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Graphic Gibbon

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- February 28, 2011

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Chapel isometric cutaway step-by-step...

- March 28, 2018

As part of a Graphic News package ahead of the UK royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, I was tasked with creating an isometric cutaway diagram of St George's Chapel within the grounds of Windsor Castle. It turned out to be one of the most challenging illustrations of my career and took eight days to complete. There was not a great deal of good reference out there, so I had to mostly make do with satellite imagery, copies of old plans, a couple of interior 360° panoramas and tourist photos. The following 100 screen grabs show how I created it using Adobe Illustrator (images can be enlarged by clicking on them) . Step 1: Gather the most reliable research material Step 2: Draw as accurate a floorpan as possible — everything else depends on this being right Stage 3: Fold it into an isometric plane (strictly speaking this is not true isometric but an angle of my own liking) ...

The story behind the story: How I came to write "Billy Twigg and the Storm of Shadows" on a mobile phone and win a publishing deal for my troubles!

- February 22, 2017

February 22, 2017 Writing a book was one of those bucket list items for me, I guess. A must do it before I die type of deal. That's certainly how it all started out, about ten years ago, in Australia. I'd always liked writing stories as a kid growing up in the Scottish Borders, and had spent a few summer holidays hunched over my parents old typewriter, trying to hammer out my "bestseller". It would invariably be influenced by whatever my favourite movie or TV show was at the time, or maybe by the books I was reading. I liked macabre tales of mystery, horror, fantasy and science fiction mostly (and still do in many ways). It didn't take me long to realise that writing an actual book was a really big deal (particularly when I was 13 years old and only had six weeks off school!) so I switched to short stories (that I had a realistic chance of finishing) and had the odd one published in my high school magazine as a teenager in the mid-1980s. Tha...

How I cutaway the Xbox Series X...

- August 17, 2020

I should point out from the get-go that this is an Adobe Illustrator illustration and not an exact CAD model or precise render of the inner workings of the upcoming XBox Series X games console. Think of it more as an indication of how it works, based on the best publicly available images from Microsoft. It was a relatively tricky graphic to do and had some quite fiddly elements to create in 3D. Here is the abridged process in 10 screen grabs. The images can be enlarged by clicking them, if you wish. I begin by taking some screenshots from the XBox website that show the console's innards. I skew one image into an approximation of a flat, face-on viewpoint and proceed to draw components. These are the elements laid on top of each other – making sure they all fit together. Time to extrude elements into 3D shapes, using reference photos from the XBox website. All the, now 3D, elements laid on top of each other – making sure they still fit together. Now to work out how to pull them ap...