Colours

The prompt for this illustration was... colours. That sounded like fun but with so much freedom it was difficult settling on one direction, so I just messed about until I didn't know where to take the image any further. The end result is a bit too 'coming-atcha!', not very stylish or tasteful. The thing is I now I have all these good ideas! Oh well it could have worked.


Two example of the many many sketches trying to figure this out:

Richard Hillary

An illustration from the same issue of ISIS. The article was about this RAF pilot who got burnt up and had to go to a special military hospital that experimented in early plastic surgery. A bit grim, but I managed to make the people not look too gruesome. Quite a simple image, I like how the various elements are composed (particularly the RAF roundel) and the colors work fine. In the final version I painted in a title, but I'm not too fond of it.

ISIS Magazine Cover

Alright, to start off here's the cover I did for the latest ISIS. The theme was 'making it', and originally I was going to have some luridly lit hands and a face assembling a nondescript thing, but I ended up with a poorly rendered prometheus-like image that was unusable. So, started over, decided I needed reference photos and spent some time with a camera in front of my bathroom mirror in my underwear. I should really bother to do this more often, as it's too easy to just draw what 'looks right' and get a bland image. Anyway, the drawing ended up with some Egon Schiele-like guy building a bike, which came as a bit of a surprise. Later I regretted going over my lines with ink as it sort of ruined the face, but what I do like is the strong positive/negative space and the composition, so it's not all bad.

The version below is the image that was finally used, in which there's only minor correction to the photograph. Josephine's camera is amazing, it picks up such fine detail with a wide-angle lens.

And here's my original version of the cover, with the colors corrected to be much closer to the actual painting. People at ISIS liked the above one better, but I still don't know. I like how clean this version feels, and the character pops more.

Mission Statement

Hello, 

This is my blog, it's a place for my art and the art I like. That's all. 

-J