously a blank wall.

Back in October 2015, a staff member from Channel 4’s sales office in Manchester Tweeted that they were looking for an artist to create a mural.

Through a fortunate twist of fate the manager of Ziferblat, a pay as you go café in Manchester where I was displaying my work at the time, recommended to them that I was the man for the job.

Thankfully, after a few meetings, Channel 4 agreed.

It was a daunting experience at first. I only had a handful of murals under my belt at the time and here I was putting my stamp on a British institution. It wasn’t long before those initial nerves turned to excitement, though.

Channel 4 wanted a piece that was fun and paid homage to their longstanding legacy in producing cutting-edge and forward-thinking television, featuring nods to modern classics like Peep Show and Black Mirror to the much-loved Shameless and Countdown.

After three days the piece was finished and was later unveiled at a launch party for the office attended by the head of Channel 4. The project was also the excuse I needed to include a Mark Corrigan quote in my work...

This design was not intended to be on a football shirt. In spring 2018, I was approached by the O Genesis record label and the famed Manchester band The Charlatans. They wanted me to create a map of their beloved Northwich, one that depicted the town’s landmarks, but also the venues that were hosting taking part in North by Northwich music festival that coming May.

Based on the success of this original piece I was approached by Northwich Victoria football club

Fast-forward to spring 2020, and based on the success of this original piece I was approached by Northwich Victoria football club about the design being printed onto their football shirts.

The project took a few months in total and involved many tweaks and changes, but the final product was better than any of us expected. Others seemed to agree with us, too.

For a while it was displayed in the window of Manchester’s Classic Football Shirts store and was voted in the top 10 coolest football shirts of 2020 by the influential fan site Footy.com.

In 2017 I was approached by Preston based design agency Wash Design to help them with a rebrand for Lancashire Tea, a local business who’ve spent years finessing their recipe for the perfect cuppa.

My job was to create a modern design that would pop on the supermarket shelves while being as classically Lancastrian as potted shrimp.

Over time, myself and the Lancashire Tea team worked together to create a design that represented Lancashire’s famous faces and its many iconic landmarks, from Eric Morecambe frollicking on Morcambe beach to the charming (if equally annoying) Blackpool seagulls. It wasn’t a simple process – the design took several attempts to perfect as the packaging dimensions were strict – but it was all worth it when I started receiving messages from friends who’d seen my work on the Tesco shelves.

To this day this artwork remains one of my most popular pieces of work, and I couldn’t be happier to be associated with the north’s best brew.

Ahead of Manchester City’s FA Cup final game against Watford in 2019 I was approached by BBC Sport about creating a piece of artwork based on the achievements of the then Watford manager Javi Gracia.

This opportunity came about as quite others do: from the fact that one of the BBC Sport staff had seen my mural at RPB barbershop in the Northern Quarter and decided that they wanted to work with me.

BBC Sport’s brief was to create a time-lapse video of me drawing key moments from Gracia’s career that led to him on the road to Wembley. Once the video had been edited it would then be narrated by journalist and Sky Sports pundit Guillem Balague.

On a stifling hot day in my central Manchester studio we spent three hours creating the time lapse creation, only to find out the next day that it hadn’t been filmed correctly.

No matter, we did it again, and fortunately were successful the second time around. Sadly, the piece didn’t help Gracia in his efforts to lift the FA Cup that year – Watford lost 6-0 – but for me it was a dream to see my work played live on BBC1. It’s not every day you appear in the FA Cup final, after all.

I first met with the team behind Salford Rum in early 2018. They had noticed a gap in the market for bespoke rum and wanted to create something really tasty and cool.

Hailing from Salford the two founders spoke of how important it was to pay homage to the history of the Salford Docks into the design, the famous thoroughfare where spices used to make their rum would have landed in the early 1900’s.

I could almost smell the smog of industrial Manchester

To create the design I used vintage maps and pictures of the Salford area from that period. In these images I could almost smell the smog of industrial Manchester, something I wanted to recreate on a rum bottle.

Since the release of their first spiced rum in Summer 2018 both the rum and the design on the bottle has resonated with consumers – Salford Rum is now stocked in John Lewis, Harvey Nichols and many independent shops and bars. The project also kickstarted a lasting relationship between me and the Salford Rum boys that will see us collaborate again over the coming years.