About Wizard Bones
I'm Max, although around these mean streets, ruins of ancient cities or far-off trading outposts in the furthest reaches of the galaxy, I go by Wizard Bones—a London-based self-taught painter and illustrator specialising in hand-drawn, hand-cut and hand-painted woodcut artworks that are equal parts ghastly, ghoulish and groovy.
My artwork lives somewhere on the blurry border between fantasy, science fiction and whatever strange corner of my imagination awoke that day. I love creating characters that feel like they've escaped from another universe altogether, such as rusted automatons crafted by lost ancient civilisations, bizarre multi-headed aliens having escaped a high-security lunar prison, or haunting cosmic horrors that look as though they've clawed their way through a multi-dimensional void out into our universe.
Howdy Partner!
Some of my earliest memories involve sitting around the dinner table with my parents, surrounded by colouring pencils, scraps of paper and increasingly questionable artistic decisions. By the end of the evening the table was covered in doodles and I usually had a healthy dose of pencil shavings perched in my hair and a dusting of graphite smeared all across my face. My mum has always had an incredible ability to copy reference images almost perfectly. She can capture proportions, anatomy and tiny details with what genuinely feels like witchcraft.
Me? Well…that's always been a struggle. I've never really been very good at drawing things ‘accurately’. Faces end up wonky (you should see the absolute state of my Year 7 secondary school self-portrait….and we won’t discuss the fact I decided to use light green watercolour for my skin tone) and hands of the poor souls I’m drawing end up with a suspicious number of fingers (I’d just like to take a minute to sincerely thank the Procreate symmetry tool—you've spared me hours of emotional despair.)
After a while I realised that this eternal battle with drawing things ‘accurately’ was actually so freeing, giving me permission to draw whatever multi-headed, multi-limbed and multi-legged creatures I wanted without anyone batting an eyelid. Let’s face it, who the hell is going to tell an eight-eyed, 20ft tall cosmic deity from Jupiter that it's “anatomically inaccurate”.
Instead of chasing realism, I leaned into imagination. Those strange little imperfections slowly became the style that would eventually become Wizard Bones.
Where it all started
I've always been fascinated by the art styles of fantasy and science-fiction worlds, from classic monster movies, comic books packed with ridiculously detailed inkwork and graphic novels where every character looks like they've survived a hundred arduous adventures before the story even begins. Big love to Mike Mignola for creating Hellboy and his expanded universe which have always been a mainstay of inspiration for me, along with Moebius and his rich world building, and not to forget CROM, whose style I just worship.
I want every metal screw, every wrinkle, and every crack in an ancient helmet to hint at a chapter of a rich backstory that you never quite get to hear. I love hiding tiny details that reward people who stop and look a little longer.
Worlds that shaped me
As every other human being on this spinning rock we call home, I fell victim to that age-old and quite frankly boring story of ‘life getting in the way’ and my love for art taking a break on the bench for over 10 years. Until one day I came across my old sketchbooks and decided to buy a cheap graphics tablet to have a crack at digitally inking these sketches. Convinced I'd be creating masterpieces within the hour, the reality was that I spent the whole evening fighting for my life trying to draw a straight line until eventually this was achieved after a lot of frantic trips to the Undo button.
Not long afterwards, my dear friend Jordie asked if I'd try my hand at painting his battered old skateboard deck with whatever design I fancied. I decided to paint the head of an otherworldly cyclopean alien with its gloriously oversized brain exposed in front of a vibrant two-tone green and yellow wavy background. It turned out really well and he loved it, so naturally we celebrated by taking it out skating. Roughly five minutes later an ambitious ollie met an unforgiving kerb, and a decent portion of my carefully painted extraterrestrial was scraped clean off the deck.
Typical. However, by my dude Jordie believing in me to deliver this project and hyping me up all the way through, I found the confidence to really get stuck into making things and to start the Wizard Bones Instagram page in 2020.
Rediscovering art
The following year I bought an iPad and discovered Procreate and goooooood lord what a difference. Suddenly I found the fun in drawing again and I ended up creating regularly for the first time in years, all whilst sharing my digital drawings on the Wizards Bones Instagram page.
After a period of hitting the digital art hard, I really fell in love with making painted woodcuts and this has since become my favourite medium to explore my art through and has become the main way I relax in the evenings. I love woodcuts because they force me to slow down, with every stage demanding patience and every cut being intentional. Unlike digital art, there's no endless undo button—just a sheet of wood, a design and the challenge of bringing an idea to life one careful step at a time. There’s something so satisfying about patiently watching a strange new character gradually emerge from a plain sheet of wood, it really does help the old brain slow down.
These days I actually spend less time uploading to social media than I do actually just enjoying the process of making things.
Loving the process
Long before the idea of Wizard Bones was conjured from the murky waters of an intergalactic witch's cauldron, I now realise I’d already been busy conjuring my own universe through the sketchbooks and doodles of my childhood this whole time.
I’ve always imagined seeing my characters and creatures on clothing, stickers, skateboards—anything, really. So launching my own Wizard Bones clothing collection is something I've wanted to do for as long as I can remember, rather than just being another project.
A childhood dream
This website is a space where the fruits of my imagination can escape out into the real world and where people can proudly take home their own piece of the Wizard Bones universe.
I hope you enjoy exploring this strange little universe as much as I've enjoyed creating it.
Thanks for stopping by, partner!
Max (Wizard Bones)