Alexis Deacon's Blog, page 13
June 19, 2013
behind the scenes - part two
This is the third image in the series. In this one the protagonist is dressed up as a mockery of a civilized man by his captors...
My main bother with this one was to work out what would happen if he was lit from two opposite sides by the lamps, one near, one a little further back... I quite enjoy problems like that!
Once I had established where I wanted the lamps, I washed grey tone over the paper to see the shape of the composition and the location of the various elements. I sometimes find this more useful than a pencil rough as it leaves all the specific marks for later whilst giving a very good guide to where stuff is going to go.
As with the first image I reached a point where I was happy with the picture aesthetically without it doing its intended job! I had wanted to have the central character surrounded by his captors.
To that end I added another figure in the foreground. The costumes of these guys are inspired by English mummers...
My main bother with this one was to work out what would happen if he was lit from two opposite sides by the lamps, one near, one a little further back... I quite enjoy problems like that!
Once I had established where I wanted the lamps, I washed grey tone over the paper to see the shape of the composition and the location of the various elements. I sometimes find this more useful than a pencil rough as it leaves all the specific marks for later whilst giving a very good guide to where stuff is going to go.
As with the first image I reached a point where I was happy with the picture aesthetically without it doing its intended job! I had wanted to have the central character surrounded by his captors.
To that end I added another figure in the foreground. The costumes of these guys are inspired by English mummers...
June 18, 2013
Memory Palace - behind the scenes!
So... Memory Palace opened last night and for the next few days I will be posting a selection of images from my work for the show. I will show each image in stages as it was produced and talk a little bit about my intentions for the picture and what was going through my head as I made them!
This set shows the very first image in the sequence. At this stage the prisoner is cooped up in a tiny cell... With this image I wanted to establish some of the conventions I would be playing with throughout the commission. Light was going to be important, I hoped. Here I wanted the light through the window to be very bright and clear in the composition. It represents the outdoors, which will ultimately be not a place of freedom but of torture. I tried to keep the light on the deer-masked character clear too. Throughout the commission I wanted physical light to be associated with moral darkness. The Thing, the organisation holding him prisoner, want to revert humankind to their primitive, pre-cultural state. I tried to reflect that through the juxtaposition of those opposites, as well as reversing the reading order for the whole sequence (it reads from bottom to top, sometimes right to left, sometimes left to right!). I took my inspiration for the costumes (and for the various forms of torture) from British folk customs and this too was intended to suggest a society unraveling itself.
When it came to rendering the image I started with the protagonist because I thought he would be the trickiest to draw. As I posted earlier I did end up drawing him LOTS before I was happy. It was the first picture I attempted so I wanted to set the standard as high as I could manage ^-^!
I drew the foreground characters in pencil (a water soluble one on damp paper so I could get a really dark mark) then added the Punch and Judy guards in watercolour only. The chap in the deer mask is inspired by the Abbots Bromley Horn Dancers... and by Herne the Hunter in Robin of Sherwood ^-^
Now, I quite wanted to stop there because a little alarm was going in my head, as it often does, saying any more and you'll mess this up ... and I still think that if this piece was going to stand alone it would have looked better had I left it at that point. I needed it to be part of the sequence though and it was supposed to be a very cramped and confined image. At this point it just didn't really feel cramped enough...
...so I took the task very literally and stuck a box around it! I was sorry to lose the more comfortable drawing above but if you see it with the others I hope you agree that the final image does the job it was meant to a bit better.
This set shows the very first image in the sequence. At this stage the prisoner is cooped up in a tiny cell... With this image I wanted to establish some of the conventions I would be playing with throughout the commission. Light was going to be important, I hoped. Here I wanted the light through the window to be very bright and clear in the composition. It represents the outdoors, which will ultimately be not a place of freedom but of torture. I tried to keep the light on the deer-masked character clear too. Throughout the commission I wanted physical light to be associated with moral darkness. The Thing, the organisation holding him prisoner, want to revert humankind to their primitive, pre-cultural state. I tried to reflect that through the juxtaposition of those opposites, as well as reversing the reading order for the whole sequence (it reads from bottom to top, sometimes right to left, sometimes left to right!). I took my inspiration for the costumes (and for the various forms of torture) from British folk customs and this too was intended to suggest a society unraveling itself.
When it came to rendering the image I started with the protagonist because I thought he would be the trickiest to draw. As I posted earlier I did end up drawing him LOTS before I was happy. It was the first picture I attempted so I wanted to set the standard as high as I could manage ^-^!
I drew the foreground characters in pencil (a water soluble one on damp paper so I could get a really dark mark) then added the Punch and Judy guards in watercolour only. The chap in the deer mask is inspired by the Abbots Bromley Horn Dancers... and by Herne the Hunter in Robin of Sherwood ^-^
Now, I quite wanted to stop there because a little alarm was going in my head, as it often does, saying any more and you'll mess this up ... and I still think that if this piece was going to stand alone it would have looked better had I left it at that point. I needed it to be part of the sequence though and it was supposed to be a very cramped and confined image. At this point it just didn't really feel cramped enough...
...so I took the task very literally and stuck a box around it! I was sorry to lose the more comfortable drawing above but if you see it with the others I hope you agree that the final image does the job it was meant to a bit better.
June 16, 2013
loopier
more Bell X1 t-shirt and screen print designs. As before, will be colours; will be words...
June 14, 2013
loopy
Might be that we do a screen print to go with the launch of Chop Chop... might look like this... only in colour... with words...
stunt elephants
Every book needs these. Jim's Lion will have some.
June 11, 2013
CHOP CHOP!
The cd version of Chop Chop is almost out... The band have also had this ultra limited edition chopping board version of the album made. That is surely a world first?!
custom Beegu
Sarah McIntyre posted this picture of a knitted Beegu on her blog...
I have one my sister made... and then there is this fellow:
He has taken it to another level! Awesome! If anyone else has homemade Beegus (first time I've written that as a plural - looks odd doesn't it?) I would love to see!
I have one my sister made... and then there is this fellow:
He has taken it to another level! Awesome! If anyone else has homemade Beegus (first time I've written that as a plural - looks odd doesn't it?) I would love to see!
June 9, 2013
s**t happening
Weirdly, one of the hardest things I have tried to learn is to draw things happening in my pictures. For years, I would fill sketchbooks with scores of people and creatures just standing around in non-specific locations not really doing anything. It is a terrible habit to get into because as soon as you want to tell a story with them all that practice counts for next to nowt...
In an effort to get over this problem I have taken to outsourcing my roughs to my left hand. That way, if nothing is going on in the picture it becomes very obvious. There is a big difference between a well-rendered drawing of someone standing around doing nothing and a wibbly lined scrawl of same. There is just no hiding the lack of action!
Here are some of the preliminary drawings for Jim's Lion done this way. I really like them! Stuff is most definitely going on!
In an effort to get over this problem I have taken to outsourcing my roughs to my left hand. That way, if nothing is going on in the picture it becomes very obvious. There is a big difference between a well-rendered drawing of someone standing around doing nothing and a wibbly lined scrawl of same. There is just no hiding the lack of action!
Here are some of the preliminary drawings for Jim's Lion done this way. I really like them! Stuff is most definitely going on!
June 6, 2013
up and running again
Time to get back to Jim's Lion...
June 4, 2013
trust the post
The Illustration Cupboard is having a show of illustrated envelopes next week (to go alongside the launch of Letters to Klaus). I've just sent mine off... let's hope it arrives ok!
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