Business & Busyness

Posted on May 17, 2012 by

I had a list of things to do this week. Some of these things will make me money, some might make me money and some definitely won’t. I would like to believe that some of the speculative things I do will lead to other opportunities. Over the last few months my earnings have come from three sources; a freelancing website, a self-publishing house and college lecturing. There’s nothing to guarantee that I will be able to depend on the same sources of income by the time July is here. There are things pencilled in, there are bits and pieces secured for later in the year, but I need to keep fishing and maintain a constant search for future projects. And really I still feel I need something small and stable that can provide consistent monthly security, a kind of one-day-a-week position that I can depend on, but I haven’t worked out what that is yet. But even without that, I seem to be very busy and always have a list of things to do. I can’t imagine that changing in July. In the meantime, I will be promoting my skills armed with new business cards – designs shown below.

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Strips & Bubbles

Posted on May 1, 2012 by

I didn’t read comics when I was growing up. I couldn’t engage with them. I found them frustrating and limited and I wanted to see movement. I wanted to see animation, or in picture books, I wanted to see the kind of details that seemed to be lost in comics. The language of comics (the use of panels and speech bubbles and thought bubbles) felt like a barrier. Comics seemed like a compromise. It wasn’t until my parents bought me a book for my birthday called Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels that I started to really understand their potential. The book is a comprehensive illustrated history of the medium and really opened my eyes. It showed me  the sex and subversiveness of Robert Crumb, the horror of the Holocaust story Maus by Art Spiegelman and the dark and beautiful Violent Cases by Neil Gaiman/Dave Mckean, which became the first graphic novel I bought for myself. And I realised that not all comics use speech bubbles or follow the conventions that I found such a barrier as a child.

And now that I am finding myself illustrating comics and battling with the task of composing each panel and page, I am appreciating them even more. Below are a three panel strip exploring the use of speech bubbles and a series of pages from the comic for Shahad Abulainain’s Dual Identity project. I’m still not certain what comics mean to me, and how I want to use them, but I am going to enjoy finding out.

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Glue & Fame Monsters

Posted on April 12, 2012 by

In a previous post I mentioned my Fame Monsters project. I am the ‘featured artist of the month’ at The Printroom Lewes (East Sussex,UK). This means I have my work up on the walls of a print shop for the next few weeks. Feel free to go along and have a look before the end of April.

I’m not used to displaying my work in this way. There were definite lessons to be learned. But through the reprints, glue-bobbles and spray-mounting in the wind, I feel like I finally have something I’m happy with. And I can thank The Printroom for the opportunity and it’s support. And I can thank Nicola for working out how spray-mounting works.

In that previous post I also mentioned how tricky it is to create a likeness of someone through caricature. That was one of the challenges of the project. It has been interesting to see which have been the most recognisable now that they are finished. Another challenge was to do with fixing the theme and the message of the project. I’ve described it as a series of portraits of troubled celebrities with monster-like representations of fame (and problems magnified by the trappings of fame) devouring them. When I started drawing these famous people, I was trying to work out how I felt about them and the psychological problems they have faced. I found myself asking lots of questions. Questions like: is my portrayal of these personalities sympathetic or insensitive? Do the pictures reinforce the destructiveness of living in the limelight or uncover the fame monster idea as a myth? Would some of these people have suffered the same problems if they had not been famous? How separate is behaviour from identity? Does an image of Amy Winehouse being eaten by a giant spider-monster-thing provide an opportunity to explore public perceptions of mental illness? Should the monsters I draw represent the problems faced by each personality in an identifiable way? What colour should I paint Michael Jackson?

I’ll leave you to work out what my conclusions might be.

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Drawing from Fairytales & 2D Character Animation

Posted on April 2, 2012 by

In March I attended one of Draw’s Drawing Circus events in Brighton. This was a six hour themed drawing session with live music, sets, props, costumes and many models to draw at any one time, all based on Grimm’s Fairytales – (http://brightondrawing.tumblr.com/post/18840539897/grimm-tales) It was VERY atmospheric. I found it slightly overwhelming and difficult to focus on drawing one model for any length of time because my eyes are the kind of eyes that want to jump around and take EVERYTHING in. But I managed to do some drawing and I’ve collected and edited some of my sketches together to show below.

Earlier, on the same day, I was delivering one of my 2D Character Animation sessions. These ran from mid February through to the end of March. The last session was at the weekend. It was great to see how students had developed their own characters and brought them to life through a series of animation tasks. And they were all amazing characters and sequences! We had a Panda that wants to be human, a psychological battle over a video game, a police car that can climb buildings, a ‘gangsta’ version of Top Cat, an exaggerated Robert Smith from The Cure with Goth superpowers, a hippy pegasus-unicorn, a power crazed bridge-builder, a clumsy good Samaritan and a girl in obsessive pursuit of a butterfly. Underneath the life drawings is an image of an example character used as a prompt in one of the sessions, expressing a series of emotions. (more info here: http://www.ccb.ac.uk/public/courses/adult/2d-character-animation-sat-jan-12-5962.html)

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Print Rooms & Caricatures

Posted on March 15, 2012 by

I really admire how caricaturists can capture the likeness of someone in such exaggerated drawings. It is quite a skill. Being able to recognise which parts of a face offer themselves for exaggeration seems easy enough, but retaining the personality of that face, through the stretched lines and contorted shapes, is where the real treasure of caricature seems to be buried. It is something I struggle with every time I try to draw a likeness. When I was asked by The Printroom (http://www.theprintroomlewes.com/) to exhibit some of my work, I decided to challenge myself by producing a series of caricatures. So I started by looking at a series of pictures of Whitney Houston and I explored different ways I might create a likeness. Some examples are below. I will explain the details of the theme (entitled ‘Fame Monsters’) in a later blog post, nearer the time (the work will be on the walls throughout April at The Printroom in Lewes, East Sussex).

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Ripped Pages & Monsters Under The Bed

Posted on February 26, 2012 by

Monsters under the bed are important. They are important in our childhoods, telling us we can still find sleep despite the sharp fangs and claws plucking at the bed springs beneath us. But to me, and many people like me (people who enjoy drawing strange things), the monster under the bed is a kind of muse. The things that creep around in the dark corners of our minds are the things I am chasing with my pen, and trying to wrestle onto my page. So I feed the monster under my bed, I want to keep it fat and happy. The monster in my closet, I take out for walks at night. And I draw pictures for the monster in my mind. A picture of a monster under a bed, below, and underneath that, an earlier version of the same image and another page from the comic for Shahad Abulainain.



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Shadow Monsters & Alcoholic Horses

Posted on January 27, 2012 by

Illustrating limericks has been my main task over the last couple of weeks. So I’ve been drawing lots of ‘young men from… somewhere’ amongst other things for a collection from Marcus Wortley and published by IndePenPress. Six of the drawings from the twenty-five are below. No words with the pictures (until the book is published) so you’ll just have to guess what the limericks are actually about. Also, I’m going to be reading a story at Rattle Tales (at the Komedia in Brighton, 8th Feb) and was asked to provide an image related to the story. So I drew the one with the shadow and the teddy bear, underneath.

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