Here a a few photos from the opening of my exhibition Face the Music. I would love to thank all the friends, family and music fans who dropped by to check it out.


The exhibition runs until the 9th of December 2017 at Sweets Workshop Gallery in Sydney, Australia. Shop 4, 58-60 Carlton Cres, Summer Hill 2130. If you can't physically make it in to check out the exhibition you can view the entire show online here.

I have hand-painted over 30 vibrant portraits that feature some of my favourite iconic musicians from across the decades. These include; Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, Prince, Nirvana, Radiohead and many, many more.

I have a brand new exhibition called Face the Music starting next month at Sweets Workshop In Summer Hill NSW Australia.

I have hand-painted over 30 vibrant portraits that feature some of his favourite iconic musicians from across the decades. These include; Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, Prince, Nirvana, Radiohead and many, many more.

The exhibition officially opens at 2pm on Saturday the 7th of October all are welcome to attend. Face the Music is also part of this years Summer Hill Neighborhood Feast which is on Sunday the 8th of October. If you can't make the opening the show will run until the 9th December so there is plenty of time to check it out.

Hope to see you there.

This is my gouache painting called Playtime 1984 - Skeletor a Portrait. It is part of the Illustrators Australia 9x5 Exhibition that is on in St Heliers St Gallery, Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne. This years theme was "Playtime" so I decided to paint my favourite toy circa 1984, the evil lord of destruction, Skeletor.



The 9x5 exhibition is run by Illustrators Australia and is inspired by the Heidelberg School of artists in the late 1800s, in which cigar boxes measuring roughly 9 x 5 inches were used as the substrate in an exhibition of the same name. It has been a mainstay of Illustrators Australia’s exhibition activities since 1995. You can view the other pieces in the exhibition here. A big thank you the Illustrators Australia for hosting the event and also for the photos from the exhibition above.

I can finally reveal my illustration for the Thirty Three and a Third Exhibition that opened at the fantastic Gallery1988 East In Los Angeles today. The piece is called The Butcher Shop Quartet and is my reinterpretation of The Beatles Yesterday and Today Album with the infamous Butcher cover. The print is a limited edition giclée print you can get a copy from Gallery1988's website here.

The Thirty Three and a Third Exhibition celebrates the art of the album cover, featuring reinterpretations and re-imaginings of existing album covers by artists and designers! When it came time for me to pick what album to illustrate I was stuck. I had a million ideas running through my head, I even lost sleep, mentally going through my record collection thinking of an album to reinterpret. I really wanted to illustrate an album that I not only loved to listen to but that I was also drawn to the cover artwork of. I then began thinking about records and record collecting and albums that I don't own and what would be my holy grail record find based solely on its cover, that's when it hit me….. The Beatles, Yesterday and Today with the now infamous Butcher Cover.


For those of you who don't know the Beatles' U.S. albums differed from the band's U.K. albums in a variety of ways, including different track lists, song mixes, album titles and artwork. In the U.S. the fab four where signed to Capitol Records and especially in the early years they were playing catch-up with the albums and singles that had already come out on the EMI record label in the U.K. Yesterday and Today was released in June 1966 and included tracks from the Beatles' two most recent British LPs which had not yet been included on American albums, plus three from their upcoming LP in the United Kingdom, plus two songs which were back-to-back on a single. At the time The Beatles felt the US releases had undone the hard work that they put into the sequencing of the British versions.


When asked to supply an image for the cover of this album, the band decided to show their dislike of the hodgepodge nature in which Capitol Records compiled their albums by submitting a photograph from an earlier photo shoot by Robert Whitaker. The photographer had the Beatles in the studio for a conceptual art piece titled A Somnambulant Adventure. For the shoot, Whitaker took a series of pictures of the group dressed in butcher smocks and draped with pieces of meat and body parts from plastic baby dolls. The group played along as they were tired of the usual photo shoots and the concept was compatible with their own sense of humour.


Capitol Records originally printed 750 000 covers with the Butcher Cover image. A small fraction were shipped to distributors, disc jockeys and reviewers before its release. A Negative reaction to the cover was immediate and after receiving complaints from some dealers, the record was immediately recalled by Capitol Records prior to its actual release. Although initially ordering the destruction of the Butcher covers, Capitol decided instead to paste a much more conventional cover over the old ones when faced with number of jackets they had already printed. Of course as word of this spread among Beatles Fans, owners of the altered cover attempted, usually unsuccessfully, to peel off the pasted-over cover, hoping to reveal the original image hidden beneath. Eventually, the soaring value and desirability of unpasted-over Butcher covers spurred the development of intricate and complex techniques for peeling the Trunk cover off in such a way that only faint horizontal glue lines remained on the original cover.


I originally chose to reinterpret The Beatles Butcher Cover of the Yesterday and Today Album because of its rarity but it also got me thinking about the power of the album cover. I feel that this cover is a definite precursor to the more artistic and creative album covers of the Beatles' later career, that move away from a simple group shot of the band. When recreating the cover I made it a little less macabre by illustrating it in my retro "story-book style". I really wanted to capture not only the likenesses but also the mannerisms and energy of The Beatles in a very simplified form. I think the final illustration has the feeling of being a children's sing along album which is funny when you think back to its original release and the controversy that followed. Rather than having the band sitting is a blank studio I decided to emphasize the humour and surrealism of the original photograph having The Beatles sitting outside a Butcher and Doll Repair Shop. I also decided to get a bit self referential placing this Butcher and Doll Repair Shop on Penny Lane right next door to the famed barber shop. The Thirty Three and a Third Exhibition exhibition will run until the 21st of December at Gallery1988 East In Los Angeles.

I have some very, very exciting news I have been selected to have an illustration of mine in the Thirty Three and a Third and a Third Exhibition at the wonderful Gallery1988 East In Los Angeles this December.


The exhibition celebrates the art of the album cover, featuring reinterpretations and re-imaginings of existing album covers by artists and designers!

I won't give away what album I have done just yet - but I will say a sneak peak of it features on the flyer above. If you are in LA this December you've gotta check this exhibition out it's sure to be fantastic! The exhibition will run from the 5th until the 21st of December.

Happy Record Store Day 2014 everyone! It gives me great pleasure to finally reveal that a piece of artwork I designed was selected to be a part of the great Secret 7" initiative.

Secret 7" is an annual event that combines music and art for a good cause. Secret 7" take seven songs from seven well known musicians and press each one 100 times, inviting creatives from around the world to interpret the tracks in their own style, resulting in a one-of-a-kind sleeve for every 7”. The unique pieces of art were exhibited anonymously at Mother London Gallery in London before going on sale this Record Store Day. The proceeds from the event go to the War Child charity.
My design (seen above) was for the classic T. Rex track Get It On. Marc Bolan is one of my favorite artists I love the work he did as T. Rex in the 70's and feel so lucky to have had my artwork selected to represent this track. Get It On was released in 1971 it spent weeks at #1 and went on to sell millions around the world becoming a glam rock anthem. It’s taken from the album Electric Warrior.
I used a photo I took of a mirror ball exploding with light to represent the colourful excesses of the glam rock pioneer, T. Rex. When designing the cover I wanted to use a similar colour palate and treatment that was used on the original cover of the Electric-Warrior album, designed by British art design group Hipgnosis (see my photo of the original cover below).


I am including some pictures from the exhibition opening taken by the folks at Secret 7".

I created this illustration for Sweets Workshop's Annual Food Fight Exhibition and Publication. The 2013 theme was The Festive Feast and what's more festive than a group of sausages having a dance! I've actually had a simple sketch of this design sitting in a sketch book for a few years now so it was great to have such a wonderful excuse to turn it into finished art.


The Posters are of a limited edition size of 100 and are all hand numbered by me. You can pick up a copy here.

I was recently lucky enough to have my Pack of Heroes action figures awarded Custom of the Week over on the Mego Museum website and message board.


 EMCE Hammer, Board Moderator wrote:
"There has been a ton of great stuff posted in the past three weeks or so. The Pack of Heroes set by John D-C really jumped out at me, both for creativity involved as well as the execution. These figures just have a neat vibe to the. I'd probably buy them on sight on appearance alone."

As a long time Mego fan and collector, its safe to say I was pretty chuffed by this recognition of my work!

For those of you that don’t know, The Mego Corporation was a toy company that dominated the action figure toy market during most of the 1970s. The Mego Corporation was founded in the early 1950s and was mostly known prior to 1971 as a producer of dime store toys. Starting in 1971, Mego began purchasing license rights to a variety of successful motion pictures, television programs, and  comic books, and started producing lines for Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, and the Wizard of Oz. Mego used various licensed Marvel and DC superhero characters to create their World’s Greatest Superhero line, which became their most successful toy line. They also produced an original character, Action Jackson, an unsuccessful competitor of Hasbro’s G.I. Joe. The secret of Mego’s success was that their action figures were constructed with interchangeable heads. Generic bodies could be mass produced and different figures created by interposing different heads and costumes on them. Mego also constructed their figures primarily in an 8-inch (200mm) scale - setting an industry standard in the 1970s.

I prefer to customise using the Mego’s 8-inch figures for a few reasons, firstly I love them as a base because you can really go crazy with the cloth costuming secondly they have a very classic look to them, and thirdly there is a really established community around customizing Mego Action Figures and it is pretty easy to purchase reproduction parts and accessories.

Here are a few photos from the opening of my exhibition, Pack of Heroes at Sweets Workshop! The exhibition featured the artwork that I've created for an up-and-coming card game by Adventureland Games.


If you didn't make it to the opening, the exhibition runs until the 18th of June so you still have heaps of time to check it out. Also if you liked what you saw and wanna get copy of the game as well as bragging rights for helping it get produced it is now up on kickstarter so head on over to www.packofheroes.com and follow the link!


I Would also love to thank my wonderful and super supportive friends and family who came out to the exhibition opening on Saturday. I really appreciate your support and it was fabulous to finally show you what I've spent most of this year working on!

This is me with Pack of Hero's Game Designer Phil Walker-Harding

This kinda mess can only mean one thing.... Yep, I'm getting for another exhibition.

With Record Store Day 2012 behind us I can finally reveal that one of the pieces of artwork I designed and submitted to Tanlenthouse's great initiative, Secret 7" was successfully selected. My design entitled "It's a Wonderful Surprise" was hand picked by non-other than The Cure's Robert Smith to be one of the 7" record sleeves for a special release of Friday I'm In Love.

My artwork was produced into an actual one-of-a-kind 7" record sleeve and was on display at the Idea Generation Gallery in Shoreditch, London where it was purchased by a mystery buyer (who has impeccable artistic taste, If I do say so myself). Every penny profited from the sale of the exclusive vinyl records went to the Teenage Cancer Trust charity.


I am including some pictures of the exhibition opening taken by the folks at Secret 7" Big thanks to Kevin King for giving me permission to use the pics.


You can read more about my original submissions and the Secret 7" project  here.