Illustrious crap, Mr Murray

- By now you know that he’s an illustrator of some sort, but let’s find out more about who he is, what he does, and most importantly, where his cat got its name.

- Oh, ok then. My name is Mr Dean Murray, but you can just call me Mr Dean Murray. I am probably about 33 years old and live in the dark depths of the Somerset countryside in England. I live with the esteemed Mr Guff,a very black four legged furry feline type who decided my house would make as good a home as any for somebody such as himself. Mr Guff arrived at such a name for himself after his owner (as he calls himself) tried feeding him organic cat food. The results of this culinary experiment made themselves evident by stinking the house out and probably burning another hole in the ozone layer some miles above. Rest assured; for the safety of mankind, Mr Guff will never munch on another free range lentil.
 -Until... oh, let's say four months ago, my primary income came from several years of creative Web design work scattered across several fairly large organisations: CompuServe, AOL, Virgin Mobile, Screwfix Direct (don't ask) and several small agencies. I came to the decision to move away from Web design and concentrate more on my illustration work after several life changing events invaded my life last year. Life is too short to be drawing monsters on dark evenings so why not do it during the day too? and muster a humble living from it too?

- I asked him how he got into doing this kind of work. Was he the kind that would spend his hours at school doodling all over?

- I've always loved to draw and draw and draw some more. Yes, back at school... now that is a long time ago, I would draw on anything I could get my hands on and often paid the price for it. I'm pretty sure there are still some of my doodles tucked away in the mouldy corners of my old high school (Mathew Murray High School - Leeds). I have never nor will I ever consider myself a great illustrator. As long as I can get the ideas in my head down on paper; I am happy.

Dean has got a very personal touch to his work, and the theme of his drawings often seems to be a bit quirky. Judging by his ”Crappy Christmas” drawings, I was thinking he might have gotten his inspiration from Mr. Hankey of South Park fame.

-To find out if this is really the case, I had to ask him who or what inspires him.

- A dark sense of humour (if you can call it that) comes in handy when you want to give someone a bum for a face. A few people have mentioned Mr Hanky when they catch a glimpse of my Christmas Surprise picture. I had to look him up as I've only ever seen a few Southpark episodes.
-Though I wouldn't want to meet them because arty types get on my nerves after a while, I do admire MichaelSowa, PatrickWoodroffe and I do love Spike Milligan's line drawings. I like the work of Fred Yates too and not just because he used to live inmy house and will be again when I leave the UK.
- People sometimes ask why I often draw one eye bigger than the other pointing out that most people's eyes are the same size. I answer this by raising an eyebrow, thus making one of my eyes look bigger than the other.


Title:Crappy Christmas

- On question of what kind of software and equipment he uses in his work, Dean points to the low-tech origins of his illustrations.

-Equipment and software you say. Well, most of my illustrations come from humble beginnings be it a scribble on the back of a Sainsbury's shopping receipt to a doodle in a very old moth eaten sketch book. If one of these doodles isn't too smudged I may scan it (Canon Canoscan)and bring it into Macromedia Flash to be traced by hand using a very old Wacom Intuos tablet. I have a new Wacom, but just can't seem to get used the new slimy feel silicone covered stylus, yuck. Flash is a great tool for doodling and gives a very natural line similar to a quill, only with less mess. From Flash I would export the vector and bring this into Adobe Illustrator to tidy up the vector paths and apply any gradients. From here I would export the final EPS vector and a high resolution BMP. Next I would open the BMP in Photoshop to apply Exif data and export the final TIF and JPG version. All this is done on a Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop. This probably seem a little long winded, but it's how I do it and... well... it works for me.

- While drawings of various kinds is his main focus right now, he also does other kinds of creative work.

- I do a bit of sculpture work now and then, sometimes fashioning my drawings in 3D in plasticine or ceramics. I'd like to do more of this type of work when I get settled again in thefuture. I do a little bit of writing from time to time too and should be seeing my first children's book hit the shelves later this year. Hopefully not the discount book store shelves.

- Having worked with web-design for many years, and being an illustrator now, I asked Dean for some advice for our contributors.

- Any business type images of power dressed people shaking hands will sell like hot cakes, but then again, hot cakes all taste pretty similar. I would say try and be true to yourself in whatever you create to sell as stock. If your heart is in your work, it will show and will probably sell itself for you (if that makes sense?).


Dean's take on the bird flu

- Being fairly new here at Crestock, I asked him about his impressions so far.

-Crestock is great. While it doesn't seem as big as other stock image sites; it feels much friendlier and there seems to be more of a community feel to the site. There doesn't seem to be as many people whinging on about useless nothingnesses in the forum as on other sites.

- I’m glad I got hold of Dean at thetime I did, since as it turns out, he’s embarking on a world-wide journey this coming March, without any clear cut itinerary.

- I may not return to the UK, then again I may be back in a few months. I'm just going to see where the wind takes me. A rough plan is to cross Russia to Beijing on the transSiberian then to saunter down the great wall of china for a while before maybe staying in India for another while. Then maybe head off to Bolivia to look after monkeys at the Cominicad Inti Wara Yassi refuge. But this is a very rough plan and I may end up living in an igloo measuring ice sheet decline or something. Either way, it's something I need to do. Mr Guff will be well looked after or maybe will be looking after somebody else himself.

For more of Dean's splendid work, stop by his website and visit budgiematic, or have a look at his highly bovine résumé.