Just uploaded a little “Flying Pig” goodness to the zazzle store. Hot Rod business cards and a couple of shirts.

Earthmonster is no longer hosting Redbubble artwork. This blog will be held exclusively for a limited number of friends, family and my personal work. You are more than welcome to continue to visit but if you are looking for your work check Redbubble and or any other persons wanting to take the time to promote you. Earthmonster thanks you for your time and interest. Good luck in future works.

Steve Harvey AKA Limey 57 is originally from London, he was born in London, England but moved to the US in 2001 to get married, he met his wife through a pen pal scheme. So I guess that makes Steve kind of a mail order bride-groom. He has been drawing for as long as he can remember, all self taught. Influenced by Picasso, Lichtenstein, Durer, Marvel Comics, Pop Art, Psychedelia, Sci Fi, Impressionists, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Monet, Mondrian, Art Deco, Art Neuvo and Propaganda Posters.

If he see’s something he likes style wise, he usually tries and have a stab at. He got into computer art when his previous career as a money broker went belly up. A friend of his showed him the basics of Corel Draw and the rest is history. His Photoshop work is by trial and error, I wonder what he could do with some lessons?

EM: Steve can I ask you, as a child what scared the crap out of you?

Steve:”We lived in an old house that had no indoor bathroom. The out side toilet had no electric light so you had to take a candle in a jar with you (I’m not making this up….) a couple of times I’d be out doing the business and the candle would go out and you’d be sitting there in the pitch black with all the spiders and such…I hated it when that happened, literally scared the crap out of you.”

EM: Do you have any children?

Steve: ” No kids – if I had any, I would steal their candy.”

EM: What are your favorite art sites besides RedBubble?

Steve: “Don’t really have any favourite art sites – Earthmonster Illustrated is pretty good though… If I see anything interesting stylewise, I’ll stop and look at it.”

EM: I like that answer!

EM: Who do you look to for inspiration? Specifically on RedBubble.

Steve: “There’s a lot of people on Redbubble who are fantastic artists and designers, can’t really say I have a real favourite, I like the illustrative styles mainly. Also, there a few of butt holes on Redbubble who are really full of their own self importance – I can’t feature those people at all.”

EM: Have you ever bitten the head off a live bat via Ozzy style?

Steve: “I’ve never bitten the head off a live anything – apart from a few people who’ve pissed me off.

Make sure to visit Steve at his Zazzle store.

A Chat With Matt Mawson

I started drawing at the end of the fifties. I credit the beginning of my creativelife to my atrocious eyesight. I didn’t even know I was short-sighted until I was about ten, but my first glasses made a huge difference, bringing everything further than a few feet suddenly into focus.

Before specs, however, I lived in comics (Carl Banks’ work for Disney, Richie Rich, Ginger Meggs, even Classic Comics with their versions of Ivanhoe and The Three Musketeers). Because my eyesight was crystal clear between about 6 inches and 12 inches, the styles of drawing made an impression and I did my best to copy my favorite frames. Later in teenage years I stopped copying and started creating original work, some of which ended up in the school magazine. (I suspect this was an attempt to stop me from drawing cruel caricatures of the teachers.)

My interest in music coincided with the first singles from the Beatles. It wasn’t long before British pop rock became a consuming interest. I sent drawings of the mop tops to their fan club and they came back months later, signed by John, Paul, George and Ringo (or so I believed at the time . I now suspect fan club helpers did most of the autograph signing).

The Beatles represented an exciting burst of creativity in the staid early sixties. I lived an average suburban life in western Sydney but the best of pop and rock added color, hope and the power of creativity to my teenage years. Album covers and comics were all tied into the culture, and there was plenty to inspire me. I drew late into the night and in the day I took black and white photographs, which I developed at home.

So as I grew up I had to make a living and the public service beckoned. I’d still be behind a boring desk if I hadn’t persisted in cartooning and sending my weird little doodlings to Radio Times, the subscribers’ magazine of the radical, rocking 4ZZZ-FM on the campus of the University of Queensland. Those were the bad old days of Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and the protest movement was in full swing. (I found out later that my tame, anti-Joh cartoons earned me my own police Special Branch file.)

My Radio Times drawings led to an invitation to draw for the satirical Cane Toad Times, and a paid gig drawing and designing for the student union magazine, Semper. This was before computers, in a time of cut and paste and manual colour separations, but as computerization developed I was keen to adopt the technology. After I went freelance, some of the more tedious work involved redrawing (in CorelDraw) lots of very poor quality maps and logos. It’s surprising how many people think that what’s good enough for a webpage is good enough for a high-quality printjob. (It isn’t.)

I spent hours and hours converting fuzzy, low-res bitmaps into razor sharp vector drawings and diagrams. At the same time I was getting more and more into digital photography. Some of my photos were deemed worthy of prizes at local shows, but most were pretty ordinary. At some stage it occured to me to combine my vector drawing skills with my photography, and I discovered that my more mundane photos came up a
treat when redrawn as vector images.

I’m semi-retired now, but love doing vector drawings and sharing them on RedBubble .

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