Laura J Martin: Part 1

This week I've done two very different illustrations of Laura J Martin for Amelia's Magazine, and had a range of stuff I wanted to mention with both of them. So in my sporadic series of 'Process and Frustration' blogs, here's what happened and why. The two articles are HERE (live review) and HERE (album review).

I got involved with illustrating Laura J Martin after seeing a callout for illustrators on Twitter. Normally I'm a bit wary of taking on illustrations of musicians, becasue if I don't particularly like the music I find it really hard to build up any enthusiasm for the project. But I took a look at Laura's soundcloud and she had a collab with Buck 65 on there, and he's one of my heroes which made it difficult to say no. And then when I heard the two tracks on there I was really, really impressed and immeidately got in contact with Richard Pearmain, the writer. And from there I was off, desperately eager to impress.

After listening to the tracks on soundcloud and videos on YouTube, I had an idea of drawing LJM (that's what I'll be calling Laura from here-on-in, LJM. It's just shorter, and avoids the chance that I'm getting unduly overfamiliar with 'Laura' or ridiculously formal with 'Ms. Martin') in a forest, playing flute to woodland creatures. I smashed together a pencil sketch of that, during which the 'woodland creatures' turned into 'imaginary woodland creatures'.

  

Then I inked it, during which I weirded-up the rabbits, added a bit of details to the birds and accidentally gave the big bear/cat thing a beard. I was stymied throughout the inking process by my pens giving up the ghost and the fact that I might have rushed it a little bit.

 

Then came the colouring. I was without my paints or pencils or anythnig like that, so I scanned it and coloured digitally. After a few false starts I decided to give each element it's own gradiated colour, and ended up with the final image. To be brutally honest with myself, if I'd used paint I'd have been happier with this. As it is, it has a certain charm, but I can't help being reminded of Arabic textbooks from the 90's (maybe a slightly odd point of reference, but an accurate one.)

Turned out that this illustration was to be used in a review of a live performacne, becasue as I sent this image off to Richard, another callout appeared. Eager to exploit the chance to do something I was happier with, as well as use the chance to do two very different illos of the same subject, I jumped for that one. Which I'll detail in PART 2.

Commissions still open

Here's a picture of one of the commissions I did in the run-up to Christmas, of a cat called Smartie (apologies for the photo quality).

If you'd like a portrait done then get in contact -- prices listed below.

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

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...