Portrait Commissions OPEN

So, you've seen my portraits of Winnie The Dog (above), and Frankenstein's Monster, and Marconi, and Sole, and Alan Moore (the little version and the big version) and you're thinking 'Wow, those are kind of neat'.

And then you realise that Christmas is coming, or it's someone's birthday, or something like that, but you don't know what to get that person.

Well, do you know what? You could ask ME to do a portrait of them! Sizes availalbe range from the very small (postcard or A6) to the frankly unfeasibly large (A1).

I'm pretty reasonably priced, too -- the cost will vary slightly on how much work I have to do to comlete, and that can be agreed on nearer the time, but here are some base prices to work from:

A6: £20
A5: £40
A4: £60
A3: £100
A2: £200
A1: £300

I'll include p&p in the price too, and probably chuck in some other stuff I've got lying around at the same time.

All I'll need is a photograph and a little bit of time and I'm good to go

Please email me at gareth@grthink.com if you're at all interested.

On Page 51. Some process.

I've just posted Page 51 to The Intercorstal blog. It's very chicken based, and that's only really half on purpose.

I was flicking through the sketchbook I'm currently using for pages of The Intercorstal and found some sketches I did of the Stepney City Farm's animals as prep for the Paul Foot Jigsaw Madness flyer a few months ago. There was a page with three sketchy chicken heads on there, all faulty in one way or another (the drawings were faulty, not the chickens) and I thought it would be interesting to use my own sketches as a base for a page, considering I've used so much else recently (P&O brochures and postcards in particular). This is what it look like to start with:

Then I drew a grid over the top of it and set to work. When I was working on the grid I used some smaller, square frames having been really impressed with the layouts in P. Craig Russel's adaptation of The Sandman: Dream Hunters which anxietydescending got me as an early Christmas present. It's pages like this one, courtesy of Comic Book Resources, that I was thinking of:

http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/preview2.php?image=previews/dccomics/vertigo/dreamhunters/SNDDH-2.24.proof.jpg

And then, yeah, I laid into it. Normally I'd work on The Intercorstal while watching TV or a film, but since moving house I've now got a desk to work at, which is much more comfortable, but there's no TV. As background I put on Alan Moore's reading of Unearthing which helped a lot, but there came points when I naturally needed to take breaks to free up some ideas. These ideas came from stuff I had lying around, and their influence is much clearer in this page than in others (which is why I thought it might be interesting).

 
Here's a run through of what's in there, other than the chickens, that didn't come directly out of my brain:

Top-right panel: There's an eye-shape near the inner border which I took from a Sandman toy that Anxietydecending bought me a while ago.
Centre-left: In the top-left corner of the frame there's a hand holding a box (you can only see the bottom of the box) which I copied from a photo I had of a Communist Chinese statue of a worker -- the dimensions are true to the sculpture.
Bottom-left: A set of lips copied from a photo of a Chinese statue of Marilyn Monroe.
Middle two on the bottom row: Details from the aforementioned Sandman toy.
Bottow row, right-hand side: A line drawing based on a photo of the view through my mum's patio windows. This was the last frame I completed, and I thought the relative simplicity made a nice contrast to the rest of the page while still being full of Intercorstally shapes.

This is the first time I've gone into this much detail of my process on an Intercorstal page -- if you've got this far I'd appreciate any feedback on whether this is something you'd like to see more of? There are still patterns and shapes and characters in this page that I could wang on about, as there are in all the Intercorstal pages, so if there's any interest whatsoever I'll try it again for Page 52.

Frankenstein's Monster

Click on the image for a bigger version -- you can better appreciate the detail in the shadows when it's up close.

I did this for Ballad Of's Little Book Of Horrors open submission call, which has since been renamed 'Ballad Of Petra Doe'. Because of the conditions of submission I couldn't share it until it either got printed or I found out it didn't make it in... Found out last night that the latter was the case.

To be honest, I wasn't surprised, as it's not quite the sort of thing I'd expected them to include. But I'd set my sights on doing a portrait of Frankenstein's Monster (aka Adam) and this is what happened. I'm still really proud of it, and am really happy I can finally show it off. I still love Ballad Of and think it's a great site and resource, and I'll definitely try to get into the next book.

And I'm looking forward to seeing the finished Petra Doe at the Launch Party - whether I dress up for the 'wake' is still up for debate.

New Intercorstal Pages and other news

I've added five new pages of the Intercorstal to the Intercorstal Blog, going back to the old numbering system.

The Intercorstal Page 48 - this was originally done as a cover for 'Elipses'

Reverting to the old system has made me realise that these five pages are the first 'old school' ink pages for over a year. Although I've produced a lot of other pages for Collider, Valentine, Witches and About Town they've all used photographs or other illustrations as a base. (I'm not including 'Cloud City', the series of postcards I did, as I'm still not sure what to do with them...).

My target of 96 pages is fast approaching -- the latest 'old school' page is number 49, but that numbering doesn't include all the 'special' pages I've done over the past year. With the amazingly patient AnxietyDecending, I'm hoping to collect what we've got so far as a very limited edition called 'Elipses'. I hope to then use that to weed out weaker pages or trends in the completed pages and then kick off toward Page 96.

As well as this type of page, I also recently won a box of USA ephemera from a giveaway by Kye Sanga on Twitter and have said I'll make a comic out of that, and I'm also working on a comic made from a ten-year old copy of Empires Sexiest Movie Stars.

Gareth A Hopkins VS London Fashion Week September 2011

House Of Worth Lingerie SS12

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, and elsewhere, but I love illustrating London Fashion Week for Amelia's Magazine. Even with designers I'm familiar with* will throw up totally unexpected things, and responding to those is really exciting.

To make things even more 'interesting', this past LFW coincided with my moving house, a process which took longer than anybody really expected it to. A lot of my stuff was packed away -- my paints and my lightbox in particular -- and I was living at my inlaws' without any dedicated space to work in (I ended up camping out with my laptop and scanner in the dining room most nights). Some of the illustrations were finished either during my lunchbreak or after hours at work, with their oddery old copy of Photoshop but excellent scanning facilities. These restrictions forced me to approach illustration from a totally different angle, and I think that shows in a lot of the images I produced. Some are the best Fashion work I've done, or at least the work I'm happiest with. Some isn't so great, but I'll let the images speak for themselves -- the ones dotted about in this post are naturally the ones I like the most.

I got through a lot of images. Like, A LOT. I'd ideally be doing a seperate post for each of the images, or a paragraph for them as I did in my last post, but with time constraints and everything else gonig on, I can't even post every image. The best I can offer is a few images and a complete list of the designers I covered and links to the respective articles at Amelia's... In some cases, I'll add some comment on how I felt with the image...

I'd also like to take this opportunity to say a big thanks to Amelia for allowing me to carry on drawing stuff for her despite the fact i'm always bloody moaning about one thing or another. And also to Matt, Alia and Maria (and any other writers I've worked with but forgotten) for being amazing to work for.

And so, in mostly chronological order:

A La Disposition Preview (2 illos)
Jasper Garvida Preview (1 illo)
Emesha Preview (1 illo)
Toni And Guy (2 illos) I talked about how much I enjoyed drawing Toni And Guy hairstyles in my previous post, but I decided to take the opportunity to share this image here, too.

Toni & Guy SS12

Bora Aksu (2 illos)
Mark Fast (2 illos)
Jasper Garvida (1 illo) After the success of my drawing for the preview that Amelia's ran (covered in my previous blog post) I was looking forward to this, but somewhere along the line the head went really wrong. I can't help looking at it without seeing Anne Hathaway crossed with Sloth from Goonies.
House Of Worth Lingerie (2 illos)
Jayne Pierson (2 illos) In contrast to my moaning about David Koma (below) I was pleasanlty surprised by my illos for Jayne Pierson. I've illustrated her clothes once before and the result was pretty atrocious, and these images are really strong

Jayne Pierson SS12

James Hillman (2 illos)
U.Mi-1 (1 illo)

Shinsuke Mitsuoka (2 illos) I was really proud of both images I produced for this review, in particular the one I've posted here. Before I saw a preivew photo from the collection I was ready for a night off, but it's rare that I get to do Sci-Fi Power Ninjas (my description, BTW) for Amelia's so I jumped at the chance.

Shinsuke Mitsuoka SS12

Christian Blanken (1 illo) I really like this. And it's totally different to last time I did Christian Blanken, which was very quick and rough with the models have circles for eyes (which was something I was pushing back then). The old one worked really well, but I'm glad I've been able to show another side here.

Christian Blanken SS12

David Koma (1 illo) I was disappointed with myself on this one. I didn't give myself enough time to finish it properly, which was part of the problem. But the other was I wasn't really into Koma's designs this year -- when I've illustrated his collections before I've been really excited, and the results have been good, but it just wasn't working for me this time.
Asger Juel Larsen (1 illo) I was overjoyed with the original ink pencil and ink work I did for this one. Really channelled my love for Brian Bolland, and put me in mind of the biker stuff he did for the Death Race story in Judge Dredd in the 70's. Adding the colour and background stripped some of the impact off. I still love the image, but am sad to have lost the original. But then, that's the first lesson any artist, illustrator or writer should take to heart -- never be precious.

Asger Juel Larsen SS12

KTZ (2 illos) I was lucky enough to be at KTZ's LFW AW11 show earlier this year which blew me away with it's mondrian-inspred stripes. So I naievely thought that their SS12 collectino would be along similar lines. So when I got the images of African-inspired prints which were very detailed, and layered, I balked a little. I think I made the right choice for the image below, deciding to do a really focussed piece on a cap/scark combo. It's one of the things I'm proudest of from this season.

KTZ SS12

Trine Lindegaard (2 illos)
Posthuman Wardrobe (2 illos) Believe it or not, but I often try to be quite light and airy and ethereal in my illustrations, which I finally acheived for these Posthuman Wardrobe images. I think some people saw them as a bit sketchy and un-worked, but I like them.

Posthuman Wardrobe SS12

So, by my count, that's 29 illustrations done, which isn't bad going I reckon.

*Just being able to say 'I'm familiar with partiular designers was unimaginable when I started this blog...

LFW Sep2011 Illustrations for Amelia's Magazine Pt 1

I love illustrating London Fashion Week for Amelia's Magazine -- get such a mix of styles to work from and the hectic pace suits my way of working -- if I get a long time for a image it goes two ways: stale or perfect (but usually stale) whereas banging out two images in a few hours without really knowing what you'll be doing tends to inspire. Everything stays raw, which is how I like it, but working from images of polished, expertly designed clothes means that the rawness is tempered slightly.

Illustration of one of Toni & Guy's SS12 suite of styles, before I tarted the image up in PS.

I especially enjoyed working on Toni & Guy for this article by Matt Bramford, because drawing hair is one of my favourite things, and it's rare to get to focus on it. I agonised over the backgrounds and levels for about two hours, and you can see both final images over at the article, where they really belong. But I particularly liked the 'tall hair' as it came out of the scanner, which I've posted above... it's not the sort of thing that I'd submit to Amelia's as it's a bit too wonky, but I love it.

I did this image for a preview of Emesha by Amelia Gregory (in an hour, at the last minute), and really love it, even if my appreciation for Abigail Daker's work is a little too obvious (well, it is to me...). One cool unexpected benefit is that the model that I drew added me as a friend on Facebook. So, you know, I did something right.

Also did this image of Jasper Garvida for Alia Gargum's interview with the designer. I was chuffed to bits with the figure -- I didn't need to fuss with it or redo anything on it, it just formed there on the page. Trouble came when I added the background, because as try as I might it just didn't work for me. Which ultimately led to me temporarily returning to my old style of adding the background in afterwards for the rest of Fashion week.

I did some more preview ones earlier in the week and have also done a few more already, but will talk about those in a later post. In the meantime , go and read Amelia's Magazine because it's not just the articles that i've illustrated for which are amazing.

Portrait series - sole

Now that the Chelmsford Arts Trail is in full effect and I've got my display at Man About Town is set up (photos to come as ssoon as I find the camera cable...) I've decided to do a series of portraits of artists/people I admire. The first is sole, a rapper I've been a fan of for a long time now (about 10 years... goddamit I'm old).

I've posted my first attempt, which will probably act as a sketch and a lesson on how not to go wrong. For one, when I 'finished' it he still had he whites of his eyes, but without pupils looked a bit like a zombie. So I added pupils and any intensity in the portrait vanished. So, I filled in the whole of each eye and now it looks worse -- for one thing, there's a shape underneath the eye on the left of the frame that is eye shaped, so it looks like I've put  the eye lower down than I actually did. I'll probably do some work on the shirt, hair and beard next time too.

Anyway, thought I'd share. It's kind of what this blog's for, right?

#A1Winnie Progress

First picture I took after spending about three hours pencilling and erasing.

Hot on the heels on #A1Alan comes #A1Winnie, which will be my display piece at Man About Town Barbers during the Chelmsford Arts Trail. Here's some WIP pics...

Sometimes I wonder why I decide to draw this way...hand cramp after three quarters of an hour.

I call this area 'The Book Of Eli' because it took the entirety of that film to get done. The film's OK, BTW.

Intercorstal: Open Call for Assistance

As part of my Arts Trail work, I had intended to get a new, site-specific version of The Intercorstal done. However, time's now running out and I've not made a lot of progress.

The intention was to use photos of my venue (the wonderful Man About Town Barbers) and overlay them with panels to make the comic, much as I did for 'Valentine' and the recently completed 'Witches'. I've got the photos, I've just not got time to do the drawing.

Which gave me an idea... Could I outsource the work? There are one or two people out there who 'get' the Intercorstal, or who are interested in Abstract Comics in general, so could I get them to do one or two pages each? Which is where this request comes in.

Would YOU like to do a page of the Intercorstal? All I can offer in return is a copy of the printed comic, full credit, and the chance to work on something fun that you might not have done before.

If you do want to help, please email me at: gareth@grthink.com

I'll send you a JPEG for you to work on, you do some stuff and send it back to me. You'd have to work pretty fast -- any entries not returned by the 5th won't make it in, unfortunately.

If you do happen to be new here, some pages from the Intercorstal can be found here: INTERCORSTAL BLOG

Any takers?

Dumbassery

Edit, Monday Morning: This is all cleared up now, and the illustration's going to be used. Doesn't make me any less of a dumbass, but does make me feel a little better.

On Friday afternoon I picked up a callout from a new writer for Amelia's Magazine called Caitlin Sinclair, but managed to miss the deadlne of Sunday afternoon for the simple, amateur, dumbassy reason that I thought the deadline was Sunday night.

The illustration was for a review of a kind of walking-tour theatre show up in Edinburgh called Blood and Roses -- it sounds really interesting, so I'm looking forward to reading the review. Here's the illustration I did, above.

I hate missing deadlines, or producing work that isn't up to par. Those are the things that I live in fear of as an illustrator. I've worked pretty hard to build a reputation for getting things doen quickly and well for Amelia's, so to have fluffed it now is gutting. My best and only excuse is that I've got quite a lot on my plate with Arts Trail stuff at the moment, becasue I've only got two weeks left to do the mega-sized picture of Winnie for Man About Town, and figure out a way to display it.

One thing about this illustration -- it's yet another example of me not having a single style. I mean, I've probably got a 'signature' style, with the swirly black lineart I do most of the time in my personal work, but when it comes to editorial and fashion illustration I seem to be all over the place. I suppose that could be a good thing... at least it keeps doing these illustrations fun and unpredictable.

Chelmsford Arts Trail Poster

Me and a few other artists on this year's Chelmsford Arts Trail were asked to do some posters. The brief was pretty open -- we just had to include the title 'Chelmsford Arts Trail', the dates of the trail, and limit it to two colours + white. I went with Marconi, who pioneered radio from Chelmsford, and despite the fact he was a massive fascist, is still kind of a local hero.

My face, in a photo, in a newspaper

A couple of weeks ago I went down to Hoola in Chelmsford to meet some of the other guys on the Chelmsford Arts Trail, and have our picture taken for the Essex Chronicle, and today I found the picture in the paper. I'll be honest, I'm pretty pleased with how the picture came out, I was expecting... I don't know. Something different.

Also, despite my limp wrist, I managed to have my photo taken reclining on a bean bag without looking too camp. Great success.

Latest work for Amelia's Magazine (August/July 2011)

I've been really busy lately, working on the large Alan Moore portrait, working on prep for my final piece for the Chelmsford Arts Trail (I'm doing a portrait of a bulldog called Winnie), as well as finishing my submission to Ballad Of's Little Book Of Horrors and doing a poster for the Chelmsford Arts Trail... but I've still managed to squeeze in a few images for Amelia's Magazine.

Oh, and that's on top of doing flyers for Paul Foot's Jigsaw attempt at Stepney City Farm and Folkestone's A Town Unearthed projects...

Here's a quick round-up of the ones that I remember doing... (in no particular order)

Illustration for Amelia's review of the documentary Just Do It.
This is an illustration of a scarf by designer Lucy Jay, from an interview with Howkapow. (Lucy was kind enough to mention the illustration I did on her blog).
Jean Paul Gautier at Montreal's Festival Mode et Design
A fashion illustration for luxury brand Dagmar's AW 2011 collection.
This is a scarecrow I did some Intercorstalling to for an article about Scarecrows at Hampton Court Flower Show
This is a flower I Intercorstalled for an article about Flower Trends at Hampton Court Flower Show.

#A1Alan, finished!

*UPDATE* 13th August -- Me and my wife Amy went to see Stuart at Man About Town this afternoon because I'd forgotten to add a signature to the picture, and when we got there it was hanging in the doorway... so chuffed with myself, and so grateful to Stuart, Jordanna and everyone at Man About Town.

So, I finished the big picture of Alan Moore in plenty of time, and have dropped it off to Stuart at Man About Town for him to take to V Festival and display at his pop-up barbers. There's not much to talk about in regards to it, so here's 12 of the many pictures I took as I went. They should be in order, to show what happened when.

#A1Alan

On Twitter I've been mentioning #A1Alan, which is my current biggest project, along with lots of other projects I've got floating around.

How #A1Alan came about is this: I went to meet Stuart at Man About Town Barber's in Chelmsford, who I was paired up with for this year's Chelmsford Art's Trail. I showed him a selection of my work, including the portrait I did of Alan Moore for the Unearthing Review I did for Amelia's Magazine (above). He mentioned that he's got a pop-up space doing wet-shaves in the VIP area of this year's V Festival, that he had a it of space going there, and would I like to do a larger version of the Alan Moore Prtrait for display and potential display?

Obviously, I said 'Yes. Yes please' and threw myself headfirst into doing an A1 version of the picture. And it's taking AGES. Here's a photo of 5 hours work:
I'll be taking photos of progress after revery hour of work, to proerly document how long this stuff takes. Check back and follow on Twitter if you're at all interested.

#ACOFI Book Tour, Brick Lane

Amelia Gregory during her talk

Last night I headed down to Tatty Devine on Brick Lane to attend the last night of the book tour being run to promote Amelia's Compendium of Fashion Illustration. Armed with the first ten printed copies of The Intercorstal:Valentine to give away to anyone interested in having one, and a selection of my illustration work to show off to anyone interested in looking, I rocked up at about 6:20 and promptly installed myself in the corner out of the way.

Spent some time chatting with Karen who does PR and runs the twitter account for Stepney City Farm -- as well as loads of cool stuff on the 9th July they'll be hosting comedian Paul Foot as he assembles the world's biggest Jigsaw... should be worth a look nearer the time.

Also got to chat for a while to Alia Gargum (aka @onetwothreedraw), who is an amazing illustrator as well as one of the lucky, lucky people to get one of the original black-cover Intercorstal comics (as well as the weirdly long letter I sent out to accompany it). She's also taking part in the Chelmsford Arts Trail this year, and lives very near to my wife's grandma (hashtag: small world).

Amelia gave a talk about Amelia's Magazine's history and her opinions on eco-fashion and social networking to a rapt audience... although 'gave a talk' doesn't really do it justice. Amelia has an apprently unique talent for talking at twenty words per second while still remaining perfectly understandable. If you ever get a chance to see it in action, you really should, it's astounding. (just teasing, Amelia)

There's some videos of Amelia giving a similar presentation here (I particularly like in the first video, when Amelia says "...this one was a Scratch and Sniff, which meant you could scratch it and sniff it"):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpmcFwcYhPo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElcZvjKuP1c

Showed off my carefully selected illustrations to Alia and Maria (aka @plasticseconds) who makes really cool jewellry out of rubbish (check out her site here: http://www.plasticseconds.com/) and then spent some time catching up with Matt Bramford and Naomi Law. Also got to meet Tim Adey who regaled me with tales of boredom and madness at sea from his time as a researcher.

I also decorated some biscuits provided by Biscuiteers -- I manned mine up by doing a skull and... an apple. Also had a couple of bottles of very fancy juice from Juiceology.

On the way home I had a bento box from Wasabi and it was a bit rubbish. (Just wanted to drop that in, for no reason other than I've not moaned about it to anyone else).

Here's some photos I took from the night -- they're mostly not very good photos.

Amelia bothering Alia and her friend with a camera while they try to draw on biscuits.

Stalking Matt Bramford from across the room.

Ladies from BiscuiteersLTD, far too polite to say 'No, really, we're ready to go home now'
(Ignore my amateurish inclusion in the picture via mirror in the background)

My Skull and Apple biscuits (I only did the bits in the middle, BTW). They tasted bloody lovely.

Tim decorates a biscuit. Not shown: Amelia being very critical.