Meet the studio

For those of you bored of looking at my work - here's a little sneak-peak at the four other aspiring illustrators that I share our third-year studio space with:

Swedish graphic novelist to-be extraordinaire, Miss Jennie Gyllblad.

Far-too-skilled-for-his-own-good concept artist, Mr Richard Partridge.

More-imagination-than-you-can-shake-a-krusczyki-at Polish children's book illustrator, Miss Malgorzata Piatkowska.

And last but not least, all round good-egg, Miss Emily Rawle.

What a smashing bunch they are ... I'm so in denial about how much I'm going to miss this lot next year...

Fisherman ...

Having watched lots of fishermen going in and out of the little harbours in all the seaside villages we have visited in Cornwall, I've for a long time wanted to do a project based on some kind of fisherman-with-a-big-beard narrative. I still don't know what to make of it, but I thought I'd start by geting the fisherman image out of my head. Post assessment, I was given feedback that I worked best with shapes, and needed to break away from the use of lines to explain things. As an excercise, I thought I'd re-do my fisherman image as cut shapes. All experiments and work-in-progress ...

If any of you have or have access to a short, sweet, fisherman story that I could illustrate - would really appreciate hearing about it ...

The Musicians of Brahman ...

My ... its been a long time since I was here, hasn't it? Life has been quite full with family emergencies, assessments and dissertations - but its all done now ... Finally, we're on the home stretch towards graduation ... YIKES!

The last module was called "Preparation for self directed study" - genius title, don't you think? Gave us the freedom to do and explore whatever we wanted. And the assessmnet didn't mean we had to have anything finished, per se, but that we were making good progress towards finding our own 'visual language'. So, as you can imagine, I have a LOT of 'work-in-progress' rather than finished work. Part of the reason I haven't been posting lately - but I think I'm just going to start showing you process; and hopefully some of these things will come together for the final show in June. Enjoy!

Right, remember Mr tabla-playing monkey? Well, he was based on my original Asian musicians ... I then found out that each note within the Asian scale is represented by an animal ... I started running with that.

Here are some developement sketches:

And the finished painted animals:

The plan is to then make little hand-shaped (again, influenced by figures from Indian classical dance) shadow boxes with lots of layering. It hasn't quite come together, but you can see my test, and mock-ups. Am really enjoying this and hope it comes together well.

"Self-directed study", here I come!

Lizzy Stewart in Bristol ...

I met the awesome Lizzy Stewart in the last week... She's as nice (if not nicer) in real life as she comes across on her blog! She is down in Bristol for a joint show with Christopher Bettig that just started at the Here Gallery last night. Oh my, her stuff is even lusher in real life! ... I'm eyeing up the winter bird image ... maybe some wedding present money can go into purchasing some original artwork for the home ;)

If you're about, do visit the show - both Lizzy's and Chris's work is sooooooo much better in life ... goes on till the end of February ... :)

King of the tabla ...

Every monkey'd like to be
In my place instead of me
Cause I'm the king of bongo, baby
I'm the king of bongo ... tabla?

Gaan

Ongoing ... hoping to expand into a bigger project.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow ...

A bit of silly fun...

Hello 2010

So here we are again at the start of a brand new year; a brand new decade ... Sunshine and I have had quite the busy year in 2009 - mostly, we got married; which seemed to take up most of the year. Over Christmas we got married again ... well, not really again, but had a another celebration for it in my home country of Bangladesh (see photo above). We came back just before New Years, and have spent the last few days just trying to get back into the swing of things, here in sunny but very cold Bristol. Sunshine's family also grew a bit more - he became an uncle :) Welcome to the world our newest little friend ...

This next year will also be quite full-on - mostly because I finish and graduate in June/July (eeep!) and can officially call myself a trained illustrator... will be scary, but am looking forward to it. Also have lots of other plans ... but we'll talk about those as we come to them...

Happy 2010! Wishing you a year full of peace, happiness, success and joy!!!

Happy Holidays!

Asian musicians ...

Getting myself in the mood for our impending trip to Bangladesh-land. I thought I'm unlikely to get any time to do much drawing while we're out there ... so I'd do some while we're still here! Not sure what the groom-chap is doing ... conducting the music (don't generally have conductors in Asian music), or directing traffic ...

Wedding Wednesday - part 9

Thank you everyone who came and made it such a lovely day ... 5 months in (yes, a bit late ... ), but we got there!

Making process here.

Thank you Adana

Phew! What a steep learning curve this has been ... Regular readers will remember that we procured an Adana 8x5 not too long ago; but then promtly stopped blogging about it. Well, we have actually been using it, but its been a lot of trial and error over several days. And with college and life, those days have been non-concurrent.

But I am pleased to say now that I think we have it (mostly) down, and have done our first two print runs (they are of the same thing - our wedding thank you cards - we just ran out of cards and had to go and buy a second box of supplies). Anyways, here's a kind of 'photo story' of the process. It's made up of photos from a couple of goes - so there isn't necessarily continuity in what's going on. Here goes... :

We start with my original design - then traced into the two separate colours (at the end I ended up re-drawing the whole thing as one piece and scanned it into Photoshop, and did the separating into two layers that way - and printed the two layers out separately).

Next, printed the layers out on acetate - in negative (for making photopolymer flexoplates).

I'm lucky that in my college they have the fascilities for making photopolymer flexoplates - it's a bit like making a silkscreen screen. There is a thin steel plate with some photoemulsion on it. You place the negative acetate the wrong way round on the emulsion and then expose it to UV light. The exposed bits harden (what you're going to print with), and you wash away the unhardened bits. Here are my two plates for the two colour separations.

Imagine then I've mounted the plates on wood to get them 'type height' and used some quoins and furniture to clamp them in place in the chase. I got some of this fab Caligo Safe Wash ink - and here is me inking the ink disk.

Even before we could print we noticed that the plate was inking up too much. This was not going to do ...

Not only was it over-inking, it was not sticking properly to the wood base. We fiddled with this for LONG time... We tweeked the impression screws; we tried to lift the rollers by putting layers of tape on the edge of the roller bearer (the thing the chase sits in); and all sorts ...

To cut a long story short, Sunshine eventually took the whole thing apart, cut the plates down so the edges were closer to the printing bits, and remounted them on wood that he had put through a special machine that would sand it down to the exact height. We made sure the plates were stuck down well, and we even had to hammer down some of the corners that kept getting inked.

Eventually though we finally managed to get it all working ... first print run we did this plate (with the rings) first - then the one with the figures. The second print run the following week we did the other way round as can be seen here:

I'm not entirely sure why I'm speaking like a child o_O ... also, when changing between the two plates, I did the old screenprint registration trick of taping down some acetate to print on, and then putting a card with the first colour on, underneath the printed acetate to align it properly. The Adana has an adjustable 'lay gauge' that holds the bottom of the card where you want it, and we used a piece of thick acetate to mark off one of the edges. You can see me pushing the card up against it in the video.

Final card to be unveiled on Wedding Wednesday tomorrow ;)

For Lu & Soph & Arran + Sharm & Snowball & Yngve

Boy in the Bubble - Paul Simon (although I had to get the the lyrics wrong, didn't I? Its "miracle" not "miracleS" ... oh well

For all the new families ;)

Rosalind Franklin

Working on some favourite lady scientists ... Move over Crick and Watson; here you have Rosalind Franklin - the structure of DNA would not have been elucidated without Franklin's data and initial analysis .

... and as an added extra, here is some retro DNA ...

Sketchdump

Sorry there hasn't been much update on the blog recently - as life's been quite full with college; lots of dance classes and workshop teaching with DZ; getting ready for our Christmas trip away for the second leg of the wedding; and all sorts of other stuff (including the dreaded dissertation...). There are three big illustration-y projects I want to blog about too - but they are all for people so I'd rather wait till they receive them.

I've also been struggling a bit with my own self-directed stuff, but here's a sketch dump of some stuff I've been doing just to keep drawing...

I wanted to do something about scientists - and here's my attempts at Darwin (why does he always look like Santa?) and Einstein...

... back to those jazz musicians (and other characters ...)

... also been thinking about our trip to Bangladesh in two weeks ...

Handmade Graphics ...

Last summer I was contacted by RotoVision as they'd seen my embroidery hoops all over the place, and wanted to include them in an upcoming book about handmade graphics. They wanted to use my hoops as a worked through example. So I ended up pretending to make a new hoop and photographed myself going through it all step-by-step ...

It was published earlier this month - and my copy came in the post this week :) Am quite happy with how it came out ... no pay, but good exposure ... And to be published in the same book with the likes of some of my heroes - Luke Best, Matt Sewell, Mike Perry ... and many more... nice!

Get your copy here.

Also, the original hoops are currently on sale in my shop. Christmas pressies anyone???

Wedding Wednesday - part 8

Wedding Wednesday comes back with a special announcement - the official (as official as we can get) set of photos are up! We had to sift through several thousand shots from our awesome 'official' photograper, and also all the lovely CDs we received from friends and family - and here you have the best of the best (click on the image to take you to the flickr collection).


Also, our wedding has been featured (and very nicely put together too!) at Aussie wedding magazine/blog Style Collective (click on banner to go straight to the site). Thank you Amanda!


Last but not least - progress has been made on our handprinted thank you cards - yes, we are very VERY late ... but that's because I wanted to make something by hand. Flexoplates and Adanas came into the equation ;) ... If it all gets sorted, that will be a big Wedding Wednesday post next week ...

Erm, I won?

Remember this? Well, my piece was one of the ones chosen to be displayed at the Arnolfini Gallery. And not only that, I found out yesterday that mine has been chosen as the overall winner by judges Amelia Gregory of Amelia's Magazine, Fiona Hamilton of Soma Gallery, and the people from Platform who are running the current 100 days (to the Climate Change Conference) season at the Arnolfini. I won a copy of Gaia Warriors and a (being printed as we speak) copy of Amelia's Anthology of Illustration- "featuring renewable technologies to prevent catastrophic climate change".

I was quite surprised to win, to tell you the truth - but am very glad I did ... and it comes at the perfect time as my dissertation that I'm working on at the moment (and why there has been almost no activity on the blog recently), is all about how illustrators can engage with social/ethical/environmental/sustainability issues.

If all goes to plan, Platform will be using my imagery as part of the literature surrounding this.

*The 10 posters will be on display at the Arnolfini (upstairs) till the end of the week if you want a peek :)

Advice

All quiet on the blogging - as I'm mostly busy trying to get through my dissertation - it looms above me ... but as they say, even this shall pass ... and I'll be back to drawing soon.

Also, we've been having a play with the Adana - have made flexoplates at college! - but there are still teething problems with printing. Am trying to take lots of photos as we go along, and will put a photo story up once we get the chance ;)

Kaplan Altior

Brief for a legal-training firm to produce calendar images based on cities in which they have offices.

From the the top, Liverpool; Birmingham (canal locks); and London (Inns of Court).