Process for Unearthing Blog (potentially uninteresting)

I recently attended the performance of the multimedia collaboration 'Unearthing' by Alan Moore, Mitch Jenkins, Adam Drucker and Andy Broder, and wrote a blog about it for Amelia's Magazine. I also did two illustrations (posted here) and grabbed some stills from some video.

The illustration of Alan Moore was relatively straightforward (posted above). I had in mind the starting image I wanted to use, and that I wanted to do it in the style I'd used for my Jon Stonehouse image for Cut-Click's mailart exhibition. Once I'd pencilled the broad features in, everything else fell into place. I was going to include a lot more text, but when it comes to Alan Moore, what do you choose? In the end, I just put the word 'Gods' above his right eye (referencing his use of Magick and one of the themes of 'Unearthing') and stuck a 'V' in there (as in 'V For Vendetta', but I suppose at a stretch it could also reference Thomas Pynchon's 'V.', which Moore is apparently a fan of.). There's also two ghosts snuck in there. I actually did most of the beard inbetween multiplayer matches of Bioshock 2.

The one of Crook&Flail (below) was more difficult. Crook&Flail is the moniker under which Adam Drucker and Andy Broder composed the music for 'Unearthing'. There's one image of them together as Crook&Flail out there on the internet that I could find, and it wasn't very interesting, and I couldn't work from it very easily, so I went looking for images of them apart which I could combine. There are loads of Drucker (who also goes under the psedonym Doseone) many of which I was familiar with already, but none were really suitable, and there are very few of Broder. I ended up trawling Flickr for images I could use... I really should have tracked back to their owners (job for later this week). I wasn't happy with the composition at first, to the point where half-way through I was going to give up, but a session of working on it in front of Ghost Dog set me right. The reliance on black and white stripes was intentional, for two reasons: 1) Referencing the style of the Egyptian Crook&Flail that they're named after 2) Alluding to Doseone's old band Subtle.

I decided not to do an illustration of Mitch Jenkins because... well, it din't occur to me. That's kind of awful. Maybe I'll do one and add it here, then retcon this blog post to look like I'd done it all along?

The still was taken from a video I took with my new favourite toy, and Flip camera my Dad got me for my birthday. I only filmed about 30 seconds of the performance, because I realised that the screen, as I was looking at it, was lighting up my face, and making me very obvious to the performers.

I had a very hard time writing the blog, though. It was the most concentrated piece of writing, other than emails, I'd done in a very long time (probably since Nanowrimo 2006). Progress was hampered by: 1) the fact that I had so much that I wanted to write about, but couldn't get it all down succinctly enough* 2) the notes I'd taken got put through the washing 3) the time I'd set aside to write got eaten up by getting slightly drunk at a BBQ and falling asleep on the living room floor. Similar to my problems with the Crook&Flail illustration, it came down in the end to just holing myself up on Sunday night after my wife and son were asleep and banging on the keys until I was happy enough to send it (adding the usual caveats in the submission email to Amelia that if she wanted to reject it, she could).

To my relief it was posted. (HERE, IF YOU'VE NOT FOLLOWED THE LINK ABOVE YET) Since it was posted, I've of course noticed things that were wrong, or I'd change now. But it remains something I'll be proud of for a long time now, whether anybody else reads it or not.

* One thing I desperately wnated to shoe-horn in, but wasn't sure whether Amelia's audience would appreciate is the fact that Ciaran O'Keefe was in the audience! I clocked him as he walked past and desperately wanted to run over and shake his hand and tell him how much I respect his work despite the fact that Most Haunted gets worse by the episode (and that I haven't watched it for about a year)... but I was having a conversation with a chap named Ben and the moment passed.

Ghosts Playing Ping-Pong

Not too long ago I submitted the above image to Sandra Dieckmann's ongoing Haus Stories project. It's a brilliant idea -- artists/illustrators create a floor, or story/storey, which gets added to the 'house', leading to a ridiculously tall building.

How they ended up playing ping-pong, I'm still not entirely sure. When I started, I knew I wanted to make a haunted room, with my usual trio of ghosts, and I also wanted to make it as 'classically surreal' as possible -- most of the objects in the room, including the door and the window on the left, have been subverted somehow so that their original purpose is invalid. And at somepoint I added a net to the table, a ball in mid air and paddles to the ghosts... Reviewing it now, I totally missed out on the opportunity to include some cheese in there somewhere...

Amelia's contribution round-up

Over the past few weeks, I've been pretty busy with various things, in particular doing odds and ends for Amelia's
Magazine. Here's a quick round-up (in no particular order):

I did this picture of comedienne Deborah Francis White as part of a round up of the comedy tent at Latitude Festival, as well as one of Adam Lambert.

This image was done for an article about a Q&A with Peter Blake, and I also did a portrait of him, which you can see by following this like: LINK The St Pepper's thing was in response to the fact that apparently, Blake is tired of talking about the cover he did for St Pepper's Lonley Hearts Club Band (which is covered in the article) -- it's very different to what I normally do, because it doesn't include using a pen ANYWHERE.

I've also had a contributor's profile added to the site. I spent as long looking for a picture of myself that I didn't hate as I spent on the illustrations for the Peter Blake article, and looking back, I still look like a bit of a numpty.

Newstuff July2010

It's been a very long time since I last posted anything, and it feels like I've got a lot to update...

I've done some more illustrations for Amelia's Magazine, the best of which is one of Seasick Steve, above. I don't know why I did him in green, but I think it looks cool.

I've also sent a picture of John Stonehouse to Magpie Markets as part of Cut-Click's travelling mailart show. It took me ages, and I loved it, but for some unknown reason I didn't scan it, just took the crappy photo presented below. I'm hoping to do a lot more of these in the future.

Oh, aand in very exiting news, Cut-Click's first printed issue is on sale here: http://cutclick.bigcartel.com/ and it's AWESOME. Really.

I've contributed a panel to Abstract Comics's ABCOLAB2 project, which didn't take very long but was very fun to do:


Aaaaaaand I've posted three new pages to The Intercorstal!

Cut-Click Printed Issue

Back in March I posted about having been invited to contribute to Cut-click's first printed issue. I had some of the postcards from St James Infirmary (still to be finished) featured back in Cut-Click 17, also.

Well, today I got an email from Caroline at Cut-Click with a copy of the proof for the printed issue attached, and I'm very exited. I'd submitted two portraits, one based on a photo of me and one based on a photo of my son Bill, and they went for the one based on me. I've posted my portrait of Bill here, right there, at the top of the page. I'll wait for the printed issue to come out before I post the other one.

Both portraits were a combination of my usual swirly detail style, but using faces as frames to work on rather than geometric patterns. I'm very pleased with how they turned out, and rate tham among the best stuff I've done. They took ages which is why I've dodged doing any more of them since...

Once it's printed and I've got a copy and it's available elsewhere I'll post again to remind everyone... for now, here's what to look for when you're out in the world (cover by Tigzy Rice)

Learning = Pain

My approach to my work is pretty consistent. I've got a pretty strong visual identity (black ink, patterning, fixed set of motifs) and I usually feel comfortable with that. However, because of a need to push myself, and because I think I have the ability to do different things, I take on other projects.

Recently, that's involved taking jobs from Amelia Gregory for Amelia's Magazine, as I covered in my last blog post. With each assignment, I've grown a little more confident in spreading my wings. And with this growing confidence, I took an assignment to illustrate an interview done with Robin Ince and casually asked if Amelia had any idea for what she'd want. The response I got was a perfectly reasonable "...maybe something inspired by crabs on the rampage with musical instruments and people in trees?"

And so, having done the housework and put my son to bed and had a beer and a coffee, I went on a hunt for images of Robin Ince and crabs, thinking I'd do a picture of Mr. Ince being terrified by an army of marauding crabs. In very quick time I got an idea of how to draw crabs... they're pretty easy. And I found this image of Robin Ince, which could look like he was scared of some crabs:

And then I set to work... I figured I'd do something colourful, so after I'd done what I thought was a pretty passable pencil draft, which I defined with sanguine ink, I set to painting. Once I thought I'd done enough painting, I broke out my black pens and set to working up what I had. Once I was finished, I put it to one side, played some PS3, and went to bed.

At 6:30 the next morning, woken up by my son, I came downstairs and found this:

"Oh GOD... it must be early in the morning, because that looks terrible". When my wife came downstairs, I held it up and said "Look at this shit, it's probably the worst thing I've ever done, and I'm including the time I spent as a child". The response I'd hoped for was "It's not too bad, you must have looked at it for too long."

The response I got was: "Well, honey... you're good at what you normally do. Why not try that?" I was understandably appalled. How dare she limit my artistic and creative freedom?! Who is she to try and put me in a box?! Justifiably, I marched out of the room, outraged and indignant. As soon as I was through the door, I knew that she was right, and what I had to do...

First I watered the plants, then cleaned the washing line, changed the bed sheets, cleaned the kitchen, had a sit down... Then, I got back on the internet, and looked for some different pictures to work from, got the printer out, then my lightbox, then worked through my usual process, which involved creating grids with my Tesco Value Geometry set, reading through the interview for interesting phrases, working out how to illustrate those individually, placed those in pencil on the grid, then slowly, bit by bit, working up in pen... and, after about four, five hours, came out with this, which is much better:

The moral being... um... Don't draw bad pictures? Well, yes, but more than that, I need to remember to be true to myself, and to take my bloody time over these things.

Lesson over.

Illustrations for Amelia's Magazine

Recently, as well as my continuing work on The Intercorstal (up to page 40 at the time of writing) I've been contributing illustrations to the superlative Amelia's Magazine.

Each illustration is very different, and certainly a departure from what I'd normally do. There's a fourth illustration which may or may not make it into a blog which may or may not ever get written...

Here they are, along wwith links to the blogs that they've been included in...


Gordon Brown, for a blog about the election


An aristocrat culling grey squirrels, for a blog about Robin Ince's School for Gifted Children


Two illustrations of the fashion of Charlotte Taylor, from a blog about Northbrook and Salford's show during Graduate Fashion Week (only the one on the left got used)