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.

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...

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.

Me, talking on camera, about #ACOFI

Here's me, talking to the brilliant Amelia Gregory about my life as an illustrator, to help promote the outstanding Amelia's Compendium of Fashion Illustration, which I was lucky enough to have been featured in! Watch the video, by the book. It's simple.

#ACOFI - NOKI process

Amelia's Compendium of Fashion Illustration has been avaialble in the shops for a few weeks now, and with only a couple weeks to go until the official launch party at 123 Bethnal Green Road, I figured now would be a good time to recount some of what I went through when preparing my contributions...

I was asked to illustrate the articles for two designers -- 123 Bethnal Green Road (you can see that image and a preview of the article HERE) and Dr NOKI. I wasn't really familiar with NOKI before getting the assignment, but only a cursory glace at some of his designs convinced me that his designs were right up my street -- very subversive, and vicious in the way that they repurpose branded clothes. In conversation I've gone as far as to say that he's doing to modern clothing brands what Dada did to post WW1 art... which I don't think is too much of a stretch.

Immediately I wanted to make a very violent, dischordant image to match his designs, but I was also very aware that the image needed to sit within the framework of the other fashion illustrations that I'd done over the previous months and also within the illustrations done by the other illustrators. (Once I've got a few projects off my plate, I'm going to go back and illustrate some NOKI designs off my own back, I think).

In a departure from my normal work, I also didn't have a specific image to work from -- instead, Amelia went to the NOKI shop at 123 Bethnal Green Road and took some photos of the clothes, with some suggestions on how I might style them. I flicked through some old fashion magazines that my wife had left in the bathroom for an appopriate model to work from, and after getting the pose down I added the clothes on afterward.

Early on, I ran into a problem -- overtired from work and desperate to get the image finished, I added too much water to my paint when working on the face and in trying to correct it managed to eat away at the paper. This meant that the paint dried in a weird way, which in turn made it look like the model had a nasty rash, as can be seen from the original scan, below:
To correct this, I traced the face and hair, and painted and inked that (very, very carefully). I scanned that in, and through the miracle of photoshop, was able to replace the offending areas. The new face can be seen here: (I also took the opportunity to give her a little more personality than in the original, by giving her thicker eyebrows and the hint of some eyelashes)
The other major hurdle I faced was getting the background image right -- it's no secret that I photoshop the background in after I've done the figure (well, most of the time) but I couldn't get the right background. I was very, very tired when trying to get this right, and positioned as I was in a strange hypnagogic state came up with some very odd ideas. By the end, I'd gone from painting backgrounds to painting scenes from my favourite books, including Gravity's Rainbow and Call of Cthulu. I scanned these in, played with the colour balances and dropped the model on. Here's a selection of the images which came out as a result:
The final one chosen was a blue background, which was actually a detail from an illustration of the climactic scenes of All Familes Are Psychotic. My personal "favourite" was the one you can see in the bottom-right of the above selection -- at the time, I thought it looked like the model had just appeared from another dimension, like some sort of Fashion BVM, but it's actually a ridiculous image in a whole bunch of ways, especially when it's at print-size.

Of all the images I've made recently, this is one of my favourites, though. And that's regardless of the work that went into it -- I just like the way it looks. And it looks especially awesome in the book, which every sane person should own a copy of... You can buy it here, didn't you know?

This Week In Hopkins Towers

Cher Lloyd, from X Factor 2010, for Amelia's Magazine. [LINK]

I've been very, very lazy when it comes to updating this blog of late. As usual, that's because I've been very busy doing things elsewhere... For instance, in the past week I've had illustrations for three articles at the continually engaging Amelia's Magazine go up! And one of them is above, and the rest are below.

Also of particular not is that tomorrow (which will be Friday 16th December 2010) Amelia's Compendium Of Fashion Illustration is released! I'm really excited to see the finished product, as it looks like it'll be amazing. You should definitely go and buy a copy. Buy it NOW. Even if you have already...

Sue Timney, for Amelia's Magazine [LINK]

Wagbo, from TV Burp, from Amelia's Magazine overview of X Factor 2010 [LINK]

Image from Rapsodica Satanica, for Amelia's Magazine: LINK

Amelia's Compendium of Fashion Illustration

A year ago, when I started this blog, I had no interest whatsoever with Fashion Illustration. I did what I did, and that was patterned black ink with bears and Appleheads and ghosts all over it, and I was kind of happy with that.

But over the past year I've been taking jobs at Amelia's Magazine for Fashion images, and have quickly built up a style I'm happy to work with, and have also developed a pretty healthy appetite for fashion illustration generally. I don't think I'll ever really get 'Fashion', but I love it when it's illustrated.

So it's with no small amount of pride that I've been included in Amelia's Compendium of Fashion Illustration, which is available for pre-order now. My pages include a selection of images produced for Amelia's, as well as a couple of new ones which I'm really proud of, that I might share once the book's out, but certainly not until then. And there's a pretty long 'process' blog behind the new images... again, I'll save that for now.

Here's the official blurb for the book. Everyone should buy a copy, because it'll be awesome.

Amelia’s Magazine has become a must see website for upcoming independent and ethical fashion designers, all illustrated in wonderful technicolour by our talented team of illustrators.

Amelia’s Compendium of Fashion Illustration book brings together the best illustration from Amelia’s Magazine alongside the best new ethical fashion designers, all in a gorgeous coffee table book with a stunning pearlised cover designed by the Arizona based artist Andrea Peterson.

The book offers inspiration to aspiring fashion designers, illustrators, art directors and anyone who is interested in ethical fashion design. It features interviews on the design practice of the chosen 30 illustrators (who were chosen via this open brief) alongside nearly 50 boxout profiles of the very best in ethical fashion design, including clothing, footwear and jewellery.

Featured ethical designers include Ada Zanditon, Beautiful Soul, Christopher Raeburn, Dem Collective, Edun, Fifi Bijoux, From Somewhere, Goodone, Henrietta Ludgate, Joanna Cave, Lu Flux, Minna, Nina Dolcetti, Partimi, Prophetik, Romina Karamanea and Ute Decker to name but a few.

Amelia’s Compendium of Fashion Illustration comes as an eminently collectible limited edition softback with a pearlised front cover. Beautifully presented and entirely ethical in production, the book is printed in the UK using environmentally responsible vegetable inks on FSC approved paper.

Perfect for fashion designers, illustrators, artists and anyone interested in the world of ethical fashion design, this will make the perfect Christmas present for that creative person in your life. (read on for ordering information and some very special Christmas offers!)

First Half of London Fashion Week

Designs by Julian J Smith for On|Off - Original Article

The writers at Amelia's Magazine have been going hell for leather over the past few days, writing up shows from London Fashion Week, and I've been lucky enough to have had the chance to illustrate a few of them. It's only since I've started illustrating for Amelia's that I've taken even the slightest bit of interest in Fashion Illustration, and I really didn't think my first efforts were up to much. But gradually I've grown in confidence, in no small part from the encouragement of the writers (in particular Amelia, Matt and Sally) and now I relish the chance.

I especially like illustrating for Amelia's because practically a pre-requisite is that I need to work in colour (except for one instance, featured in my last blog post), which is really liberating. Now, when given any piece of work to do, I always think about working in colour, and only go for B&W if it actually suits it, and not the other way around, which is how I used to work.

Because my approach to each set of illustrations is slightly different, I've started drawing eyes as simple circles to kind of 'trademark' my work -- despite what else is going on, if the model's got blank circle eyes, I did that picture.

Here's the illustrations I've done so far -- there's another set waiting to go up on the site, and I've got some more to work on tonight, and hopefully the night after, too)

Design by Jacob Kimmie - Link to orginal Article

Design by Jacob Kimmie - Link to orginal Article

Elliot J Frieze catwalk showPresentation by Laura Bailey at Esthetica Brunch

Three new illustrations at Amelia's

Designs Felicity Brown and Simone Rocha (London Fashion Week Preview)

This week I've been very busy for Amelia's Magazine, doing two illustrations as part of their previews for London Fashion Week, and one of the band The XX for their Mercury Music Prize preview. I really like two of them (Felicity Brown/Simone Rocha and The XX), and despair a little for the other (Cooperative Fashions) -- the despair arriving on the back of the fact that I did it when very full of illness, so my usual critical faculties were out.

The xx (Mercury Music Prize preview)

Cooperative Designs (Interview as part of run-up to London Fashion Week)

If I wasn't still so full of snot and headache I'd endeavour to do a 'process' post for one of them, but as it is, I haven't the faculties...