"I can't express anger. That's my problem. I internalize everything. I just grow a tumor instead."

A postcard sized portrait of Woody Allen, 

sketched in ink with a paintbrush

(drawn for a sketchathon with Little White Lies Magazine)

Merz Beach Collage

I've started to play about with creating films and music lately - (in the most amateur sense possible) - but I'm hoping to find a way of combining this with illustration. 

I'm also (with the help of my very talented friend Line Lorna as well as Wendy Froud's amazing tutorial dvds) learning how to make dolls and puppets from polymer clay.

New Empress: The Stewardesses (1969)

An illustration for New Empress's B-Movie special, for an article on the 1969 film The Stewardesses

New Empress: The Violence in Silence

We've just got the new issue of New Empress in the post - now A4 sized, printed in b&w, with a glossy cover for the Silent Film Special. My illustration for Helen Cox's article "Slap That Baby Make Him Freak: The Violence in Silence" (about violence directed towards babies in silent-era films) was of a train about to hit a pram. I wasn't sent the article to work from (the brief was just to have a pram in a precarious situation) but oddly enough one of the first examples of infant-directed violence mentioned in the article involves a pram hit by an oncoming train. 

(Please note that no babies were harmed in the creation of this illustration.)

I also made a colour version too:

Dan filmed me drawing today

Sensurround

an illustration for New Empress magazine, for an editorial on Sensurround, a process used in the 1970s to create "extended-range bass for sound effects" in cinemas. Film producer and agent Jennings Lang (pictured) wanted to create an "event movie" - and Sensurround was first utilized to create the film "Earthquake", using sound to emphasise the feeling of an earthquake for the cinema audience. Unfortunately, the bass was so loud that ceiling tiles would fall down, cracks appeared in the walls of cinemas, the windows of nearby businesses shattered, and some people reported nose bleeds and headaches.

(You can find the latest issue of New Empress Magazine at BFI Southbank, Wardour News in Soho, The Prince Charles Cinema London, Riverside Studios London (one of my favourite cinemas), and Watershed Media Centre in Bristol, and via the New Empress webshop).

A selection of my illustration work has also just been featured on the blog of Juxtapoz Magazine (one of my favourite magazines). You can find the article here.

Tintin

I've been thinking about early cinema and film tinting for a while now, ever since seeing Film Ist a Girl & a Gun at the Filmmuseum back in April, and because Dan showed me a really beautiful polarised print from the film archive the other week and it blew my mind! Tinting is something I've been meaning to recreate in my work for ages. I think it suits Christmas cards.


This footage was used in Girl & a Gun, the colour was all hand-painted, frame by frame:

Silly One

A wonderful and very inspiring past few weeks with my man, which included:

2 nitrate film screenings at the BFI - one technicolour nitrate, The Yearling, (which Dan explained is considered true technicolour film) and one black and white nitrate, Brighton Rock, which really glowed, and has stayed on my mind for a long time. It was a shame that more people didn't turn up to the screenings because this was a rare chance to see actual nitrate stock.

A documentary on Jack Cardiff followed by Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, and a stroll around Hyde Park, all spent with my dear friend Pip Chorley (who's work you can see here).


Original Beatrix Potter drawings from her first book The Tale of Peter Rabbit at the V&A


A thorough collection of Roman Cieslewicz' work at the Royal College of Art...(completely stunning, with not a weak piece in the lot).


A visit to the London Film museum, the White Cube and the BookArtBook shop.


Ozu's first talkie, The Only Son


A lovely day trip to Brighton, chips on the beach and lots of comic book buying (some David B, The Unwritten, and lots of TMNT for Dan)


A holiday in Morthhoe, Devon with lots of walks, rope swings, dips in the sea, jellyfish, jigsaws, tiny travel scrabble games, amusing sheep and cornish ale.

comic book front cover

Emma Ridgway (c) Copyright 2010

Front cover design for my comic book. I'm tempted to change the background colour to something more textured (although I don't want to make it too busy) and I still need to decide on the name, but I have written most of the script now and I am planning the pages in my sketchbook.

Setsuko Hara

Emma Ridgway (c) Copyright 2010

A couple of little drawings of Setsuko Hara, one of my favourite actresses, for a comic I'm working on.

Magpie Wow!

I am back from Amsterdam! It is so hard to come home again. I want to live there so much. 

Anyway, I have just finished a petite book about a unicorn, which I will post on here once it has reached its intended owner. 

I had a lovely time with Dan, we watched some Godard (Une Femme est une Femme):

(this has to be my favourite scene...apart from the one where Anna's husband tells Jean-Paul Belmondo "hurry up, Breathless is on the telly and I don't want to miss it")

and the studio Ghibli film, Grave of the Fireflies, which was so relentlessly sad.

Dan also introduced me to a couple of incredibly beautiful films at the Filmmuseum:

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (L'Enfer):

(As you can see, Romy Schneider has the most wonderfully open expressive face, which lights up completely when she smiles)

and Gustave Deutsch's Film Ist a Girl & a Gun:

which was a beautiful assemblage of short silent films, many of which were from the film-museum (or "Eye" as it is now known) archive itself, with a soundtrack added.

We both especially adored this scene with its beautiful music:

The music is by Soap&Skin, taken from their album Lovetune for Vacuum. She reminds me of Chan Marshall crossed with Azure Ray. This is another song from the same album, called Thanatos:

On the last day we sat in the afternoon sun in the park by the edge of the canal, drinking Trappist beer, eating strawberry laces, watching the ducks...and we saw a bright green parrot fly up into the high branches of a tree. And then another parrot called to it. And they were joined by another. 

We're hiding like elephants when they're happy

(Jean Seberg always reminds me of my friend Pip Chorley)

Flying

"Bicycling is the nearest approximation I know to the flight of birds.
The airplane simply carries a man on its back like an obedient Pegasus; it gives him no wings of his own."
- Louis J. Helle jr.

Anna Karina in the Godard film "Une femme est une femme":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbQuHu9RRkY

I feel slightly reluctant about starting a blog, and at the moment the writing feels very awkward and self-conscious, but I have decided that it will motivate me to work harder.

I spent a couple of days visiting London recently and my boyfriend took me to Forbidden Planet, which was very exciting for me, never having been in a comic book shop before (despite writing my dissertation on "Social Commentary within the Graphic Novel Genre"). I bought home with me a 50p book on Joe Sacco (his graphic novel Palestine was a big eye-opener for me) and Jeffrey Brown's "Miniature Sulk" (captivated by the name...being prone to miniature sulks myself) and more and more I'm wanting to make my own comic books.

(He also took me to Dungeness which was sunny and otherworldly, and a perfect place for black and white photography.)


Here are some things I've been working on recently (click to enlarge):

An image for the Quote Book (published annually by University College Falmouth) to illustrate the quote "A gentleman is simply a patient wolf" - Lana Turner.



And a couple of images for a double page broadsheet editorial on films adapted from books.


(left to right: Sophia Coppola, Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut)

(Akira Kurosawa and Stanley Kubrick)