Thursday 30 June 2011

Rejoice! There is colour.

I've been slacking a little with the blog posts. Thats not to say I haven't been cracking on with stuff. Here's just a few of the latest experiments. I Had to inject some colour into my sketchbooks, it all looks drab and boring when its just brown and black. I used the images from some past sketchbooks as well as newer stuff straight from observation. Still a little sketchy I know, but I wanted to get it out there, maybe even get some feedback?







Tuesday 21 June 2011

An Illustrated Life









Sometime during 2008 I found myself unable to put pen to paper. So stuck in my rut I turned to the last resort and began Googling 'sketchbooks', in the hope that I might find some inspiration lying in and amongst the pages of some random person’s personal drawings. Having sifted through the piles of flowery doodles and sonic the hedgehog traces I found myself on YouTube, being guided through some of the most beautiful sketchbooks I had seen yet. 

The artist they belonged too was Danny Gregory a managing director of a major New York ad agency who began keeping illustrated journals in his mid-thirties. As it turns out, he too was looking to see inside the sketchbooks of others, describing them as his "... favourite art form... the closest one can get to being inside the artist's head, to feeling raw creativity flow." However, unable to find a book matching anything near his expectations he decided he had better put it together himself. 

And so 'An Illustrated Life' was created. This is a book crammed full of the private sketchbooks of fifty artists, illustrators and designers. There is without doubt something for everyone. The contents of the book span from doodles to full blown works of art. Collage, pen and ink, digital sketching, experimentation and contemporary illustration all feature within. Reportage features most heavily, the author himself draws solely from life, and every creative featured is so different that it makes each new page refreshing and exiting.  I have found it incredibly difficult to open a random page and not find something really beautiful. Or to find someone's words of inspiration and insight into the process of creating and filling the books which we all pour our hearts into. The book includes warts and all, the risks and lessons learned, mistakes and smudges are all included. This results in becoming rather a personal book and much more than a coffee table accessory.
























Danny Gregory: http://dannygregory.com/


Thursday 16 June 2011

What does this button do? ...

Talk about being new to this whole blogging thing. I have never made so much as a facebook post which in these modern times has left behind the game. First on the agenda; post a few sketchbook pages that I have slapped together since breaking up from university for the summer. A bit of a mixed bag I know. Not having a brief has left me in a situation where I am not having to restrict myself in anyway, and so sometimes I just go days on end filling pages with tripe. I have been working mainly from newspaper photographs, which I know is a bit of a no-no, but if I am honest it has been giving me a direction to focus on which is beginning to help me break out of the rut. However, quite naturally I work whenever and wherever possible from life. Currently I have three different sketchbooks on the go, an A6 that I take with me everywhere and an A3 and an A4 mainly for use in the studio. I have drowned them all in coffee and tea staining on an impulse but I have not yet began to regret it, though I am sure that time will come.