Games Review

TITLE:   'My Life' 

GRAPHICS:  Awesome and totally convincing. 'Sometimes, I felt as if I was actually there'

GAMEPLAY:  Average 

STORYLINE:  Predictable and linear plot after a promising beginning.

COMMENTS:  Started out interesting and absorbing, then the storyline turned into a resource-based dungeon crawl. Towards the end of the final level it definately weakens. Other players tell me that there is a software glitch which causes unrecoverable system errors, culminating in a fatal crash.  Apparently, only the  codewriters have actually seen the End Boss. 

OVERALL SCORE: 70%

single-panels

Here are some published singles which have appeared in UK magazines during the last two years.  I'll add a new one every Sunday.

    Updated: Sunday 4 January 2009

               HAPPY NEW YEAR

This set is about a new landlord who comes to visit 

his new country seat, and is given a hard time by the locals

     Updated: Sunday 23 November

This one (below - NOT the ferret one above lol)  was inspired after nuclear submarine USS Newport News hit the Japanese supertanker VLCC Mogamigawa in the Straits of Homuz on 8 January  2007...
Headline:  'planes fogbound at Heathrow...'

time

Have you ever noticed how all your best ideas come when you don't enough time to develop them? And when you eventually get some spare time to work on the ideas, they mysteriously disappear? 

I have found a way to overcome this. Creativity is like food or sex. You'd never say to somebody you desperately desire "I really want you so badly....how about Tuesday week at 3 o'clock?" or think to yourself "I'm starving! I must have some food later on!"

Similarly, there is only one perfect moment to develop your idea, and that is NOW.  So always be ready (in my case I carry a sketchbook everywhere)  to stop what you are doing and make as finished a version of your theme as is possible.  A scrap of paper and a pencil are all you need.  It's actually more fulfilling than sex because you have something to show at the end of it.

Believe me,  if you can master this you will be so happy.

so...hello

Hello. My name is Richard, and for many years I worked as a high-ground gamekeeper in Cumbria, so I have built up a working knowledge of the British countryside.  I have always possessed an odd sense of humour, and then in 2004 I found I also had a bit of artistic talent, so I decided to combine these three elements and draw cartoons about rural life. 

Downland Graphics (www.downlandgraphics.co.uk) was born as a online portfolio, and I now put most of my spare energy into improving my drawing and trying to drum up new business.  At the moment, five magazines publish my cartoons. Every day I take an A5 sketchbook on my 60-minute bus journey to work, and I find that 06.45 to 07.45 is a great time to be creative.  Why waste it?

Art is about inspiration plus dedication!