A Fistful of Burgers: A Conclusion

This afternoon I ordered my book from blurb.com, it's 52 pages and cost £22 inclusing postage. Ouch. But it should be worth it. Getting my book ordered means I can concentrate on other things:

Gallery Space
Vending Machine
Jewellery
Tote Bags
Mini Comics

I think it's safe to say this project turned out nothing like what my proposal had proposed. I was in a very different place at the start of the FMP, a bad place, I can't really explain why, or how, I was just in a slump. I wanted to go "wah wah wah, this is me, I'm sad, read comics about it" which would have kinda majorly sucked as a project and probably not really helped at all.

Luckily, after going home to get my head together, I don't feel like that anymore. And I didn't wanna be down, I wanted to make art and make people smile. In all honesty, I can't explain how I got to my final project. I don't really like registering my thought processes as I work, I basically draw faster than I can think (which made blogging a difficuly ordeal.)

I guess it could be said that my FMP was a continuation of my Options project. Making comics using some characters from the previous project as well as some new editions. I wanted to extend the project beyond pictures on a page (or in a frame) to me, art is more than that.

Art can be found on a shirt, a bag, a skateboard, around your neck or on your fingers. Art is vinyl toys, or plush toys, it's jewellery, shoes, or even ceramics and furniture. An artist can apply themselves to anything, they're not limited to paper, and so they shouldn't. This is something I wanted to explore within my project. Though I've put it on the backburner, as stuff I'll make for the Gallery shop, I find the non book stuff of my project very important. In fact, if I could go back in time, I'd tell past self to not worry about the book. I'd make an entire project not on paper, on anything but. Gosh darn it, I wish I had a time machine

Paper Fortress: 2009 - 2011 Reflection from Paper Fortress on Vimeo.

Artist spotlight: Keaton Henson

I was just introduced to this artist's work through a fellow student's blog. Which means I know that you, the people reading this blog, have probably already seen all this. Well tough, this is what you get for making us do this.

I think something that always attracts me to an artist I'd their line-work. I've noticed that it's something many artists lack, especially my contemporaries. Sometimes I'll watch someone draw and feel an inner wince as they have little control over the lines, they'll be all scratchy, ragged and quite frankly, ugly.

Henson's line work is beautiful; there's the perfect balance between simple line and shading. There will be colour when it's needed, some times it's a tiny amount, like on the tips of fingers. It works magnificently.










Henson has some very particular motifs that he draws often and make his work all the more memorable and stylistic: triangles, all seeing eyes (as seen on the American dollar) hands, big heads with small faces in the middle.

Artist Spotlight: Olly Moss

I just came across this faaaantastic video on Mike Mitchell's blog. Olly Murs is a name I've heard of, but never really bothered to find out who he is. Watching this video, I think I can tell I'm gonna be a fan of his

http://vimeo.com/23621548

Having gone on his blog:
http://moss.fm, I realised I had come across some of his work before, and to sum it up in the simplest of terms: it's good work.


Olly Moss was born in '87. That means he IS ONE YEAR OLDER THAN ME. And he is making illustrations for Empire magazine and Marvel (meaning he got to visit the Thor set!) In fact, here's his current client list:

CLIENTS: Lucasfilm / Star Wars, Star Trek, ABC / LOST, Levis. The Alamo Drafthouse, Urban Outfitters, Nike, Puma, Penguin, Wired, GQ, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times Magazine, Threadless

Say it with me folks: oh, my, god. OH MY GOD. It's kinda really encouraging but really freakin' scary too.

I'm gonna say this flat out; I don't know what I'm gonna do when I leave uni. And considering that's less than 2 months away, that's a pretty freaking scary thought. I'm always waiting for some ...magic event to happen that will land me with an awesome career as an awesome artist.

As an ultimate goal, for some time in the future, but not too far, is to run a gallery. An illustration gallery.

For years I've been aware of various galleries in America that I would love to one day, have my work in.

Nucleus Gallery

Gallery 1988

Bird and Bear Gallery.

These galleries are all sorts of awesome; they cater to Illustration and graphic design, they're run by young people and display young artists. To sum it up, it's all very cool. And I want one. I don't know if it's just my own naiivity, but I feel illustration isn't very accessible outside of places like London (and possibly some other big cities)

This is the Photoshop blasphemy that awaited me when I returned from a toilet break today.

This is a little doodle I did after Alex joked that, because I always draw him with a hunch, soon he'll just become a face in a hunch. My witty rebuttal was he'll become his hat.

I did 4 pages of comic today, including the first sushi banter page. It happened spontaneously, I didn't really plan it at all, but I thought of a joke, and I couldn't resist.

Here's a couple of the pages I did today, including the sushi banter. The second page was one of my busiest, I wanted to get in a lot of wordless action on one page, I feel it works, ut isn't quite what I originally imagined.

ghost comic

For the project I feel I needed a bigger story to run through the book. I felt it was perhaps a bit too late to try and come up with a new idea, and so thought I could re-do some of the comics from my last book.

Ghost is the longest comic from my last project. It's about a ghost at a party that wants some punch but can't get any, cause he's a ghost.

Above is a screen shot from my progress so far. Visually it's very different from the previous comic, but I really like how it's coming along. I've been making the image 100% in Photoshop using my Wacom to draw. It's been years since I've really drawn with my tablet, and it feels good.

Donkey Progress

Here's the Donkey so far, I emailed it to Pete and he said "MOR GUTTS OMG" because Pete is very immature and not a very good speller, but he had a point. I need to add MOR GUTTS, or more stomachs, in crazy places like the ears and down the tail!!

Donkey

I recently talked to Jonny and showed him my sketchbook (mainly to show I've been doing work) and a certain image caught his eye. It was this donkey digestive system drawing I did that, although I liked the idea, didn't feel the outcome was too great.




Later that night I got passed on a rather cryptic text from no-one other than Pete Lloyd. He wanted to to come in the studio the next day and bring the donkey image. I'm not gonna lie, I was pretty damn scared.

So the next day rolled around, and it turns out Jonny told Pete about the image. They've been looking for an image to represent Solent at the D&AD show, and they wanted me to recreate my donkey image for the show, but using the various stomachs and guts to visualise the illustration course :)

It's pretty exciting, Though rather daunting too. The hardest part will be balancing humour with relevance (and not being too cutting with my humour)




Here's a sketchbook page I did recently. It's following in the 'breakfast' idea and is a recipe for making fantastic beans on toast. Although I like the idea of pictorial recipes, they're quite difficult and not very visually rewarding.