Jonny Duddle is, as far as I can determine, a concept artist for the gaming industry who lives in the UK. The “Who” section of his website just has a “More info soon” line above a row of photos that look a bit like a criminal line up; but we’ll ignore that in light of the fact that the “How” section, right next door, has nice step-by-step breakdowns of the creation of three of his wonderfully silly and exaggerated images, including the image shown here.
Duddle’s images have the feeling of highly rendered cartoons, brushed out with plenty of texture, lots of color and a good dose of flippant attitude. Monkeys and/or apes feature prominently in many of them, including a series of astronaut chimp images and a series he calls “Monkey Girl” of which the image at left is a part.
Some of the work on the site, notably in the “Games” section, is from his professional work on games like Milo and the Rainbow Nasties, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, and E.T.: Return to the Green Planet. The brief bit of text in that section tells us we can’t expect to see more games images from him for a some time for contractual reasons; but we’ll ignore that in light of the “Stories” and “Gumph” sections, which are chock-full of fun stuff, apparently done for his own amusement. The former featuring work done around story-like themes, if not for actual stories, and the latter a place to fit things that don’t fit the former.
In addition to the detail images you can find in the course of the step-by-step breakdowns in the “How” section, you will occasionally see icons next to images that say “Big?”, and link to some genuinely large close-ups of the images.
For reasons that elude me, Duddle’s site opens in a pop-up window, uses frames and is too big for its window at times; but we’ll ignore that in light of the fact that his opening page indicates that his site is due for a major overhaul.
Duddle paints digitally. Only one of his step-by-step sequences includes any commentary at all, and it’s pretty breezy; but we’ll ignore that in light of the fact that Duddle is now a regular contributor to ImagineFX, a UK magazine devoted to digital fantasy and science fiction art, and the magazine’s web site includes several of his workshops, including Go Berserk in Photoshop and Perfect Brushes in Photoshop, followed, ironically, by Defecting to Painter, and Painter related posts like Getting Messy with Oils and Mixed Media Experiments (part 3), in which he uses both apps together.
In the course of this post, I’ve probably told you less about Duddle’s work than I have about the structure of his web site; but we’ll ignore that.