Pop!

Cirque

Another piece of personal work.

Black Swan

This one was commissioned by the wonderful Diana Panfil at Institutional Investor, for a piece about a new approach to assessing the risks of financial speculation, and about how to deal with so called Black Swan events.

Pug

A personal piece - inspired by the resemblance of a certain type of dog to a certain type of despot. The dog's a lot cuter though.

Wedding!

I just got married! Hopefully this will go someway towards explaining the lack of updates on the blog recently. A beautiful day, an exceptionally beautiful bride, and a very happy illustrator.

Lost

A new piece of personal work, done in between commissions. I tried to keep the drawing very simple and stripped down for this one, letting the composition do the work

Paul

Continuing the theme of pop stars of the 60s, though this one's a bit easier to stomach.

Jagger

Mick Jagger with a hairy belly and a ridiculous pair of pants. A bit embarrassing really.

Sunday School

Personal work - takes me back to sunday afternoons, at about 2.50pm

I HEART MOVIES

I've finally finished this image that I've been working on for ages, and that I previewed previously with the image of Travis Bickle on a dodgem. Anyway, here it is in it's final incarnation, featuring a final tally 0f 50 movie references. The movies included were chosen for a number of reasons:

1) They had to be Movies that I genuinely liked (otherwise, how could I 'heart' them?).
2) The characters included had to be visually striking/unique in some way or another, because as much as anything this poster is a celebration of the visual richness of cinema.
3) They had to be mainstream enough not to alienate or confuse the viewer - I want people to see this image and immediately start recognising its occupants - it's supposed to be fun after all!

Anyway, I've had fun working on it, and hopefully it'll be a worthwhile addition to my portfolio. I've posted up a few details of the image as well, as when it's printed it comes out at about 40cm x 40cm.

Consumer Reports

I just finished a very nice job for Consumer Reports in the US. It involved 9 separate artworks for a special issue they're just about to publish on how to manage your finances in this topsy turvy mixed up world of financial mayhem. Here's a selection of three of the images - it was a pleasure to get to work on a sequence of images like this, because it gave me the chance to branch out a bit and try a few different approaches. Many thanks to Janice Hogan, who art directed and was great to work with...

Travis

I've been working on a big complicated piece lately involving lots of movie characters at a carnival. Since it won't be finished for AGES here's a little preview.

Some portraits...

Five portraits for Report on Business Magazine, Canada.

Jemaine and Brett

I wanted to try out a new way of approaching portraits, so I gave it a go with the nice chaps from Flight of the Conchords.

Where's the Money Hid? Part 2

Following on from the first image, here's another Night of the Hunter inspired piece featuring the creepy looking little girl. If you watch the film, look out for the bit where she's getting into the boat. It's maybe the most frustrating 10 seconds in the history of cinema.

Where's the Money Hid?

I've just finished this new personal piece - inspired in no small part by a recent viewing of The Night of the Hunter, which was projected in the Movie House in Belfast a couple of weeks back. A great film, with a slightly unsettling pair of children and an extremely unsettling travelling preacher. I should point out that I was introduced to this great film by my very lovely Fiancee. It's her favourite!

Abe and Flo

Two new portrait pieces - not for anything in particular...

The New Website and Blog!

To accompany the all new, singing and dancing www.barryfalls.com, I've decided to launch this handy blog, for all the bite sized updates that were sorely missing from the previous website. I'll be using this page to post my latest work as it happens, and talk about influences and processes etc, as well as for posting up anything that I think it particularly interesting or worth mentioning. You know, the standard blogging look-at-me-I've-got-wonderful-taste type stuff.

As always, a fairly comprehensive portfolio of my work can be found on my main website, but if you're itching for the most recent stuff then you'll always find it on here. Please feel free to get in touch and let me know what you think.

The Songs Will Save Us

Over the last couple of weeks I've been working on this new personal piece, which I've rather pretentiously titled 'The Songs Will Save Us'. The Church in the background is a very deliberate nod to Max Beckmann's painting 'The Iron Footbridge' (below). Actually, if you look at the wheelbarrow, you'll see that Beckmann's head is being carted off by that suspicious little girl. It seemed a respectful gesture at the time.

In all seriousness, I've always really liked the colour palette that Beckmann uses, and the character that he puts into his figures and his architecture. Check out more of his stuff here. This is one of the biggest images I've produced, coming in at about A1 size.

George. W. Bush

This week I was commissioned to create a double page illustration for the Hong Kong based magazine Power. They were running a feature on the biggest villains of the year and they wanted me to tackle George W. Bush in an apocalyptic scene that referenced the Lincoln Memorial in D.C. I came up with the idea of putting him in the Joker's colours.