"Chavs"

These are a series of images I did on request for a magazine that seems to have disappeared before going to print. I'd initially been asked to do 8 pages of illustrations, said I could do four, and then a pretty full-on case tonsillitis meant that only three got done.

From what I understand the magazine was going to be themed on subcultures of London's East End, and I was given 'chavs' almost definitely because of some illustrations I did for Amelia's Magazine a few years ago. I felt pretty uneasy, especially when looking online for reference, since so much of it is vicious, nasty and horrifically classist. So I tried to make my illustrations monstrous, a reflection of how 'chavs' are viewed, as well as trying to build some sympathy in too -- whether that was successful or not, I don't know.

Earlier sketches and drafts replaced the figure's heads with ant heads, or abstracted tribal masks, but in the end I went with what I know, which worked in my favour. Although, with more time to work on it, who knows what might have been.

Tallulah Rendall for Amelia's Magazine

Recently I got back on the horse and did an illustration for home-away-from-home Amelia's Magazine, for an interview with the very talented and inspiring Tallulah Rendall.

The finished, polished-up version of the illustration can be found at the article itself, but as is my way I wanted to share the original scan, because I think it just looks pretty nifty. The illustration itself was done on a St Bride's Foundation notepad because I liked the grain of the paper and the fact that it wasn't brilliant white (which is what I'd normally favour for this sort of thing). Then when it came to scanning, the scanner wouldn't detect the size, so I put behind it the nearest A4 piece of paper I could find, which was a scanning test sheet.

The approach I took was similar to the one I took for my Lorde Secret 7s entry, except I did't have a fortnight to source images and play with textures and spend hours really digging darkness into the page. Also, Tallulah Rendall has blonde hair, so the amount of detail in it needed really lifting off. And then in keeping with the pattern of the hair, the background work became more about movement than density, meaning I could really fill-in the patch of body and arm in the foreground.

Ravens And Chimes

Recently did an illustration of the band Ravens and Chimes for Amelia's Magazine. Here's the process:

Draw the band from a promo photo on their website

Draw some ravens in flight, using Google Images as a source.

In Photoshop, create a background by rotating and pasting the ravens image, and add the band drawing in the foreground.

Print out the combined image and paint the background. Printer ink mixes with the watercolour and makes unexpected hues and shadows.

Crop the image, bump contrasts and levels: Final image.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

400th Twitter Follower Giveaway (The First)

Through some kind of supernatural force, I'v managed to get over 400 followers on my twitter account (http://www.twitter.com/grthink) and to celebrate I offered my 400th follower some free stuff.

The 'lucky' winner was Kristina Vasiljeva (@kvasiljeva) who got the contents of the above photo: the original Cassette Playa watercolours which were used at Amelia's Magazine for articles about Cassette Playa at London Fashion Week and my own experience at London Fashion Week, and a copy of The Intercorstal:Collider.

Hopefully she doesn't hate either... Kristina also has some great work on her blog, which everyone should go and check out.

Through a bizarre logic loophole, I actually had a SECOND 400th follower... Mr Anxiety Decending himself, and he'll get some stuff in the post too, eventually.