Change of Focus

I am in the middle of setting up an actual Footynews website so while that is happening I will be posting new artwork on my tumblr and giving this blog a break.

Hope to see you on my tumblr!

Dan

Martin Skrtel

TO PURCHASE CLICK HERE

A moment frozen in time...

Simple. I am Zlatan.

Simple. I am Zlatan.

Stevie G's Big Toe

After reading Steven Gerrard’s autobiography, the story that stuck with me the most was where he nearly lost his big toe after looking for a lost ball in some long grass. A rusty old garden fork stuck straight into his toe and he nearly had to have it amputated. His whole career basically hinged on that moment. I wanted to show that even the smallest of obstacles can have the biggest of repercussions. I hope you enjoy this! Please spread it around! :D

Hard Work

Iniesta is my favourite player. I’ve wanted to go back to doing comics for a long time and this just seemed to fit. Would love feedback on it! Spread it around! :D

Football Penguin Classics

Football Crow

Football Crow! He scores when he wants!

Arjen Robben

Le Tissier

Le Tissier

Displaying Information

Click to enlarge

I was playing around with ideas on how to display information and thought I'd rate these three metallica albums...

Vaguely Intelligent Canine Overlords

A dog has won a talent show tonight. The canine world is moving forward in strides, credit where it’s due. It has upped it’s game. The human race on the other hand, I am worried about. When is the last time a person won a talent show? I mean an actual human being with layers of personailty and a unique outlook on life? A real life person? I think it might be Craig the scouse brickie who won the first series of Big Brother. Ever since then the contestants have been an ever mophing devolutionary cul de sac that has spread to other arenas of tv in general. Geordie Shore, Katie Price, X Factor make me think being taken over by a race of vaguely intelligent canine overlords may be an improvement.

Dr. Alan Grant (paleontologist/hero) suggested in one of his lectures (Jurassic Park 3, 2001) that if velociraptors had been allowed to evolve they would have been the dominant species on planet earth instead of us glorious humans. And sure why wouldn’t they? They can open doors and jump really high, two unfathomably important skills in life. Humans can open doors, just fifty percent of the raptors capabilities. I mean some people have long toe nails but they can’t compete with a velociraptor in that regard. And that is just my limited knowledge of prehistoric version velociraptors. Version 2.0 could have little leather shoes that allow the toenail to move freely or suits that have a hole for the tail to account for  torsion when jumping large distances. The possibilities are endless really.

So to look upon the potential situation in a cautionary but firmly intelligent manner we must hypothetically evaluate how well a velociraptor would do on Britains Got Talent. First off we must assume for the purposes of the evaluation that raptors embrace the notion of nationality and don’t live in one bustling urban sprawl named Velociropolis. Secondly we must try and imagine what raptor judges would see as constituting talent. I assume the general sphere of raptor talent would have evolved from the basics of hunting and survival. Some form of culture would have been developed, I can see them engaging in some form of operatic screeching if I’m honest.

All that of course is assuming they don’t stick classless devolutionaries with great wads of silicon surgically wedged into their chests on social pedestals and let dogs win talent shows whilst wondering why popular culture is going to fuck.

Gone are the days of the heaving biomass. Gone is the noise.

One dimensional football fans are dead. Football fans used to be a hive mind organism we would see bulging in a stand on television or find ourselves a part of on the way to a match. A big screaming finger jabbing food consuming monster with no coherence or academic faculties. An organic biomass wearing thirty thousand replica jerseys and only exercising it's vocal chords. A mobile worship unit for the hero of the day. 

But now. Oh, but now. This biomass has been spliced and diced and each newly severed entity has been implanted with opinions and thoughts and preferences and wants and hopes and formations and this and that. Go onto twitter right now and you will find someone who has written a blog about what fingers Xavi scratches his arse with. Dig deeper and you will find someone writing a counter argument. It's that scary. 

No wonder Anfield has turned into a crypt where the only noise is Bill Shankly turning over in his grave to wipe the vomit from his mouth at Stewart Downing prancing up and down the wing, each kilometer bringing him closer to his titanic sized pay packet. 

The unthinking biomass is gone and in its place are the football hipsters. Each one dissecting the performance and identifying the false 9's here and there in anticipation of updating 'Musings on the Game via Bauhaus design principles and Curry Cheese Chips' when they get home. Downing is of course pioneering his own niche position, the false footballer. 

I run a blog on Joseph Kony & Arjen Robbens cleaning lady. I run a blog on Rastafarianism & how Gary Pallister has nothing to do with it. I run a blog on Blogs & how they affect introverted wingers. I pick my nose and draw pictures of Bill Cosby on the side of Petit Filous containers which I then arrange in 4-4-2 formation and photograph it. And the list goes on and on and on and on and on. And the stadiums get quieter and quieter and quieter….

Football Esoterica

The aim for the 'Football Esoterica' collection of shirts is to appeal to the football fan whose taste goes deeper than a players face on a shirt or a logo of a massive team or corporation. This is football through the looking glass. I think the market is saturated with designs that tip toe around a copyright minefield by vaguely alluding to an icon or famous match. I want to fully embrace my creativity and develop shirts that stir the imagination whilst simultaneously keeping football as the main focus. It’s a beautiful game and I want to make beautiful art of it. People have said to me that the average fan won’t know what ‘football esoterica’ is or who would want to wear a bearded lady on their chest? I believe there is a new more erudite breed of football fan that will appreciate these designs and the off kilter subject matter they portray. I aim to cater for those fans. Now the trick is finding them! I would greatly appreciate any feedback on these designs or if you know someone who would like them then please feel free to pass on this link.


The Kalahari shirt is in the process of being made so I'll post pics when I get the finished product.

Thanks :)

Guardiola & Mourinho

Del Piero, a fine vintage.

A tribute to Alessandro Del Piero. What a legend of the game.

Footballer Reading

Footballer indulging in some reading.

Rodrigo Palacio

This is an illustration of Rodrigo Palacio's goal for Genoa against Lazio for Soccer Italia magazine. It was an extremely intuitive strike that was a mix of innovation and improvisation. I hope the illustration does it justice.

St. Guardiola

St. Guardiola

This is my tribute to Guardiola's time in charge of Barca. It meant a lot to me because his squad were the catalyst for Backpage Press approaching Graham Hunter to write a book on the Barca squad at the time. Graham in turn asked if I would provide illustrations, which was a big step forward for me in my pursuit of a career in illustration.

Guardiola himself has a saintly quality which is amplified by the presence of the malevolent Mourinho. As a coach he seemed to be sent straight from some footballing heaven and it is there to which he flies in this piece. He will descend again some day soon to bestow his unique knowledge and implementation on another lucky team.

Good luck Pep!

Dream Team II

PURCHASE HERE

To commemorate Pep Guardiola's ultra successful time at Barca, here is a highly detailed collection of portraits arranged in his famous 4-3-3 formation. This piece is available to purchase at the link below.

PURCHASE

Poster Poll

I would like people's opinions on which of these posters is better. If you could leave a comment with either A or B to denote your choice I would be very grateful!

A

B

Doodles

I love doing these doodles! :)

Weapon of mass construction

On me 'ead!

20 minute Andy Carroll doodle...

1950's Scott Parker

If there's any interest I'll put this up for sale as a print. Just contact me on twitter (@danleydon)

LFC Poster Project

I've been posting my updates on my tumblr. The link is in the sidebar on the right. There will be daily updates!

:)

Unattainable Goals

When I am in the gym, I sit stretching on the mats. Straight opposite me, stuck on the wall, is a really large telly. Now this thing is set to ‘Dance Nation’ all the time. Maybe it’s broken? I am subjected to writhing females in skimpy attire while I condition my body and generally work up a sweat. It is a slightly jarring experience. I don’t need to engage in strenuous physical activity while Beyonce shakes her arse at me from the other side of a tv screen. I feel like a horse chasing a carrot on a string that it’s never going to reach. After watching Wednesday nights champions league offering and musing on what happened I figured that’s what Barcelona felt like. They could see the goal, they could get near the goal, they could have the ball all they wanted, but the goal itself was the equivalent of Beyonce. A permanent fixture on some other plane of existence.

Barcelona will get to reverse the situation and welcome Chelsea to their stadium next Tuesday. I however will not get to reverse the situation, which would infact be one where Beyonce watches music videos of me gyrating while she stretches in some gym. And anyways, how creepy would that be?

In the Camp Nou we all expect Barca will proceed to load up the goal canons and fire at will for ninety minutes. In doing so, they will have reached their goal. I however will still not have breached that shiny divide between the world of Beyonce music videos and where I do my stretches in my gym. The world is a cruel place but at least I know it.

What Newcastle are up to.

I think I’ve figured out what Newcastle are up to. At this moment they are approaching pole position for entry to Europe’s unashamed money fight. As Chelsea and Spurs teeter about like children atop one anothers shoulders pretending to be adults, Newcastle slowly emerge from the fog on the Tyne like some sort of present day Captain Willard, wild eyed and daubed in striped camouflage, the scent of death in his nostrils.

They have looked into the abyss for many seasons now. Maybe the abyss has taken a shine to them? Whatever is happening, and it’s not Moneyball because Liverpool have tried that and it obviously doesn’t work, the rest of the league should fret. Krul, Cabaye, Tiote, Ben Arfa, Ba and Cisse are the soldiers manning Willard’s boat this time and instead of being driven to insane distraction by the void at the middle of a vacuous Premier League they are flourishing.

Tiote slices through midfield like a machete. Cabaye slings long passes like arrows from a long bow. Ba and Cisse take turns being the most prolific marksmen in Premier League history. Ben Arfa just tore the entire Bolton squad in half.

As a Liverpool fan curled up in foetal position covering my ears I have this reaction to share with you: The horror, the horror....

Hatem Ben Arfa

After his wonder goal today I was inspired to do this quick doodle of Ben Arfa. I think I'm slowly figuring out a style of illustration too. Slowly the operative word.

Practice

Been working on this for about a week now. The aim was to practice portraits and develop my ability to draw well with different shading techniques. I'm pleased with some aspects of it and now know what direction to go in to better improve.

As usual, any thoughts are appreciated and RT's too as they get my work to a wider audience and I'm very grateful for that.

Thanks! :)

Roy Orbison

'In Dreams'

My thoughts on the football

I popped over to my friends Tom and Fergal to watch highlights of the Schalke Bilbao match. It was being covered by 3e, a station so boring I assume that is the dosage of pills you’d need to take to endure their halftime talk, where they fling cliches over and back like a tennis match that runs on uninventiveness. Anyways, on to the football. I liked Schalke’s jersey and was just about to say when Thomas said he didn’t like it very much, so I quickly revised my jersey opinion to ‘Yeah, it’s a nice overall design though. Like, as a whole’.

Schalke’s stadium was pretty cool and the fan’s looked like they were on day release and or some type of mood enhancer so the atmosphere was up to scratch. Fergal said he thought the angle of the stands was quite appealing as it made the stadium more like a cauldron. I agreed and said I thought the stadium was the ‘Westfallendon Arena’ (I’d seen this in FIFA the odd time and chanced the name). At halftime the camera basically cut to the stadium exterior and the sign might as well of been ‘Not the Westfallendon Stadium’ because it was some other name and I was wrong.

Raul was up to his old tricks and got a peach of a goal in the second half to really put the shits up Bilbao. The ire of being out of the Spain squad just before they started being a proper team must still be driving him on. Nothing like negative reinforcement eh Raul? Bilbao started playing properly then, as if they had been playing possum all along. Marcelo Bielsa sat in the dugout watching the match. But if that sentence were written by the popular football media it would read something like this: Reclusive football genius Marcelo Bielsa channelled Brando from Apocalypse Now as he sat gloomily on the bench no doubt musing how the petty physical tussles of a football contest fade into the ether when compared to the real philosophical questions that life poses at three a.m. on a sleepless night within earshot of the melancholy rumblings of the Atlantic. Or not.

Bilbao then took the piss a bit and scored enough goals so it was 2-4. They had plundered enough away goals for two teams, the greedy feckers. It took the wind out of the sails of the Schalke fans and that was a bit unfair in my eyes. They had brought flags and everything. It’s probably pretty hard getting a big blue and white flag to wave about, never mind waving the thing for 90 minutes. Even getting it by the turnstiles would be an absolute nightmare. Imagine trying to get it on a flight to America? You could probably massacre an entire plane with a blue and white flag these days. Terrorists are stock piling them as we speak.

Onto the money fest that was Milan Barca. I heard that Milan had made somewhere near 2 million filling their shambles of a stadium for this glamour tie. I don’t care if it has a great reputuation. When I was there for Milan Bari, the atmosphere had forgotten to turn up but the ice cream on the seats had arrived early, eager to annoy my shite. I can imagine Silvio Berlusconi, honeying and lovemaking from on high in his tinted window filth den high above the halfway line, when one of his aides pops in. ‘Mr. Berlusconi, code vanilla! There’s ice cream on the seats!’ to which he replies with a mouth full of foie gras, the blood of some freshly punctured middle eastern princess still to dry across his thighs, ‘I am never to be interrupted when in my Bunga Bunga room! Be gone!’.

The first half was notable for Alexis Sanchez sprinting from the half way line until he reached the box, whereupon he threw his body with all his might. As he hurtled through the air he managed to outstretch a leg which grazed Abiatti. Sanchez had flown with such pace that he didn’t make it back to the stadium until about fifteen minutes later. He was heard to comment that ‘it was a brisk night outside but he enjoyed the walk back’. All the same it was claimed as a ‘stonewall’ penalty by the football world at large which I will take as a sign that resigned cynicism is the new black. 

It ended nil all. Ibrahimovich wandered about the pitch. Messi cut inside on his left foot a lot. Ambrosini fouled whoever came near him. Tello was after the glamour of a goal. Messi shouted at him. I liked both jerseys.

The Barca Match Day Experience

Footynews presents this short video on what precedes a Barca match day. Hope you enjoy!

My week in football

It’s been a week where Liverpool have, to put it lightly, not lived up to the expectations of a team that has had squidoodles of money unceremoniously rammed into it over the last while. The clubs travails remind me of a passage in ‘The Hobbit’ where our illustrious heroes find themselves in a dark wood (The Premier League) and they can see the twinkling lights of merrymaking (Entry to the Champions League) in the distance. However, each time they arrive near the party, the lights vanish and they find themselves once again in the dark only for the party to have sprung up at a different point in the forested murk just on the edge of vision. Someone was moving the goalposts on them, ironically something which Liverpool may have benefitted from this season.

For the QPR capitulation I was at a five a side so did not watch, a decision that was vindicated when my chauffeur Fergal informed me of the score and manner of defeat through the partition in his limousine. The disappointment of the match was added to the fact that toward the end of the game I had done that pass where the goalie gives it to you short, you’re so tired that when you attempt to find a pass it clunks off your shin and into the path of some glitzy forward who sticks it in the goals while putting gel in his hair. I did this twice in thirty seconds.

For the Wigan match I was propped up on my bed squinting at my computer screen. I spent the first half convincing myself that it was infact a football match and not some form of blurry tetris (due to pixelation) that was bizarrely accompanied by the voice of a British commentator. My friend Thomas popped over for the second half and opted to sit on the end of my bed to watch the match, which I found a bit odd because I was sitting on the other bit of the bed, but I didn’t say anything, we just sat in silence as Wigan romped to victory like the relegation steamroller they are. I got Thomas a pint of water then, it’s hot weather.

Later on in the week I went to see a one man show about a guy who had gone to great lengths to basically commit fraud in a legal way by cashing a fake cheque for 95 grand in some bank in America. At the intermission my friend Brian asked who he should text to get the score of the Chelsea Benfica match. I said he should text Andre Villas Boas but that he mighn’t actually be watching it. He text his mum because she has Sky.

When I got home I watched the highlights and was pleased to see Torres set up Kalou and then do the most enthusiastic ‘get in’ movement I’ve seen in quite a while. He was a monument of gritted teeth, Iberian highlights and a single hairband as he proceeded to punch a non-existant entity right in it’s invisible guts. I then day dreamed of him playing back at Liverpool with Suarez and the pair of them being great friends.

Butragueno

Bearded Ladies F.C.

Looking for opinions on this shirt design. I'm aiming to make clothing that I would buy. Quirky, off beat stuff. Any opinions appreciated!

First Touch Soccer

I recently had the pleasure of working with Alan Gould (@alanjgould) on a logo for his soccer company 'First Touch Soccer'. The whole process was very fun and I am extremely happy with the end result. Alan is a sound man and I hope the business takes off for him.

El Buitre

Get Well Soon Eric Abidal

Mes que un Club

PURCHASE

This artwork traces the progress of Barcelona Football Club over the last few years. An assortment of notable players and personalities associated with the club are rendered painstakingly in black and white to ensure this piece would fit in well in any living room as well as any bedroom or football club house. A high end piece that is art first and football second. 

As always, opinions and comments are highly appreciated. For anyone that retweets this I would like to thank you in advance. It really is a massive boost and helps my artwork get to new audiences. Thank you.

I have also used individual pieces I was proud of in more basic posters below. I hope people enjoy them!

Brazilian Culture

I was watching 'City of God' earlier on. The colours struck me and I sketched one of the characters (Lil Ze, below) in 25 minutes. I really like this blocky messy style and feel like exploring Brazilian football culture. Any new samba stuff will be posted here. People's opinions and ideas really help my work so if anyone has them don't hesitate to comment or tweet me with them.

This feels like it will be an exploration of the whole culture of samba. It's a massive thing and ignites thoughts of certain colours and sound whenever I think of it. My dad always used to play samba and Brazilian music in the house and car when I was small so if I get certain inspiring youtube vids I'll stick them in here too.

As usual tweeting my work to other like minded people really helps my stuff get a new audience and I am so grateful for anyone that helps me out in this way. Thanks!

Lil Ze, a character from the film 'City of God'

The main character (Rocket) in 'City of God' is introduced playing football in a slum with other kids his age. The film plunges you head first into a colourful, vibrant world which communicates certain aspects of one way of Brazilian life. Everything is infused with music and colour. The tight maze like alleys of the favellas are at once a backdrop and one explanation of where renowned Brazilian footwork is developed. The film is so kinetic and full of flair and inventiveness it is like watching a Brazilian national team in full flow.

Pele leans to the left, defender sails to the right. 1970.

While browsing photos of Pele on Interleaning I spotted one that really showed how he changed direction at pace. I wanted to illustrate it with geometric simplicity. This is the result. I think I got some of the dynamism of the movement across with the flat blocks of colour. As usual I'd love your comments.

He's a magician.

Watching Ronaldinho in his pomp at Barca was the most exciting thing football has offered me. Messi is getting near it but not in the same way. Ronaldinho brought groove and funk to football. When he played there was magic in his feet. His goal at Chelsea where he toe poked it past Cech was one of the best goals I've ever seen. In this illustration I've tried to convey his sense of balance in tricky situations while doing something amazing.

Edison Arantes do Nascimento

To an extent he is the face of football pop culture. I've found it's hard to seperate the man from the enduring myth. He seems like a superhero that is incapable of doing something wrong. For me he embodies a joyful simple side of the game and with this illustration I wanted to capture a bit of that joy. It's why I play football and why I make my illustrations so I can understand it. Here he is; Pele.

AVB in a snowstorm of doubt

Football Heads

A bit of practice on faces.

Portraits

Darren Smith from SW Accountants approached me about designing portraits for his website instead of just uploading regular old photos of himself and his business partner. I really enjoyed getting to draw up the lads in this style.

I love these interesting projects so if anyone has an idea they're musing over just contact me and have a chat! Thanks again to Darren for letting me display the artwork.