Let's draw with Herbie

I've been rejigging my portfolio and website for my MA final assessment and exhibition. My style and approach to colour has changed so much over the last few months that I've been struggling to make it all look like one person's portfolio. In particular I didn't really think that my previous 'title page'

represented what was to follow anymore so I decided to do a new one.



But I still wanted to use my 'signature' colours of cyan, yellow, black & white, so I returned to my original source of graphic inspiration...

... the book of Blue Note record covers. Such amazing graphic compositions coupled with stark b&w photography and emotive use of colour.

There, I found this little beauty, the cover of Herbie Hancock's second album (or so the internet tells me).

And here's my new portfolio title page. See the resemblance?

Mmmm.... nice.

Private/Public

This is a piece that I did for a college brief about the conflict or continuum between the private and public in illustration. It's an interesting area and definitely one that I think you have to think about if you're positioning yourself as an illustrator (whatever that means right now!)

All the stuff in the bottom left is what was surging through my head at the time, so there are glimpses from my Big MA Project in there and Anubis, who is the star of the essay that I should have been writing when I drew this.

I'm not really sure that the picture gets across much of what I intended it to, but then again that's sort of the point, so maybe that's OK in this case. How very meta!

Coupla things...

I did the pic below for the limited edition Illustrated Lyric Book for She Makes War's new album Little Battles.

It illustrates the last song on the album, Disarm, a lovely little tune with the line 'Dreaming Bodies/Are all we'll ever be'.

You can check out She Makes War and buy her album at http://shemakeswar.bandcamp.com/album/little-battles, although it looks like you only get the Illustrated booklet (including other great artists including Viviane Schwarz and Eliot Elam) if you buy the supa-dupa luxury version.

T'other thing is that I'll have a piece in an exhibition From the Loom Room, featuring lots of comrades from the Illustration MA at Camberwell that I'm currently taking. It's at Blackall Studios, 73 Leonard Street in trendy Shoreditch. Private view is Thursday 12 April and then the exhibition runs until 17 April. Come check out the talent! 


http://www.fromtheloomroom.com

COLLEGE PROJECT

Can't say too much about this yet as I don't sufficiently understand it myself, but here's a bunch of sketches etc from my big project for my MA.

It's very much Work in Progress at the moment, and is something to do with the idea of the City as a centre of financial (mis)management.

This is playing with an idea of Debt as some kind soul-sapping louse or parasite.

Sketches from the documentary Inside Job.

SCARY SANTA!

My tutor saw my big red faces and asked me to do a scary Santa for our class Xmas do.

Here he is. He ended up on a skateboard. 
That's  how he does it all in one night.

I've gone back to college...

...it's like one of those episodes of Neighbours where someone's Mum goes back to school and really embarrasses the kids. Well, it's a bit like that, I should have waited until I had offspring.

Anyway, as opposed to the first time round, I am not, thus far, spending all of my time drinking myself into a slough of depsond, I'm actually making work!

Here are highlights so far: twenty faces on a sheet of A1 paper, followed by another sheet of A1, concentrating on one face. Faces are my thing so this was right up my street, so I decided to muck about with some new techniques, loosening up my drawing/inking style and having a right laugh with some really basic printing techniques. The kitchen looked like I'd murdered the cat*

I'm in there, with current Movember lip slug, and there's the obligatory reference to William Blake in the form of his Ghost of a Flea, top right. The big face turned out like a particularly angry Aleister Crowley, not sure what happened there. We put our A1's up in the corridors of Camberwell on the day that a bunch of prospective students were visiting, so I hope I didn't scare any off!

This Monday, Chloe Cheese took us through some more established forms of those printing technigues, in the form of mono printing. Brilliant fun! It was like primary school art class all over again. Potato printing for the artistically ambitious! Hoorah!

Here's the culmination of my day's experimentation, Hitsville UK's Gwillum, in process and finished version.

I'm really enjoying trying out these new techniques, and I'm really keen on incorporating some of them into my big project (which I am writing the proposal for now, I am I am honest!) 

I get to try out etching tomorrow, hope William is watching over my shoulder.

*I did not murder the cat.