Feature updates...

Forgot to say in my last post: I've recently had work featured on two very special blogs!

The first was on the outstanding Ballad Of..., who made me their featured illustrator on the 25th April take a peek here: http://balladof.co.uk/2011/04/gareth-hopkins/

Also, uber-trendy fashion store Lucy In Disguise featured a set of illustrations that previously appeared at Amelia's Magazine, and it included an illustration of mine. Take a look here: http://lucyindisguiselondon.com/2011/05/drawn-in-by-amelias-magazine/

Lame Ol' Me

I've been very bad at updating recently -- a mixture of the recent run of Bank Holidays and the culmination of some big projects at work have meant I've been away from Ol'Blogger for a bit.

Not that I've not been busy, though -- a new Intercorstal comic called 'Valentine' was created, but at the last moment myself and Anxietydecending decided to experiment with the format, which means doing more pages for it. Some of the pages I've finished are up at The Intercorstal Blog.

I've also applied for inclusion in The Chelmsford Arts Trail, curated this year by The Shiny Shed. And I really, really want to get into it -- last year's was great, and I thoroughly enjoyed walking around the town looking at all the stuff on display, and think my proposal of turning a shop window into an Intercorstal page could be a good match, but we'll see.

As always, I've been doing some stuff for Amelia's Magazine -- take a gander at these articles to see what I've been upto.

Will write again soon, hopefully with some good news on stuff.

Process and Frustration: comXchange/Liminal final piece

This is a blog detailing the effort and process that went into preparing for a show which I missed out on because of forces outside of my control.

A little while ago I was approached by Ibrahim Ineke, an artist/curator based in the Netherlands, to participate in a show he was putting on, in conjunction with Altered Esthetics in Minneapolis. I'd previously been in contact with Ibrahim after he requested a copy of the first Intercorstal comic I put together.

The show was to be a collaborative one between 5 US comic artists and 5 European artists. The idea was that each artist would send a comic of theirs across the Atlantic. They would then choose a sequence, or pair, of panels from the comic that they received and create a large-scale artwork based on the gap, or gaps, between those panels. As The Intercorstal is based in 'the space between spaces' I was really enthusiastic about getting started.

For the project, I put together The Intercorstal: Collider and sent it off. In return, I got a comic back which had detailed plans on how to build a High Tunnel by Maxeem Konrardy as part of a community project. It was the exact opposite of my comic, and therefore extremely exciting to work on, as well as extremely difficult. After a lot of deliberating, I chose two very specific panels to work inbetween, which showed how to fix two planks of wood together end-on-end using a bridging block of wood. The idea was to find the half-way point as the block was put in place and then do some Intercorstal-ly swirls and patterns around it. This quickly went wrong, as I was going to leave any 'physical' objects (i.e. the wood) as empty space, and within 20mins of drawing I'd accidentally filled in that space.

So, I reviewed what I had, and the idea, and went in a slightly different direction, and instead split the image I had into two, to better enforce the idea of the space between the planks and the block, and the action taking place between them. At first, I was gonig to build up the seperated objects onto one final image, but couldn't decide on how they best went together, so in the end they were left seperate. Below are three images -- two showing me trying to decide on a single image, the third shwoing what I finished with.




Overjoyed at having finished, with a week to go I packed the whole thing up and sent it recorded delivery to Ibrahim. And it never turned up. The show started, and Ibrahim emailed me to say how sorry he was not to have been able to include my work. A few days before the end of the show, he found out that it had been delivered, the day after the show started, but that he was out and his neighbour had taken receipt of the parcel, and not told him for two weeks.

Ibrahim still has the art, and the stack of Collider comics that I sent along with it, and I've left them with him, because I've not got the room for them really, and with first hand knowledge of how much it cost to post, wouldn't want to put him out by spending the money on sending it back. I'd work with him again in a heartbeat, because I think we're on a similar page, creative-wise, and he's a true gent to boot.

And that's that. Lesson learened, if there is a lesson to be learned.

Edit: LATER THIS SAME DAY: Writing this blog has been very cathartic, and made me realise that although I'm still angry about these circumstances, there's only two things I'd do differently: 1) Paint the artwork, because I left it as white paper with black marker, and I think painting it would have lifted the final piece 2) Fork out the extra for full-on postage. I went for First Class Signed-For, whereas if I'd spent £5 more it'd have been special delivery and the sad ending would have been avoided.

Here's Altered Esthetics blog on their side of the show: http://blog.alteredesthetics.org/?p=477

Britney Sabo was the artist who worked on Collider for Altered Esthetics. Here's a link to her website, and below is a shaky cameraphone photo of her finished piece, which despite the quality of the photo, I think looks aces.

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.

Cut-Click Mailart Exhibition, Cleethorpes

Just a quick post to say that I've done another envelope portrait for the travelling Cut-Click mailart exhibition (I talk about the first one HERE). The exhibiton will be up at Artlandinsh in Cleethorpes -- details are in the poster above.

The portrait this time is of Patrick R Donahoe, the current US Postmaster General. Whereas the subject of my earlier envelope portrait was John Stonehouse, who'd led a fascinating life featuring double-identities and faked deaths, which I built into the image, Mr Donahoe seems very boring. The biggest story around him is that he's inherited the US Postal Service at its weakest, poorest state, so I made an effort to include that. Here's the image:

#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?

New Year Update

Last year was amazing -- got really stuck into illustrations for Amelia's Magazine, resulting in my inclusion in Amelia's Compendium of Fashion Illustration, The Intercorstal really came on strong (and Collider was made as a little standalone), I fell back in love with using watercolours, and one of my favourite pictures was done, for the travelling Cut-Click mailart exhibition...

And this year's already off to a flyer:

• I'm currently working on a miniature version of The Intercorstal which will make a mini- mini-comic, and I'll post some of those as I scan them.
• I've got some more Fashion Illustration to do for Amelia's this week.
• I'm waiting to get started on my part of a cross-channel Comic Art exhibition (which is what Collider was made for)
• I've just started work on a new portrait for the Cut-Click exhibition, which opens on the 1st Feb in Cleethorpes...which I'll elaborate on in my NEXT POST...

Anyway, wishing everyone a very Happy 2011, hopefully it'll be at least as good as 2010.