Alexis Deacon's Blog, page 16

last day of term

It was a sad day yesterday, the last studio day I will teach with one of the MA classes at Anglia Ruskin.   They have been great to work with... I will really miss seeing them every couple of weeks.

a couple of wavy lines

One of my most liberating drawing discoveries happened just after I left art school.  For years I had been drawing all my images with a single line showing where one form ended and another began.  I had always wanted to draw comics and that was how pretty much everyone that I liked drew.  But that sort of drawing is really very unforgiving and if you get something wrong it really shows!  My tutors had been trying to ween me off it for ages, trying to get me to broaden my influences.   I'm afraid I just dug my heels in and didn't change a thing.  I really disapprove of anything that feels like artistic snobbery; anything that says, this is high art, this is low art.  As time wore on I was getting more and more frustrated with my work.  I am by nature rather messy and this way of working just didn't suit me.  I could never be as precise as I wanted.  Then one day the penny dropped.  I was looking at an etching by Rembrandt, one of the self portraits where he's looking really surprised, and I realised I loved it just as much as all the things I had tried so hard to protect for so long... perhaps even a little bit more.  It was just a really good drawing!   I looked at it for a long time.  The face was so vivid and so alive - and very obviously a face - but it had no outline as such.  It was made up entirely of intersecting curved lines that followed the contours of the form.  They made the edge of the face between them.   I went home and tried drawing this way myself and found that I really liked it.  It seemed to me a much more generous method than the one I had been using previously.  Above all it allowed for ambiguity and that is a great friend if you don't know exactly how something works.  When I was very clear about something I could show it clearly.  When I wasn't I could just generalise the marks a bit and it wouldn't stick out quite so much.  Hurray! 

 
Here are some of the drawings from that time:

this never happened

I'm so happy that Bell X1 are using my pictures on their new album!  I haven't had much luck with album covers in the past... or book jackets for that matter.  Here are some designs for an album cover that never happened:






 

Can see why they didn't go for the one with the leg... and the little people on the table actually... but otherwise, what's not to like? ^-^

Chicago

... so it was fun to be a tourist too.  Never been to Chicago before.  They have an amazing natural history museum... among other things.

  I did a couple of drawings while I was there:

people at the Art Institute of Chicago



fish at the John G Shedd Aquarium

The big fish in that last picture is an Arapaima.  They can grow over two metres!

Zena Sutherland Awards in Chicago

I have just been on an amazing trip to Chicago to attend the 2013 Zena Sutherland Awards.  A Place to Call Home won two prizes last year, Best Overall Book and Best Text.  This year the University of Chicago invited me over to present the awards and to collect my prize from last year... This awesome poster:



I was very impressed with how thorough the whole process was and how engaged the children were with it.  No joke, I think it compares very well to some of the best prizes judged by adults - and I'm not just saying that because I won!  These are super bright kids and the depth they go into when assessing the various titles is amazing.  From beginning to end it takes almost six months to select a winner in each of three categories, Best Text, Best Illustration and Best Overall.  The children even design their own detailed assessment criteria.

If you want an idea of how much this award means to them, listen to the reaction to the announcement from last year!

set building

One thing I was playing with a few years ago was to draw an elaborate set for a sequence then draw the characters on top.  Just as you would in an animation cell.  I think I might try that again for the next issue of Loaf 

The second and third pictures in this group do sort of animate.  Poor butterfly!

making shapes

Lately I have been doing a lot of experimenting with with the way I make images.  I have been trying a method where I first paint a coloured shape or group of shapes and then use line to resolve the shapes into specific places or characters.  Sometimes I add a third stage where I wash over sections of the shape with additional colours.  All the additional colours show a little of the base colour behind them and I think this helps to unify them somewhat...

I used this technique on the cover of the forthcoming Bell X1 album, Chop Chop and also for several spreads in the Selfish Giant.

Galapagos

I have work in an exhibition opening in Lisbon today, at the Centro de Arte Moderna... this features pieces I made for a residency programme on the Galapagos Islands.  I will be posting more about this later.

we are not alone

original cover design for Beegu...

monster mama

Here is a sequence following Bobo's mother as she goes about her day: