Below I've presented a selection of bits and pieces I've worked on in my career. Obviously this is a small overview - I've worked on hundreds on things, so I can't post them all online and some are very tedious. So this is a selection to give you an idea what I'm capable of:

One of the best looking jobs I've done was the DVD pack for the rock band Harem Scarem. I was supplied an image for the front, and had to create a foldout digipack to contain a DVD and bonus CD. On top of that, a design had to be done for both the prints on the disk, and a four page booklet to go inside the pack. This was to commemorate the band's last gig at The Firefest which is run by Fireworks people, and as always I wanted to do the best possible job. When I received my finished copy, the printing was top notch and everybody involved was delighted. The collectors edition sold like hot cakes, and the regular version hit shops the world over.

Following the success of the Harem Scarem DVD, another band who performed on the day at Firefest were Valentine. They too recorded their performance of the show to release as a double disk DVD and CD, and I was once again responsible for the artwork. I was particularly happy with this one, because I was given free reign this time around - other than supplying some live shots of the performance, I was not given anything else and could create whatever I wanted. I was delighted with the finished version - the printing was fantastic and it loooked really vibrant.

Things went so well with the Valentine DVD, they decided to record a brand new album, and I was fortunate enough to be asked to do the cover for it. They found a picture of an angelic woman walking down stone stairs into a rough sea, but it wasn't really high enough quality to use for a CD cover. So I ended up recreating a large portion of it, completely replacing the sea with a new, computer generated version, altering the sky, tidying up the stone stairs, sharpening the central figure, and adding a reflection of her to the new sea, before finally adding the logo and album title.

The success of bands appearing at Firefest and recording their performance for DVD release has meant I've been fortunate to have been asked to create quite a few sets. This one was the most involved, because LA based rockers Loud And Clear supplied so much stuff, we couldn't get it all on the two disks, and created a microsite to download extra extras! The guys are led by Jess Harnell, an in demand voice actor in Hollywood who was the voice of Ironhide and Barricade in the recent Transformers films, and has loads of big name stuff on his CV, from Finding Nemo to Tom & Jerry. He was great in helping articulate his vision for the set, and we ended up with a package everyone was delighted with.

White Sister played at Firefest V and went down so well they were invited back at Firefest VI. They wanted this DVD set available to sell there, so I had to work against the clock to get it done, by despite being the one that I did the quickest, this is one of my favourites. They wanted a set of army dogtags with 'White Sister - Straight From The Heart Live at Firefest V' on them. A bit of Photoshop trickery ensued to make the text look like it had been punched into the dogtags, and we were done!

Mitch Malloy, singer and songwriter who can list a brief stint with Van Halen on his resumé, also performed at Firefest and I did his DVD cover too. Mitch didn't mess about and approved the design very quickly, although to date he is the only rocker to have played at Firefest who listed his hairdresser on the credits of his DVD. Seriously.

As well as doing artwork for bands who performed there, the Firefest shows were jobs in themselves. The Firefest event is something that a lot of people at Fireworks work very hard on, and I worked on the posters and adverts to promote all of the events except the very first one. At Firefest V, I designed a 32 page concert brochure to sell at the show, containing profiles on every band there, along with photos, biographies and numerous other goodies. It came out as a thing of beauty and because it was a short run for a one off show, it's a collector's item in melodic rock circles now.

This is the first book cover I have ever been asked to do. Fellow Fireworks writer Neil Daniels has had several books published, and for his latest one, he employed me to design the cover for it. I was only too happy to oblige for a fellow Fireworks writer, and he paid me, which was a nice bonus.

On the magazine front, along with Fireworks, I'm a big fan of recording artist/West End star Michael Ball, and I'm very fortunate to have the job of creating items for his official fan club, including the club's 20 page magazine 'On the Ball'. I've done several issues now, and even got to meet Michael after seeing him in his award winning performance as Edna Turnblad in Hairspray.

I work with a few local businesses creating everything for them from their stationary, giving them matching letterheads, compliment slips and business cards, to creating promotional material for them. One fine example of this is some of the hair salons I do work for - designing high quality flyers for new offers, to promoting new products from big brands like TiGi. The purple 'Colour Me Tuesday' flyer pictured was also reproduced as a 7ft x 2ft window banner for the salon in question, and I went on to to be commissioned to make several other banners on the strength of it's visual impact.

I'm used to doing logos and corporate identities for companies, but it was nice to be asked to create one for a band. They are called Broken Desperado and they are a country act influenced by the likes of Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings. They asked for a logo perhaps incorporating a sheriff's badge for their image. I sketched one out in Illustrator and rendered it into what you see opposite in Photoshop.

Another band, a Canadian outfit named Twist The Shaft, approached me to design a logo for them. They had a cool idea of having their logo done to look like a backstage pass. They really liked Gibson Les Paul guitars, so my job was to come up with something that encompassed the two items. I drew all of the logo out from scratch in Adobe Illustrator rather than cobbling it together in Photoshop, to give the band the option of having this blown up to A3 or more for posters, without any quality loss.

One of my dreams as a kid was to be either a comic artist for someone like 2000AD, or to do album covers for a living. Doing Fireworks is a pretty cool second choice, and it led to me doing a cover for a rock band called Millenium. This is actually the front half because it was a wrap around cover for a double cd. It was released all over the world.

I'm always doing CD covers for myself, and this one is one of my favourites. I made a compilation CD of the band Boston to listen to and decided it was the perfect opportunity to stretch myself. They always had real cool spaceships on their album covers, so I planned to draw one in Adobe Illustrator. And behold, here it is. The ship was done completely in Illustrator, and with the exception of the galaxy top left, I drew the rest in Photoshop. I love Adobe's software to bits!

One CD cover I did for myself purely using Illustrator was a compilation I made of my favourite Journey tracks - the scarab beetle plays a large parts in their cover artwork, so I tried to create something similar, but to look like an emblem.

And to balance things out, a collection of CD covers I have made for my collection (either of DVD rips or other live recordings) purely done in Photoshop. I usually work with a Photoshop / Illustrator or a Photoshop / InDesign partnership, but I find it's handy to be able to do it in any one program just in case you don't have the luxury of working the way you want to work.

Sometimes customers don't want to pay for full colour work (which requires four inks to produce). Sometimes they only want one or two, and that's what these logos were. All three were done in Illustrator. The Salsa one was tricky because I only had the one ink to play with, but I really liked the outcome. The JCS logo was for a paintball company, and they had a full colour version of this logo but only wanted to use red and blue inks, so that's what I created it out of. Similarly, the Blue Marlin was from a full colour logo, but my re-drawn version is made up simply of two blues, therefore halving the cost.

On the subject of logos, to celebrate the release of the first Glenn Hughes / Joe Lynn Turner CD, HTP, I created a series of desktop wallpapers for the website for fans to download. This one was the most difficult because I drew it all in Illustrator. I simply took the original logo created by the very talented Darwin Foye, and re-drew it as a metallic emblem to keep my hand in. Thanks to the marvel of the internet, this adorned the desktop of a friend of mine in Moscow!

A totally seperate side of what I can do is not the design, but the reprographics. In laymans terms, this is where the artwork is tweaked and altered slightly to make sure the printed result on the press is as close to the original artwork as possible. This is very important when printing packaging because it's a lot tougher to achieve results on those material than on regular paper. Opposite is one of the many big brand names I've worked on.

This turned out to be a nice little side project. I was asked to design some childrens t-shirts for a promotion to tie in with the TV sponsorship that was going on on Saturday morning television. This was one of six designs I submitted. Don't ask me which one they went with because I can't remember!

Never underestimate the power of advertising. Everywhere you look there is advertising of some kind, and if that's what you need, I'm more than happy to help you create them. I've done a lot of adverts in the past, some of my most recent ones pictured opposite.

This side of advertising is something I enjoy - creating eyecatching flyers for things that hold my interest. This flyer was for a local rock night. With me really appreciating quality rock music, both through taste and through my work on Fireworks, this was something I could relate to and had fun designing.

I'm very lucky to be able to do work for something which I'm so passionate about, such as music. I have a friend who has a touring band which pays homage to classic rock songs, and he commissioned me to create a poster that would convey the feeling of the show and the music. I drew the picture opposite in Adobe Illustrator.

Not particularly bright or dazzling, but essential nevertheless, diagrams adorn an awful lot of products. I drew these for some packaging I was working on which again received worldwide distribution. So, once again armed with my trusty version of Illustrator, these are what went on the paper included within the product. One thing with diagrams, you have to get them right!

One magazine I worked on had reports from different countries, and I was asked top place a flag by each relevant country. Previous issues had really flat, lifeless flags that looked like little pin badges, so I decided to liven the page up a bit with these. I did them in Microsoft Word. Ha! Yeah, right. As you probably guessed, I drew them in my programme of choice, the mighty Illustrator.

After doing the cartoon style of the t-shirts and labels above, I thought I'd try something similar for a CD I had. As a Roger Taylor fanatic, when I got hold of a live recording of his band The Cross, I wanted to make sure the artwork for it was the best I could make it. The cover is my re-drawing of the original Bugs Bunny-style middle finger that adorned the single cover sleeve, once again done in Illustrator.

Once the cover was sorted, I was in confident mood, so I decided to have a crack at drawing Roger in a similar style. I got a photo of him and set to work, creating this result, which was one of my first real applications of Illustrators superb 'gradient mesh' tool to create the hair.

How to follow that? With a picture of me of course! Again drawn from a photo I had, I created this in the same cartoon style using nothing but Illustrator.

While this section is primarily stuff I did in Illustrator, if you decide to venture into my personal site you will find some stuff I've done in Photoshop there. Any program that allows me to stand next to my heroes is a must! Click the link to enter The Great One's playground, and bring your sense of humour with you. Follow the link to James' World at www.jamesgaden.co.uk