Stewart Lee

A quick sketch of Stewart Lee in brush pen. Went to see him at Stafford Gatehouse last night - he was amazing. 

International Women's Day 2015 (8th March)

Just before International Women's Day I was approached by a publisher of women's comics to work on creating art for an existing script. The publishers later turned around and rejected my designs because the female character (a cancer patient) wasn't "sexy" enough and they wanted it to feel more like Frank Miller's Sin City (a comic book series Alan Moore once described as "unreconstructed misogyny".)

(rejected character designs)

I don't feel that female characters shouldn't be sexy. But it tends to be the default mode for depictions of women across the media, and I had hopes that a publisher of women's comics might want to create more three-dimensional female characters.

I've noticed some illustrators and comics artists beginning to develop the way they depict female characters - on some of the blogs I follow I've started to see people experimenting with drawing women with different body shapes and sizes, different face shapes and proportions. It's good for artists to stretch themselves in this way, and it's healthy for readers to have to relate to female characters beyond just thinking "she looks sexy".

There was an article in the Huff Post a while ago about this, setting out a non identikit challenge for artists. And Julia Scheele's work also left an impression on me.

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On International Women's Day, I asked people on Twitter to tell me about the women who have inspired and influenced them, creating quick portraits in brush pen over the course of the morning. 

(Should I have made them look sexier?)

Frida Kahlo, artist

Zora Neal Hurston, Anthropologist

Rosa Parks, civil rights activist 

Caitlin Moran, broadcaster and columnist

Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space

Mary Wollstonecraft, writer, philosopher and advocate of women's rights

Agatha Christie, crime novelist and playwright 

Portrait of Ed Miliband

Sophie Heawood in today's Guardian - It’s the age of the geek – so why does Ed Miliband still get such a bad press?  (here)

Nigel Farage

The common, old school, ordinary man of the people, who just happens to be a public school educated ex-banker. Booooo! I'm sceptical of anyone who wants their politicians to be proficient in eating sandwiches and drinking pints - we might as well scrap the leader debates and turn the whole general election into a televised round of It's A Knockout. Curiously, in most pictures Farage wears a blue shirt, perhaps to symbolise his kinship with the struggle of the ordinary blue collar worker. He also seems to be quite fond of pin stripe suits, which tend to be favoured by psychopaths.

(What Nigel Farage Really Thinks)

Kauto Star

(click for larger view)

a portrait for an upcoming charity auction aiming to raise 

money to re-home and rehabilitate ex-racehorses.

A portrait of my Papa

The only Zen you'll find on mountain tops is the Zen you bring up there with you - Alan Watts

(mountain print available from Society6 here)

Portrait Commission - Pepsi

portrait commission - Cassia

Sketchbook pages

After Henri Fantin-Latour's Portrait of Sonia (1890)

ducks and pigeons in Victoria Park, Stafford

my brother, Lewis

Left: drawing made in British Museum         Right: drawing made in National Gallery

Pigeons, ducks, gulls and geese in St James's Park

One must keep right on drawing; draw with your eyes when you cannot draw with a pencil - Ingres

I found David Hockney's book Hidden Knowledge in the library last week and I've been pouring over it ever since. My understanding of art history tends to be quite patchy but I find it endlessly fascinating to learn about. Hockney's examination of the Old Master's and their (possible) use of optics is a good way in, and whether or not you agree with his conclusions it is an opportunity to examine the work by these artists more closely - as well as chronologically, side by side with their peers, which gives a little more context and room for comparison.

(Incidentally, I've also been captivated by the BBC series Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds: A Tale of Three Cities)

Some recent drawings from my sketchbook:

Drawn from Ingres' portrait of Mrs Charles Badham (1816) 

Ingres focused most of his energy into drawing his subject's faces - they are drawn so tightly that you can barely see the individual pencil marks, the modelling of the face is often light and sensitive - while the clothes are drawn with more looseness of expression - harder strokes, stronger lines - still maintaining a strong focus on line and contour. This effect draws your eye to the face - it appears more in focus than the rest of the drawing - while the looseness keeps your eye engaged in the drawing as a whole.

drawn from Rembrandt's portrait of Baartjen Martens

(self-portrait with hair in towel)

Miniature Schnauzers

A recent pet portrait commission. 

Process picture - pencil prior to adding watercolour:

Portrait on a Postcard - Amelia Earhart

 My Dad is an engineer and for a good part of my childhood and teenage years he built model aeroplanes. Gliders, spitfires, an Utterly Butterly biplane...we spent many days out at Cosford and Duxford at air shows, and while my Dad and brothers could recognise and name each plane on sight, I felt a lack of connection towards all mechanical flying things. I can appreciate now how beautifully aeroplanes are designed, and the skill that goes into making them aerodynamic, and the role they played in history, but back then I used to say "I hate aeroplanes!"

Anyway...I'm a different person now. I really enjoyed drawing Amelia Earhart's Lockheed model 10-E Electra.

I was reading about how when she was a child she kept a scrapbook of clippings about successful women working in male-dominated professions. Not only did she go on to become an aviation pioneer - the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic - but she also did so much to help other women, as president of the Ninety-nines (organisation for female pilots) as a careers advisor to women at Purdue University, as a member of the National Women's Party, and an early supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Visited my family back in Stafford over Easter - spent a lovely day working in the garden with my mum, accompanied by her two guinea pigs. We have some red tulips that my Grandad Cyril planted before I was born which come up every year. I love how eternal flowers are. (I planted freesias, which are her favourites, and lettuces, which I suspect the guinea pigs will gobble up).

(Bacon the guineapig)

My Grandad Geoff sat for me and let me paint his portrait, which was lovely...I hardly ever get chance to paint people from life any more. It's nice to paint someone you love and admire so much. I was so impressed with him for sitting still for so long too - he never, ever sits still. He always has to be busy doing something. His childhood nickname was "lightning".

Later, while having a sort out and throwing away sentimental ephemera I came across a couple of bits and pieces I made a while back:

(the piece above was from an idea for a comic about Prosopagnosia or face blindness)

Heart of Darkness

I've been immersed in Heart of Darkness over the past months, analysing the text and various criticisms, researching African art, learning about Joseph Conrad and his life, filling a sketchbook with drawings and notes...

These are some of the illustrations I made:

This is from a part of the book where the steamboat is described as being like a grimy beetle crawling the floor of a lofty portico. The sense of scale is immense. The Europeans are so small in their little boat and so disconnected from the vast culture and nature around them. Drawn in brush pen, mapping pen, rapidograph, and ink wash sprinkled with salt (while listening to an Alan Watts lecture).

I really wanted to play more with different viewpoints...this illustration is from the part where Marlow wanders into the "grove of death" where the exhausted slaves are dying under the trees. He notices a piece of white worsted tied around the neck of one of the slaves, and wonders what on earth this piece of material from European shores is doing in the Congo, and what it means for it to be around his neck.

Conrad describes the knitter's dress in Chapter 1 as being made from a plain fabric like umbrella material...in my illustration I've taken a few liberties and given it a "rained on" quality. I think the idea is that they are impervious; nothing can stop the progress of their knitting. They are the Fates, possessing power over everyone who passes through their chamber, measuring out their lives in black wool.

Conrad imagined the universe as an infernal knitting machine:

“There is a – let us say – a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold! – it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider – but it goes on knitting. You come and say: “this is all right; it’s only a question of the right kind of oil. Let us use this – for instance – celestial oil and the machine shall embroider a most beautiful design in purple and gold”. Will it? Alas no. You cannot by any special lubrication make embroidery with a knitting machine. And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself; made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart. It is a tragic accident – and it has happened. You can’t interfere with it. The last drop of bitterness is in the suspicion that you can’t even smash it. In virtue of that truth one and immortal which lurks in the force that made it spring into existence it is what it is – and it is indestructible!
It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions – and nothing matters. I’ll admit however that to look at the remorseless process is sometimes amusing.”                              
                                                                              - Joseph Conrad

(speculative cover design based on the character of the Harlequin and a colonial map of Africa)

Winter Sketchbook

I recently got a Pentel Brush Pen and I've been using it for location drawings. It's much more expressive than the rapidograph or mapping pen, and pretty handy for creating spontaneous drawings while out and about.

My brother Sean

People in a café

A very bad drawing of my brother Lewis, which makes us both giggle

Scarf on an office chair

A pot of tea

Vaslav Nijinsky

Just a couple of drawings I did of Nijinsky for my own amusement, straight from photographs of him.
I've been reading about his life, which the ballet critic Richard Buckle once described as: 

"ten years of growth, ten years of learning, ten years of dancing, thirty years of darkness."

Portrait Commission

part of a set of portraits commissioned by a lovely client in New York

David Lynch & the Dalai Lama