Wolf-Speaker finished

The finished Daine. It looks pretty different from the WIP version for something I only spent another couple of hours on. I added her forearm of course, and the bird-and-animal elements are a whole extra layer (or several?). But it's also amazing how much difference adding colour and tone to a face can change it.

Unlike often, my Alanna pic for instance, I didn't change anything about the face with the paint layer. I only wanted to add a thin wash of tone, not enough to fully conceal any cover any misplaced pen lines, so I stuck to what I'd drawn with he acrylics. But the colour brings volume to the skin, and expression to the eyes and mouth that give the face a different dynamic. More vulnerable that I'd expected, perhaps, less guarded. She lost much of the imperiousness I intended to give her, as Daine at the height of her power and self-posession.

And I could have worked on and regained that, but I was reluctant to overwork the paint layer, and furthermore I like how she looks like she's listening.

I placed the two birds and the monkey to look like they're whispering to her, and I think her slightly abstracted, attentive expression sells the idea that there's communication going on.

Wolf-Speaker WIP

I quite like how this is looking at the moment, so thought I'd post it in case I later screw it up in any way...

Following on from my Alanna picture, it's Veralidaine Sarrasri (Daine) from the next series Tamora Pierce wrote, The Immortals. The series, and the character were always my favourite of Pierce's Tortall stories - possibly simply because I read them first and it is via them I formed my first impression of the world. But Daine does have an awful lot of undeniably awesome moments. Pierce also steers skilfully clear of Mary-Sue-dom despite having a friend-to-all-living-creatures, unknowingly-attractive, awesomely powerful god-child as her protagonist. Daine is endearingly down-to-earth, and often cross and grumpy. This is also the series where Pierce's attention to authentic detail really kicks in. Daine's interactions with animals feel real because Pierce has so thoroughly researched the biology, habits and personalities of the animals she writes about. Apparently Daine first came to Pierce when she was watching a David Attenborough documentary, and the influence of that serious and sharp-eyed attitude to natural history is apparent throughout the series.

What you see so far is a line drawing of brown paper, the skin and hair with an initial layer of acrylic colour. The feathers on her (headdress? Actual head, semi-transformed?) are real feathers. As is evident from previous work, I love working onto brown paper in any case, but somehow brown does seem to be the essential colour I always associate with The Immortals. Perhaps because Daine's magic manifests as copper, perhaps because I associate the colour brown with nature and animals, perhaps simply because the first of the gorgeous covers for the series by David 'awesome' Wyatt is rather brown.

I want to surround her with animals and animal motifs, naturally - maybe some painted but largely found images. Which is difficult as I have not yet found many of the right sort, and at the right size.

Alanna! Oops.

Yup, I took precious time away from finishing Christmas Open House stuff to complete my Alanna of Trebond and Olau sketchy.

Tamora Pierce seems to have fallen out of fashion in Britain, and you don't see her stuff about as much as you did when I was a teen. I gather she's still very popular in America - a status she very much deserves. I can't say enough nice things about Tammy P. In a genre full of flat, generic characters and poor Middle Earth-rip-off settings, Tammy has always managed to create books that are full of life and humour and convincing detail. It's not that her stories are necessarily founded on ideas that have never been explored before - in fact, her two first series in particular are founded on almost folkloric bases: the girl who disguises herself as a boy to train for knighthood; the girl who can talk to animals etc.

It's that she fills these stories with characters who you care about - who can be petty and stupid sometimes, and who have fun, and who interact with each other like people really interact. If she's writing about a girl who runs with wolves, you can be sure that Tammy's done her homework and that the behaviour of the animals is based on solid research. As she has set more and more books in Tortall the land and its neighbouring countries have grown in depth and subtlety, and changed with the passage of the books timeline, in the way the best fantasy lands do. There's something of Terry Pratchett about Tammy's world-building. She's another writer who stops to think about how a magic-influened, pseudo-medieval city would actually work.

('The Healing In The Vine', one her none-Tortall books, must be pretty unique amongst fantasy novels, in that the meat of the story is the outbreak of an epidemic in the city, and follows the efforts of the characters to fight the disease and find a cure - it's a drama of research-magic. It's also a great read.)

But back to the point: this is Alanna, star of Tamora Piere's first quartet of novels. Actually, this series came second in my personal Tammy P chart to 'The Immortals' (the one with the talking-to-animals-magic) but that is not to say I didn't read and reread the Alanna stories and still turn to them now for some serious comfort-reading.

I'm happy with the picture, though I weakened and made Alanna look more feminine that I originally intended. I had meant for her to be about age 15 here, and thereby still disguised as a boy. But it works as well to think of this being fully-knighted Alanna, and so openly female. Despite myself, it goes against the grain to make a girl look too boyish. I do the same thing with Maladict/a from Terry Pratchett's 'Monstrous Regiment' - in my head she's androgynous, but she comes out looking no more convincingly male than a twenties flapper: boyish in haircut, but of extremely feminine face and figure.

It's been ages, so I'm going to stick a few photos up of (some of) what I've been up to. Firstly, above, life drawing (painting).

I had a few months when I wasn't doing it regularly, and I've picked it up again now I've moved back to Brighton (here: http://brightondrawing.tumblr.com/) I felt pretty rusty starting back, but I feel I'm getting back into the flow a bit. My favourite at the moment is the blue one cuz of the skellington.

Also this <--

The very first thing I posted on this blog was

a variation on the same theme. Basically, I once drew a large picture, compositing Brighton landmarks which I called 'On A Clear Day You Can See Forever...' (hm, I must update the image on my website with a better quality one).

It was a million-hours (or so) well spent, because I've been deconstructing the image and using various bits of it in various ways ever since.

This <-- and this are where I've cut apart the elements of the drawing and used them to form layers in papercuts set in deep frames. Sounds relatively straightforward, but requires an awful lot of fine craft-knife work, as well as lots of work where you need to fill in gaps that are on show in 3D form, where they weren't in 2d.

In fact I have (just about) done two cut-outs recent based around elements from 'On A Clear Day...' and this is the second:

Actually a good 70-80% of the image is stuff drawn anew for this project. Partly because it's rather larger than previous variations - the biggest cut-out I've ever done. I was lucky in coming across a large deep-set frame. This piece has a theme: Brighton Rock. One of my very, very favourite books, and also a great film/s, Brighton Rock references crop up pretty frequently in my work.

I'm feeling pretty smug with regards to this project so far, I frankly think it looks pretty awesome :)

However I can't work out whether I should leave it monotone and just finish it by adding in more black areas - or colour it. And if so, how? For original 'On A Clear Day...' I was looking at 30s railways posters, and the limited palette of ice-cream colours they employ so effectively. The same palette suits Brighton Rock because of the period, and because it's nicely ironic for the town to be so pastel and innocent, in a way that echoes the novel's lines about 'cream houses like a pale Victorian watercolour...' and so on, that I've quoted within the picture. On the other hand I don't want to retread the same ground, it's boring. So, stumped.

Anyway, what with these, creating cool stuff for our Christmas Open House (pictures to follow, I hopes) and updating my showreel and website, that accounts for the past couple of months' creative output... I might also have a illustration-type-picture to post soon of Alanna from Tamora Pierce's books if I am not successful in keeping my nose to the grindstone of Open House oriented work in the next few days. I started one last night, you see...

The Retiring Room

Now here's a picture with a long history of very gradual development. It's a His Dark Materials illustration; Lyra Belacqua in the Retiring Room of Jordan college at the beginning of Northern Lights. She's just heard someone approaching and is about to leap behind the armchair to hide.

It's been about three? four? years since I started this. In fact! I've got a picture of it at an earlier stage here. And I wouldn't exactly say it's finished, because where's Pantalaimon? But the elements that are there, are... finished, I guess. The latest burst of activity is the third or fourth such since the thing was begun, each representing several weeks of attention to the thing.

Phew.

As for Pantalaimon I'm stumped on what form he should be in and where he should be placed. In the book he's a moth throughout this scene, but when I was in the earlier stages of painting this I imagined maybe I'd make him a bird of paradise for a couple of reasons: a bird starting into surprised flight would bring a lot of movement to the picture; the colours would pick up on their more sombre versions of the room; a bird of paradise would be quite incongruous with the staid, English surroundings, implying the uncanny, magical nature of daemons.

But I've become uncertain. I feel like he should maybe tie in with Lyra's grey-scale colour scheme rather than the room's colour scheme.

Um... Harry Potter fanart. Apparently.

My feelings about Harry Potter have traditionally ranged from the actively vitriolic to the mildly dismissive (although, to be fair, this is more inspired my the disproportional love the franchise receives rather than the books themselves which I have read and mostly enjoyed).

Actually, my attitude mellowed considerably recently since seeing the final film. It was pretty poor stuff, and it made me realised Rowling's not inconsiderable skills as a storyteller - that with the same materials she could produce something ten times as exciting, moving and satisfying as the filmmakers mustered. Although the 'nineteen-years-later' coda has a the quality of bad fanfiction no matter who is doing it.

Anyway.

As posted previously I started this picture with different characters in mind but couldn't get the idea of the Marauders (plus Lily) out of my head once I'd thought of it.

If not clear, it's Lily, Peter, Sirius, Remus and James l-r.

It's a Sherlock jamboree

More Sherlock Holmes pictures. Specifically BBC!Sherlock. Although the above picture seems to have turned out to resemble the movie version of the characters more. Partly because I put them in Victorian clothes, those being more fun to draw than modern day childrens' clothes.

A roughly 14-year-old Mycroft and roughly 7-year-old Sherlock. Yes, like many I'm a sucker for the idea of a fundamentally close realtionship between the brothers. In particular I was wondering why, for all the 'young Sherlock' franchises no one seems to have thought of partnering him with his big brother. Possibly because canonically there's meant to be much more of an age gap and you'd want them fairly well matched... but I do like the idea of a little sidekick Sherlock, hugely admiring of his brother but also desperately competitive. The more energetic but impulsive one to Mycroft's more reseved and careful intelligence...

Anyway, this has very little to do with this picture as I think even Sherlock Holmes would need to be a little more than 7 before he started crime fighting. And more importantly, this:

Possibly I've spent too long working with children's books, but when I thought about how popular pictures of young Mycroft and Sherlock were, and how their parents are always absent giving the impression that Mycroft is raising his brother singlehandedly, I thought of Lauren Child's Charlie And Lola books.

Then I thought of 'I have this little brother Sherlock...', giggled for half and hour, and doodled this. Then I went to have a quiet lie down and log hard think about my life. Didn't work. I still think it's funny.

Finally from my page of Sherlock obsession is one of Sherlock Holmes and Mrs. Hudson. For some reason. She was meant to be toasting the view with her mug of cha, but it looks more like she's offering it to whoever she and Sherlock are talking to (Lestrade?), which I rather like. To me it looks like a scene taking place after some dramatic denouement at 221b Baker Street: Mrs. Hudson's providing the police with tea and biscuits and Sherlock Holmes looks very pleased with himself. He also looks like Kevin Bacon and has a weird neck. Which is a shame. And controversially, his biscuit of choice is the pink wafer. Why did I draw this? I think it may be time for another quiet lie down.

What larks

Cos the Sherlock Holmes picture was so quick I thought I might be able to set myself the task of churning out a finished picture a day... I can't. But I done this to, well, this extent. I'm unsure of how to proceed: in paint? Collage? The usual mix?

It's characters of my own again. The other one I was doing which included these characters is still ongoing.

A Study In Mixed-Media

Lolz.

It's Holmes and Watson!

... Okay, not by any traditional standard, but I'm a big fan of the BBC version and also love the Downey Junior/Law portrayal (though I find the film otherwise patchy). And the way in which I appreciate things is by putting them through the prism of my own convoluted character design process.

The thing that particularly fascinates me about Holmes, apart from all the obvious things that ake his a popular character, is the little acknowledged fact that he's 27 years old in A Study In Scarlet. Not only has this been worked out according to other canonical facts - to me he really reads like a young man. The nervous arrogance, the ambition of a man at the beginning of his career, the lack of money, the need to share his flat. Indeed, when Watson first meets Holmes, he mistakes him for a student. Arthur Conan Doyle was 27 when he wrote the story. I'm 27 now. It's no wonder I find a 27-year-old Holmes interesting.

Watson, I think is a bit older - he's gone through medical traing AND seen active service in the army. Early 30s at least.

The thing that makes them one of the great partnerships in fiction is the same thing that ALL great double-acts boil down to - not that I can define exactly what that is (the right balance of mutual dependancy and antagonism?) but I mention it because I was thinking about Russell Brand while I sketched Holmes. His relationship with friend and radio show co-host Matt Morgan prompted me to relate him to Holmes: the sharp intelligence, the ego, the bohemianism, the outsider status (which I think all comedians have to some extent - interested in people but not of them), the dependance on a few strong human bonds, one in particular...

Anyhoo. A vague narrative evolved as I was working: a Hound-Of-The-Baskerville's-style situation; Holmes and Watson called urgently to the murder scene from their beds (I guess explains Holmes shirtlessness?); an outdoor murder scene drenched in mud and blood.

So this, therefore, is Holmes and Watson having a quiet smoke in a blood-trampled porch, recovering from the gore in the case of Watson, who is remarkably squeamish for a soldier and a doctor; and beginning to theorise in the case of Holmes.

It was really just a character design exercise but I'm tempted to contextualise the figues more - hint at the nighttime setting, the stone wall they're standing against etc...

Dido Twite and Simon Battersea

...And in the meantime:

Young Dido Twite, cockney street-sparrow-turned-repeated-saviour-of-the-English-monarchy and her friend Simon Battersea, one-time-long-lost-heir-to-the-Duchy-of-Battersea and briefly king of England.

As far as I'm concerned Joan Aiken's Wolves Of Willoughby Chase and its sequels are some of the great childrens' books. Despite the 'classic' status of the former, the books get no where near enough attention (not least on DA). Dido is the hero of the bulk of the series and Simon, star of Black Hearts in Battersea, recurrs as well. I love their friendship and loyalty to one another. There's a bare hint of romance towards the end of the series but mostly Aiken never seems to feel the need to examine their relationship. They meet in youth (Dido's nine, Simon's a teenager) and grow up an undisclosed amount in the book

I've drawn them both as young adults, so some time after the end of the series, and tried to depict an interaction that could be romantic or not. I based it on a photo by Venetia Dearden. Dido seems to have grown her hair but it doesn't look as if she ever brushes it, the perennial urchin. I had trouble with her wolfskin jacket: she looks like a biker. I'm more pleased with Simon's Regency coat... except in the Wolves alternate history, there is no Regency of course... buh.

I should also add that , for extra London authenticity, the brown paper it's painted/collaged onto is a paper bag from the last time I had fish and chips.

Inspired particularly by finding actual (and brilliant) Joan Aiken fanfic

Work progresses.

New paint/collage work

The thing what I'm working on at the moment, when I'm not working on what I'm meant to be working on... heh.

It's based on a drawing I've had lying around for a little while, of some characters of my own, but my reason for working on it now is essentially to try out some of the collage ideas I've been thinking about lately. As I mentioned in my last post, I like how a couple of things I've done recently have had a bit of a stripped-back look compared to my usual approach.

Therefore I'm working on this quite slowly, having a big ol' think before I apply any more paper to stop myself from overworking it.

Also, my desk looks like this:

More A Little Princess

An updated version of this. In fact, apart from Becky's hair (she's the girl higher on the page) I haven't done any more work to the original, but I've played around in Photoshop to test ideas.

I really like the physical copy of this, but I can't get it to look good on screen - and that's something I've been thinking about lately: producing work that can be more successfully reproduced digitally. My two favourite recent bits of work are the character design for the father from Beauty And The Beast and my other A Little Princess illustration.

So perhaps the way forward is a slightly less texture/more watercolour-y approach with the acrylics, and using paper as flat pattern more than textured collage.

Anyway, I again did a quick mock-up of how this might look as a book cover and I think the result is not bad:

Beauty

I don't know if it's because I'm using an aging Emac since my own laptop died, because my scanner is getting on, or because my work is difficult to photograph/scan (the latter is definitely a factor) but these images a re extremely not good. At least they give the general idea.

Anyway. As I already mentioned, striking the right balance in telling Beauty And The Beast to young children is a challenge. With Beauty, you want to make her look young so a young readership has sympathy with her, but at the same time you don't want to depict someone who looks like a pre-teen falling in love with a big, bestial male.

My thoughts, as usual, gravitated towards 20s/30s design - in this case the boyish, shapeless cuts of the dresses. Putting Beauty in a shapeless, dropped-waist shift means she still looks cute but her age is ambiguous. I also gave her beauty of the soft-20s-prettiness variety which again makes her look ambiguously youthful I hope. Her hair is in loose pigtails rather than being down or formally dressed.

I also think it makes sense to dress Beauty in practical, slightly boyish clothes (I imagine this is some sort of riding outfit) rather than the beautiful gowns she is normally shown in, and to put her hair in a careless, scruffy style, because it throws any prettiness I've managed to depict in her face into sharp relief.

The lines might be very 20s but I again tried to inject a certain amount of vagueness about time and geographical setting by the patterns I chose. I gave Beauty a white palette since she's the traditional fairy tale innocent. It also makes her black hair look more striking.

I'm well into using colour as a signifier... in this case I like how she and the Beast are at opposite ends of the greyscale so they're related in colour as well as contrasting. Her white is punctuated with earthy colours, green and brown (probably not clear in the scan), because she's your humble, friend-to-all-living-creatures type. Beast has bright red and blue in his clothes because he is removed from down-to-earth living as a prince and a Beast. The palace is dominated by my favourite colour, green, which can be used to create an unworldly, unnatural atmosphere as I've attempted in the dining-hall illustration. Alphonso Cuaron uses green an awful lot to create various atmospheres. Look at his 'A Little Princess' - it's the greenest film you'll ever see.

If I was working on the actual picture book, some sort of colour/lighting map is one of the first plans I'd make.

Designing the Beast

So, the process of coming up with a character design for the Beast.

I love sketching in the V&A in South Ken, and it occurred to me when I was there the Natural History Museum next door might be a good place to get inspiration for a beast. The sketches in the top left

corner are some that I did there (when I wasn't jabbing small children with a sharpened pencil for getting in the way. Not really. I just wanted to. Bloomin cheek they've got, running round enjoying a child-friendly museum).

Ahem. As you can see, the animals I sketched don't have an awful lot in common with the gorilla/bear hybrid I ended up doing, but I find it often works this way - an important part of the process is trying an eliminating blind alleys. It's something I have to discipline myself to go through, this process, rather than just diving in and coming up against problems that should

have been eliminated at an early stage, when its too late to do much about it. In this case I'm glad I worked through civet- and dog- based ideas early on (see the early sketches in the top right hand corner).

After that I hit on something pretty close to the final design pretty quickly. I think this is because I was utilising a lot of the work I've done over years in drawing another character - Iorek Byrnison from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials (relevant bit's about halfway through post). To me, the word Beast conjures a very mammalian creature, and if you want your Beast to be at all appealing, fur helps. But I didn't want the Beast to look too friendly, and I think this is why I started thinking along the same lines as Iorek Byrnison: reducing the proportional size of the head and eyes to make the character a little inaccesable and hard to read; more imposing.

The other consideration with Beauty And The Beast is while the Beast is just that, you have to try and make him not appear so animal that it seems weird that human Beauty falls in love with him.

Can I just take this opportunity, by the way, to point out what an odd fairy tale Beauty And The Beast is? Whereas tales like Cinderella and so on seem to have a fairly clear morality and absolutely archetypal plots, Beauty And The Beast seems to me to be something more rich and complex.

Anyway; bears and apes/monkeys struck me as the animals with the most obvious human-like physicality. I'd already thought about Iorek-style-beariness for the Beast's body and I liked the idea of contrasting that imposing bulk with quite a delicate, clever almost-human face based on a monkey's.

I think the final design looks a little like some depictions of the Chinese Monkey King. He's somewhere between a bear, a silverback gorilla, a monkey and a sloth. Putting trousers and boots on him pulls him a little more towards the human end of the scale.

So that's about it. All in all a design I'm pretty pleased with.

Beauty And The Beast

This is the double-page spread done as part of the competition entry. All of these images combine collage and paint. This one is 44x28cm. I want to talk a bit more about the process but keep not having time... I think I'll scan some of the sketches and stuff to show my thoughts on the brief.

... the father...

Here's Beauty's father. Bad scan again. But probably my favourite of the three characters designs.

He's based, oddly, on Thomas Hardy. I was leafing through a book of early 20th century photography and that look leaped out at me - I was trying to make everything slightly anachronistic, combining elements from different eras and places so the overall look was quite timeless. So the idea of very Victorian/Edwardian facial hair on someone in quite medieval clothes appealed to me.

Beast

I'm entering this Waterstone's illustration competition to commission a previously unpublished illustrator. The brief is for a new version of Beauty And The Beast, being written by the great Michael Morpurgo. And here is my Beast (bad scan)...

I'll post at some point in a bit more detail re. the design process etc.

A Little Princess again

Unsure of how to proceed with the previous A Little Princess illustration, I did a different one... actually a lot of the painting was done ages ago, like 2009 or something, and then abandoned. But I happened across it in a folder and thought I could tie it in with the more recently started ALP illustration by including some found patterned paper (Sara Crewe's dress and the sleeve of Becky's).

I'm pretty pleased with the result. Here's an approximation of how it might work as a wrap-around book cover:



Course it's not remotely what I'm meant to be getting on with, but I'll, er, put it down to practice...

EDIT: someone pointed out I'd forgotten this: the picture is based on a screenshot from the 1995 film version of A Little Princess. The characters are changed to a different interpretation, but their positions and the context is closely based on the screenshot.

A Little Princess

This is for the other great Frances Hodgson Burnett classic, A Little Princess. Covers for this one are often quite unimaginative, I've noticed. They usually show a simple portrait of Sara Crewe, and where she is shwn in her 'riches' stage as opposed to the 'rags' stage this seems a particulalrly redundant front cover. The book is already called 'A Little Princess'. Adding a picture of a princess-looking little girl doesn't add a lot to the idea.

I wanted to focus on elements that might bee more intruiging to modern children than a richly-dressed girl passively standing there. So this is Sara engrossed in story-telling while lying on a decorative rug. I found a pattern (from my vast collection of pretty papers :)) that looked quite Indian, and positioned Sara's head in the middle of a crown-like part of the pattern...

It's not finished because I've paused, undecided as to whether I've overworked Sara's face in acrylic. Would it be better if I'd left it just as a layer of tissue, like the rest of her, with her features done in pen-and-ink?

Messing around with bits of paper (as is my wont) and paint, experimenting with bringing together a lot of the stuff I do. Particularly for use in illustration/book design. So here's the first experiement, a book-cover-style illustration for The Secret Garden. I put down a base layer of very washy paint; put in the mid-ground with loose tissue-collage and then build the foreground up with a combination of more careful tissue collage and paint, with a little touch of patterned paper for Mary Lennox's crown of flowers.

I've spent the last couple of months doing more video stuff than artwork, and I'm just gearing up and getting going again. Being busy doing something else and getting frustrated that you can't get on with your artwork is great for firing up creativity, and I've done a lot of thinking about what direction I'm going to go in now...

To be fair I was thinking about that before and I can see it in some of my more recent work that's breaking away from the style you'll mostly see in most of my work.

For instance, this one. It's clearly figurative, but it's not based firmly in a particular scene. It feels like a step forward in artistic confidence, and more expressive of my identity. More inclusive of all my bents as an artist rather than being firmly in one camp.

I'm looking forward to getting some more thoughts down on paper...