"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.

#quickdrawlive Sep 18th

Last night I went back to the House Of Illustration down by Kings Cross for the second of OffLife's Quickdraw Live events. I think the first one was last March... I could look it up but am preeeetty lazy. The event was a continuation of the Quickdraw that Offlife runs every Thursday night over Twitter where they give a topic and people at home come up with an image for that topic which they share back with the hashtag #quickdraw -- the difference being that on this occasion a bunch of people were in a room together, all working furiously away.

The one drawback was that where the lighting was dimmed for a cozier atmosphere, taking photos of pictures was difficult. And adding insult to injury, the Twitter app on my phone cropped my photos in weird ways. So here are my responses to the themes (paraphrased below...again, I could look them up but...). There's photos of the event all over Twitter -- got to Offlife's Twitter account for a good selection.

How I'd Get My 5mins Of Fame

What's Really Down The Back Of The Sofa

My Dream Job That Doesn't Exist (yet)

What I'd Do On My Last Day Alive

Technology Has Ruined My Ability To... (as displayed on the big projector)

Forget Scotland, I'd Vote Yes For...

By chance, I met fellow Amelia's Magazine Alumni Jenny Robins there. We both took selfies together. This is my attempt, and as you can see I'm not very good at taking them.

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.

Aquila Illustrations

Aquila Magazine recently asked me to do some illustrations for their April 2014 issue, to accompany a story featuring Shakespeare and his players. This is the second time I've contributed to Aquila -- for their September issue I illustrated (quite graphically) the dangers of cross contamination along with a knight being thrown from his horse (they were seperate illustrations, if that wasn't clear)

Working on these illustrations was a lot of fun, and I also learnt a lot about Medieval armour and Elizabethan fashion to boot. Here're some of the images I created -- they're very different to the stuff I'd normally do, but that's all to the good, and have served as great confidence boosters for my current Big Project, a full length figurative graphic novel...

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.

Secret7"

I missed out on Secret7" last year, somehow, and this year decided in a pretty off-hand way that I'd submit something. So I had a listen to the tracks to work from, and instantly fell in love with Laura Marling's "The Beast". As I was listening to it, I knew I had to include a Jackal somewhere, and after doodling a few ideas, the design for my final  sumbisssion came pretty much fully formed into my head. After that it was just a case of finishing it off and here it is. If you'd like to VOTE FOR IT then you can click the link in the caption, below.

http://www.talenthouse.com/creativeinvites/preview/grthink/888

While I was working on "The Beast" I felt the urge to do another. Again, the design for an image came fully loaded into my head, but unfortunately for me, the image was of a hand, for Jessie Ware's "Still Love Me" and drawing hands is my artistic Kryptonite. As I was sketching my hand, over and over and over, I realised that I needed to break off and work on something else, and as I listened to Haim's "Better Off" I came up with the image of a bird. Because of my personal fixation with Magpies, doing one of those seemed like a natural choice, and I came up with this:

CLICK HERE TO VOTE FOR THIS IMAGE

And once I'd finished the Magpie off, I re-approached the hand image. 

Now then, I happen to think this last image is the best of the three. I probably shouldn't play favourites, but conceptually I think it's the strongest: is the wedding ring missing -- and if it is, is there still love in that relationship? Plus, it's got the best balance of shape and movement, and a big block of my favourite colour... I think you should vote for that too, if you're reading this.

CLICK HERE TO VOTE!

If you do vote, then thanks -- I really appreciate it.

If you don't, I'll know, and I'll hunt you down*

*really

(not really)

Also, the voting system doesn't really affect the choice for most of the entries, so it's a kind of nice to have, not an imperative. Cheers.

Wolfman's Got Nards

While I had breakfast this morning, I watched the end of The Monster Squad, which was on Sky Movies. It's a film that I used to watch a LOT as a child, back when I lived in Aberaeron (my brother bought his copy on VHS from Aberystwyth's WHSmith) and watching it back now, while it's obviously dated, it's still as good as I remember.

What it also reminded me of was that a while ago -- a year, year-and-a-half, maybe -- I made these two illustrations of an iconic scene from the film for a zine project. But yeah, here I am, finally sharing the pictures I did. As well as the differences in colour between the two, there's also the change in order of the first two panels. Don't know which one I prefer, if I'm honest.

Ministry Of Stories

For a little while now -- I think almost two years, but with my memory it's almost impossible for me to be sure-- I've been volunteering with the Ministry Of Stories in Hoxton. I've done a few bits and pieces, and am a fully trained up Story Minister, but predominantly I live illustrate during the Storymaking Workshops.

During the Storymaking Workshops a class from a local school will go to the Ministry, and come up with brand new, original stories for the fearsome, unseen Chief. The session is in two parts -- during the first, the class collectively write the first half of the story, democratically voting on key elements like characters and settings. During the second each child finishes off the story in their own way.

The illustrating part takes place during the first half of the session -- as the children write their story, the illustrator comes up with 3 images on a flipchart at the front of the room, which as they are completed are handed through to The Chief's office.

I got involved originally just to do something different -- for one, I'd never done live illustrating, and thought it might be fun, and I needed something to get me out of the office. After illustrating a couple of sessions, I decided to get trained up so that I could help out as a mentor during the half of the workshop, and I've also used that training to help with a few of the after-school sessions.

Of the six sessions I've illustrated (I thought I'd done more, but not according to their website...) the last three have involved zombies. I don't know if that's because of how I look, or something? Although I'm not the only illustrator to have done zombies, my hit-rate seems disproportioaltely high. Besides that, though, I really enjoy going down there and helping out -- the kids are always fantastic, and come up with incredible ideas every time. And the other volunteers are amazing, and great to work with. My only regret is that becasue of other life-stuff I don't get to do more with them...

If you feel so inclined, there are a few ways you can get involved -- THIS PAGE at the Ministry's site will have details.

Previous stories can be found at the story-making section of the site -- clicking the pictures I've posted here will take you to its respective story.

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...