Twitter Art Exhibit 2012

Here's my submission to the 2nd Twitter Art Exhibition, being held in Moss, Norway, in April 2012. It's being organised by David Sandum, with all money from sales of artwork going to The Women's Crisis Center in Moss. Full details of the submission and event can be found HERE: http://davidsandumart.posterous.com/call-for-artists-2nd-twitter-art-exhibit-in-m

There wasn't any particular theme, but I thought it'd be cool to work on some advice that Bryan Lee O'Malley (creator of Scott Pilgrim) posted on his twitter feed:

I'm past knowing whether I followed that advice or not, but I was thinking about it while I worked on the page. Once I've had a chance to think about it a bit I might be able to make some sense of it in the context of my other comics work. As it stands, though, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, and regular readers of this blog will know how terrifyingly rare it is for that to happen.



LFW AW12 Round-up/Round-down



DR NOKI's NHS AW12 by Gareth A Hopkins



For whatever reason, I couldn't keep anywhere near the same pace this past London Fashion Week as I did for the last one, and in my opinion the images I turned out were a bit weaker than normal. 

But I'm going to resist the temptation to bang on about it like a little emo loser and instead share a couple of images that I made from LFW for FUN. This is actually the first time I've created fashion-based images without having a brief or a deadline, and I'm really happy with them.

First is a painting of one of the looks from DR NOKI'S NHS (up there, at the top). I love Noki's work, and have always wanted to create an image which is as lurid and threatening as his fashion work. Whether this is 100% there, I'm still not sure, but taking a few days to work on this paid off.

And secondly here's an image of one of the models from Oliver Spencer's catwalk show. I've never seen a model carry so much disdain for the audience as this guy did, and he instantly became a hero of mine.



Angry Model for Oliver Spencer AW12 by Gareth A Hopkins



I also did my first Fashion Review for Amelia's Magazine this year, for the Asger Juel Larsen VS T.Lipop show, and commissioned some genuinely great illustrations from Sam Parr, Jo Ley, Gemma Cotterell and Lo Parkin. And I wouldn't have been able to get anywhere with it without the support and editing skills of Matt Bramford. I actually think my writing was more successful than my illustration this LFW. Interesting to see how that develops.

Finally, I did an illo for Alia Gargum's review of Sibling, which I took two shots at finishing. This is the first one, which I wasn't happy with at the time, but in retrospect is OK.

SIBLING AW12 by Gareth A Hopkins

Tina Elisabeth Reiter

Did this illustration the other night, for Amelia's Magazine's review of the London College of Fashion MA Exhibition.

I'm pretty happy with it, as was the designer I illustrated, Tina Elisabeth Reiter, who tweeted her thanks to me. To get a personal thank you from the person you've illustrated is pretty rare, and very welcome -- I think I can count on my fingers the number of times it's happened and I've done loads of stuff for Amelia's in the past. On my part, it was a fun illustration to do -- I really liked the designs, especially the shape of the coat and the use of browns and oranges.

My scanner was refusing to work because it's printer was out of ink, so in the end I had to resort to taking a picture, which while not ideal actually worked in my favour, because it's given the figure an antiqued effect, although it did mean that the oranges which I'd hoped to make really 'pop' went a bit muddy. The background is a colour-altered version of the red one I used for my The XX illustration a little while ago -- making it green was a no-brainer.

That my drawing of the model has made him look a bit more like a young H.P. Lovecraft than I intended is a good example of that whole 'literature and horror creeping in' thing I mentioned in Digital Arts blog post.

Abstract Comics: The Blog

I've recently been invited by the incomparable Andrei Molotiu to contribute to the Abstract Comics Blog, which is a massive honour for me. The Abstract Comics anthology from Fantagraphics is one of my favourite things, so to be able to get invovled directly with the blog is really exciting. (Thanks to Mike Getsiv for the nudge).

So far I've stuck three articles up, about The Intercorstal, naturally. Here they are:

Intercorstal Page 57 Raw Version : http://abstractcomics.blogspot.com/2012/02/intercorstal-page-57.html
Overview of Intercorstal:Witches: http://abstractcomics.blogspot.com/2012/01/intercorstal-witches.html
Details of Pages 47, 48 and 49: http://abstractcomics.blogspot.com/2012/01/intercorstal-pages-47-48-and-49.html

(I had a pic in) Digital Arts (in January)

Totally forgot to post this at the time, but back in January, Digital Arts included my illustration of Asger Juel Larsen Spring/Summer 2012 in an article about Creative Trends in 2012. They'd asked Amelia Gregory (editor of Amelia's Magazine) what she thought would be happening with Fashion Illustration in 2012, and she said:

“A feeling of restlessness is prevalent in illustrations which draw influence from the spectre of war and the darker end of literature. Look out for strange and hellish scenes,”

From that, they had a look at Amelia's Mag and pulled out my image (here's the orginal article with some stunning illustrations from Faye West and Gem Sheldrake, amongst others). I laughed out loud when I found out -- for a while I've been conciously trying to make my images LESS hellish and dark. But then I suppose I did go to town on this one -- I've said it before, but the background's made from a very rubbish painting I did of Gravity's Rainbow, for a start.

Still, awesome to have had work on Digital Art's website, and if the trend for 2012 is dark and haunted by the spectre of war, I'm sure I'm very happy to oblige.

Puppets etc

 

So, I've been having a bit of a crisis of confidence over the past couple of weeks. Don't know what brought it on, particularly -- one minute I'm bobbing along perfectly happy with my place in the world, the next I'm getting all moody and weird about not being able to draw or something. I think part of it comes from my re-found love of 2000AD and the fact that I've been comparing myself to Simon Harrison and Edmund Bagwell and Chris Weston.

But anyway, pretty much out of nowhere I signed up to do some illustrations for Amelia Gregory's review of The Devil And Mr Punch and did the two illustrations posted here. And I'm totally happy with both of them. They were both done pretty superfast, and without much fuss, which meant I was going by instinct throughout. Reviewing them critically now, there's stuff I would have done differently, but there always is, isn't there. Go Team G, I guess.

Laura J Martin: Part 2

As mentioned in PART 1 this week I've done two illustrations of Laura J Martin for Amelia's Magazine. PART 1 covers the illustration I did for Richard Pearmain's review of a live show. This part (predictably called PART 2) details the process for getting an illustration prepared for Amelia's review of LJM's album 'The Hangman Tree'.

After the image of LJM playing flute in a wood, I was eager to do something a bit more familiar, and had originally planned to do a 'grthink portrait'. After carefully selecting a photo off of the internet, I sketched out what it might look like, and to be honest it wasn't looking good. I'd suspected as much, to be honest -- my particular style of portrait, with all the lines and black ink and abstract shapes ages women in the most unflattering ways. It's OK with men and animals, they can take a bit of extra age, but I've not found a way to get it to work for women. So I toned it back, and played with some more ideas, sellting on a simpler style where all the work goes into the hair, which is still pretty abstracted.

So, I thought I'd do a more finished version of the simpler portrait, and put in a Japanese-inspired abstracted background, becasue there's a lot of Oriental influences in the music, particularyl because of the flute (also, there's a song called Fire Horse which is about a Japanese lovestruck arsonist). And here came my first mistake: For some bizarre reason, I made the portrait a double, with LJM looking knowingly at her own reflection. I still can't remember why I was so sure that this was a winning idea. Anyway, I did the double portrait, and coloured it in, and here's what that looked like:

 

After I'd done that I set to doing the background, deciding to use some of the shapes from one of Hokusai's 36 View Of Mt Fuji as a starting point. In the picture below, you can see what that looked like in my sketchbook. 

When I tried to combine this new backgorund with the double portrait, I realised a number of things:

1. The new background was too small, and no details showed through from behind the portrait.

2. The lines in the background were too bold, and totally distracted from the portrait.

3. The double portrait wasn't going to work for me.

So. First things first, I deleted the right-hand portrait and moved the border in. Then I played with the background, trying to tile it and layer it and lighten it and darken it and a whole other bunch of stuff, but it wasn't working. So I dumped the background and pulled out another one I had saved. And then considered the space I had, and the sie of the portriat and stuff, and whacked in a light green fade, and was finished.

The lesson I'm going to take from this whole thing: paints. Digital colouring and manipulation is one thing, but in general I get much better results if I've got paint to hand.