On Blogs

The difficulty with blogging as a promotional tool for illustrators is that when things are busy there is seldom time to think about updating a blog. As things begin to slow down most of the work that has been keeping you busy isn't yet published so can't be shared, and as it becomes available to share you're (hopefully) back into a busy period.

That, along with taking time out to plan a wedding and get married, has been my life for the last little while. I've just updated my main portfolio with a few pieces for WIRED, and the Children's book section with illustrations from Who Are Serena and Venus Williams.

I'm currently busy working up interior illustrations for a biography of Pelé for Penguin Random House, and I've been making plans on how to build my local creative community through Drink and Draw (see previous blog post) and other activities.

I've also been using an iPad Pro and Astropad for the last little while, heres a drawing of a character from Destiny I did to practice with the iPad. I find it so much easier to work digitally with colour when I'm drawing 'directly' onto the image.

View fullsize

I am still alive, I am still here covered in ink. Keep an eye on what I'm up to ever so slightly more frequently on my Instagram:

Drink & Draw - and a Call to Action

Really excited to be announcing a collaboration with a local venue, The Boileroom in Guildford. 

We will be running a monthly Drink and Draw session! Hopefully these sessions will be a positive, and inspiring place to meet with other members of the local creative scene. Share ideas, share techniques and industry tips and, of course, share a drink or three.

The first session will be Monday 6th of Feb 2107,  6:30pm and from then on we'll be aiming for the first Monday of each month - or as close to it as the venues schedule will allow. It will be FREE entry, but we'll be taking donations which will fund future drawing events, things like: life drawing, artist tutorials, drawing trips, and more.

Keep an eye of THE BOILEROOM and my TWITTER for the most up to date information. Guildford creatives, of all sorts, I hope to see you there!

Now, this may not seem relevant to some readers of this blog (specifically those based outside of Guildford.) BUT of late, there are huge parts of the world that seem darker, scarier, and more threatening, and I think events like this are a direct response to those changes.

I want to extend a challenge, a call to action: start a group, join a group, spread your passion, meet people, create good things. In response to the threat of a darker world, make YOUR world a little brighter. It may seem like a small resistance in the 'grand scheme' of things, but many small good things can easily outweigh the bad. You never know who you might help, or how you might help them.

Working Traditionally - For WIRED

A few months ago WIRED magazine got in touch with a very cool commission. I thought I’d run through the process here.

The main challenge with this piece was that for the whole issue, every illustrator was asked to work in traditional media. No computers allowed. (Well, some allowances were made. I don’t think anyone wanted to start sending work via the post.)

First things first:

THE ROUGHS.

The article was a short piece on speaking with confidence in public. So after making some mess in a sketchbook or two, I drew up these roughs:

1 - Based on a line in the article: Public speaking is like a musical instrument, everyone can learn with enough practise.”

3 - A drawing of two realities - the confident, comfortable speaker. And the Nervous, fumble-y speaker.

2 - A direct narrative approach - a confident charismatic speaker.

4 - Playing on the idea of imagining the audience in their underwear. Whilst it wasn’t a technique referenced in the article it’s a common enough concept that most viewers would make the leap with just the image.

Once these Ideas were sent and reviewed, we moved forward with the third idea, but with a female speaker.

THE FINAL ARTWORK:

I knew I was going to approach this image with a focus on the ink work. I could achieve the two coloured drawings by inking each figure in a different colour of ink - that bit was easy to figure out. But, I knew I wanted the image to look a little more ‘finished’ than just a 2 colour line drawing.

If I was approaching this image digitally, I might have used a texture from a library of scans/photos I’ve made and collected over the years. I would have applied a colour to the texture layer and then used a layer mask to erase it away under the main drawing.

So, how to do this traditionally? Make a physical layer mask of course! (I’m aware there are probably better ways to do this. It was interesting to learn how dependent my process is on the computer, and how little I knew what to do!)

Cutting a thick sheet of acetate to create the negative space in the background layer. If you’re following along Blue Peter style, this bit hurts your fingers…

The completed ‘layer mask’ ready for printing. Once this was ready and taped down I mixed up some different types and colours of paint and lightly rolled it over a few different paper stocks until I’d made an appropriate amount of mess and had ….

Here it is in situ in WIRED:

Apologies for the poor process shots, I didn’t think of doing this blog post until afterwards. It was lucky I had these shots really.

Thanks to Mary Lees for the Art Direction on this one!