Artwork process part 1

I've been trying to become more analytical about my artwork, so I thought that it would be interesting to document the process that I use to make it. This is not a guide or a tutorial- there are plenty of those on the Internet by people far more skilled than I am. Feel free to comment on the way that you do things, or if you think there's a simpler method than mine!

I've chosen the illustration below, which is cover art for The Girly Comic (Collected Vol 2) because it's complex and because I really had to work hard at it.
This is the finished illustration:

The brief was  specific-the illustration needed to ....

• have either blue or green as the dominant colour
• have a technology theme,
• feature a large central figure
• reference the comic strips inside the book
• the idea of using Ipads as tarot cards was suggested.

 The reason I was asked to draw the cover is because I've got a number of strips in the collection. One of them is Chess for Witches, a comic that I adapted from a short story written by a co-worker in my first job. Here is a page from it:

My art style has developed since then, but I liked it and was looking forward to revisiting the character. The original brief mentioned the comic Madame Xanadu as inspiration, so I looked at some of the old comics:

I wanted to show the main character leaning forward towards the viewer and was having trouble getting the perspective right, so I  photographed myself in the same pose and used the photographs for reference.  When I did the original comic I didn't have much idea how to draw people, so I used myself as source material. (This is the only part of the process that I'm not putting online, because the photos are too embarrassing)

If I am struggling with something and cannot get reference myself I will search images online. Apparently some artists think that everything should come from imagination or from life. That might work if I had a less realistic art style but in practice most artists I've known use reference.

Paul Duffield built 3D sets for the most complicated layouts in Warren Ellis's comic Freakangels and rotated them to get the right perspective. Mine is not the most complex procees out there.

The Ipads became mobile phones because they were nearer the size of tarot cards Below is an initial sketch:

I finished the rest of the body, flipped and traced the image a couple of times on a light box to make sure it wasn't wonky (the face is still a bit skewiff in this sketch) and traced it out in thick black marker. I  pencil final artwork on the back of cheap A3 supermarket paper and then ink on the opposite side using a light box. This means I can redraw it as many times as I want without paying for expensive tracing paper, but it  loses some detail, so the lines have to be clear. 

The image often ends up the wrong way round because I trace and flip it so many times- but that's something I can correct later in Photoshop. This is the clean line art. I had such a hard time with the figure that I drew the mobile phones at the bottom of the page in separately:

I  scanned it into my computer and adjusted it in Photoshop using the Auto Levels and Brightness/Contrast Tools.

I drew and scanned the background separately and added it using Photoshop. At this point, I  also decided that the perspective on the pointing hand was horrible and needed to be redrawn

It's looking a bit more like the final version now, but notice that the actual illustration has much more blank space at the bottom?  I sent it to the client at this stage , they liked it but asked for more room for the logo. It's easy to change things at this stage. When you add colour, it becomes a lot more difficult.

Next stop: Colour!

Check your messages, Luke Skywalker...

Animal Inside Out-Natural History Museum

Gunther von Hagens' Animals Inside Out exhibition plastinates animals-stripping off the skin and flesh to preserve them for educational study.
The exhibition was a bit pricey at £9 per person but contained much more variety than I expected with 90 specimens ranging from frogs to elephants.  The public display in the foyer is harshly lit and dissected in greater detail than many of the displays in the exhibition so don't get put off - it's still well worth a look!To see animals dissected in the flesh like this is intriguing - anyone who struggles with drawing or animating the legs of animals like horses or giraffes would definitely get a lot of help from this exhibition.
There are no photographs allowed but it is the only place I have known that requires you to ask permission before sketching too.

Oh, yeah...

I've updated my website. Why don't you check it out here?

Choose wisely, Dr Jones....

Petra in Jordan, one of the Seven New Wonders of the World and famed fictional location of Indiana Jones's Holy Grail. We didn't have much time there despite leaving at 2:30 am and returning to our hotel at midnight,so this is a very quick sketch, but you don't see a wonder without a bit of pain.

Jordan is mostly desert but spectacularly beautiful. I hope to return.

If you'd like to find out more about Petra, Married to a Bedouin is a great biography of Marguerite van Geldermalsen. She is a New Zealand woman who married a Bedouin souvenir seller and moved to Petra during the 70's and 80's.

Egypt 2

Isis carving at Philae in Aswan. 

Tombs of quarry workers on the Nile bank.

Kom Ombo temple at sunset

Kom Ombo temple

Hieroglyphs in the tomb of Rameses IV

Some more sketches of Egypt. The paintings in the Valley of the Kings were amazing. They are bright, vibrant, graphic, and much bigger than I expected. In one tomb, KV14 , you could see the outlines that the artists drew onto the plaster thousands of years ago.

I've never been much of a fan of Ancient Egyptian art, it can look twee and formulaic in reproductions and it's analytical approach (some pictures are the artistic version of a circuit diagram) seems strange when you're accustomed to the Western artistic ideas of self-expression or realistic representation of a scene.

 This trip changed my mind. The real thing has much more of an impact than I expected, especially the hieroglyphs which included at least five identifiable species of birds (You might have gathered from some of my previous posts that I don't like generic pictures of birds, I like to know what I'm looking at) This is something that I didn't expect from an alphabet. Some of them are in the sketch above.

Egypt 1

 The hypostyle hall, Temple of Hathor, Dendera

 The Colossi of Memnon, Luxor

Just come back from 2 weeks in Egypt- here are some sketches from the trip.

 I have always been interested in Orientalist art- drawings and paintings by 19th century European artists in the Middle East and North Africa.  There is some controversy about this style. At worst, it can be imperialistic, stereotypical and ethically questionable but at its height it produced some spectacular and beautiful art. It inspired me to travel (as did Herge's Tintin comics which have some similar issues)  

 This genre of painting includes some amazing landscape paintings with ruined temples covered in drifts of sand and tiny figures thrown in there to add some scale. David Roberts' pictures of Abu Simbel are maybe the most famous examples of these. It was inspiring to draw in some of the same locations.

 Egypt in summer can reach 50 degrees C, and any artist who bothered to visit before the invention of air conditioning has my respect whatever their motives.