Kevin Atkins

Illustrator, Resident Artist, Creative Start

About Kevin

Kevin was born in Cleethorpes in 1977 and, inspired by a million early memories of cartoons and comic books, has been drawing anything and everything for as long as he can remember.

He dreamed of pursuing art as a full-time career (ideally in animation or comic art) but, due to various personal reasons, dropped out of Art College at the age of 17 and, as an obvious result, never made it to university and so therefore never got to make his dream a reality.

He spent his late teens and early twenties working menial jobs and had basically given up on art as ‘a thing’ until he met his then-girlfriend (now wife), Louise and her daughter Savannah (then aged 5, now 24), who were a source of both encouragement and inspiration for him to pick up the pens, pencils and paintbrushes again, and his love of art began anew.

Since then he has created hundreds of canvases, cards, posters, designs and illustrations, has written and illustrated comic books and children’s stories, appeared on television shows, written essays and provided content for numerous websites on the subject of art, and is now (amongst many other projects) in the process of producing his first ever short, self-animated feature film.

Achievements

As a UK finalist on SKY TV’s ‘Portrait Artist of the Year’ show, presented by Frank Skinner and Joan Bakewell, in which he painted a canvas portrait of the actor Alison Steadman in Trafalgar Square (which she liked so much she ended up buying it); he subsequently appeared as a guest on BBC’s 'The One Show’ as part of the promotion, on which he painted Frank Skinner himself.

Fairly recently he was in-house designer for Cleethorpes-based skate clothing brand ‘Tourist’ - creating numerous t-shirt, poster and skateboard designs.

In conjunction with Creative Start he was responsible for designing the Sistine chapel-inspired shutter art adorning two business fronts on Cleethorpes’ north Promenade, the 'Grimsby Imp' at St James Minster and most recently as part of the 'Paint The Town Proud' Project, is currently working on a mural painting of ‘Mariner’s Legends’ at Grimsby Town’s Blundell Park stadium.

Recent Gallery