'Say hello'

'You are going to send a 'greetings card', telling your tutor about yourself, your interests and inspirations, the materials you feel comfortable working with and maybe what you would like to get from the course.'

 Having read the overall exercise I first put it aside and start doodling quite freely, puzzling out visually the first images that came immediately to mind. At this point I'm thinking about everything I can at once, a free-for-all of mixed compositions and formats and techniques. Among other things I worked loosely from reference photographs of life models & myself, generated indian- & William Morris-influenced repeating floral patterns and made vague architectural studies of the Duomo in Florence.

a sample: my first drawings are a period of free association, gathering raw ideas

'materials' thumbnails & notes

Once I had run out of steam I was fortunate because I could show my early workings to Jenna Chew, who I've been very lucky to know as a friend and sometime mentor for about a decade. Talking with her I revisited the brief, and she encouraged me to develop three divergent thumbnails; a part of the process I'm often very remiss in pursuing. I needed a few seeds to grow three distinct approaches from. I returned to the source, picked out and de-constructed the key phrase:

'yourself, your interests and inspirations, the materials you feel comfortable working with and maybe what you would like to get from the course'

Since I expected to be working in traditional media with gouache, ink and brushes, to a certain extent my use of  "materials" could be figuratively (as well as literally) translucent, so I wasn't enormously worried about representing this element whatever solution I settled on--they would be literally represented by their concrete presence. In this I had the advantage of knowing that I have a narrow and educated primary audience.

I provisionally separated out "interests" as chiefly external phenomena that one is attracted to because of one's visual DNA and "inspirations" as the building blocks of that DNA, things that aren't primarily conscious. Or, in other words, as external and internal. In practice I reasoned the type of icons that represent an interest and an inspiration would be very similar, so that by illustrating one I would imply the other, but the way that those icons would appear in relation to the self would obviously differ.


Those three words each became the catalyst for one of my thumbnails-although in this case at least my inclination was to create A5 studies, half scale to my intended final illustration and full scale to the intended greetings-card size reproduction, more like visual synopses than the more exact 'elevator pitch' function of a thumbnail..

"Myself" jumps out obviously as the keystone for the illustration--this is the central idea that all other elements have to support. Immediately I started to think that, as the doodling had suggested, I should visually represent myself, myself as a practitioner--so how concrete or abstract would I appear? What's the most efficient way to represent myself that can embrace my interests, inspirations and my favoured materials? Which ways of doing things, what images from around and inside me, are most integral to making me myself?



Both the British illustrators I studied were notable for the way they used cutting and empty space, actual and visual, to create their compositions. In all my thumbnails I decided to pursue this sense of emptiness balanced with structure. On the other hand I knew that I had no natural desire to create bold planes of flat colour. I like bold crisp shapes to be counterbalanced by bleeding and imperfect edges, transparency and worn textured surfaces. In the final illustration I turned to sponging for this purpose, a standby for filling space with tone while imparting texture.

'influences' (left) & 'inspirations' thumbnails

preparatory compositional drawing

Though I quite dramatically altered the composition between my chosen thumbnail & final, many of the figurative elements were already in place at this stage and remained little changed through to the end. I returned to reference photography to create a reasonably realistic profile silhouette of myself. In my first assignments my instinct was always to start working with paper. I decided to stay the course and created a stencil for the outline of my head & cut masking tape for the nostrils and eyes.

The elements I settled on were all that came to mind easily and were polysymbolic. The Duomo, though here a rather poor cartoon summoned largely from memory is a recurring image of my visit to Florence, which was an artistically formative time in my life that kindled my fascination with the history & architecture of continental europe and reinforced my desire to continue studying & playing in the realm of the visual arts. In fact all of these were drawn with minimal reference, which allowed me to work quickly & easily while giving them the characteristic, somewhat childish look of imagined objects.

This isn't the first appearance of the kissing couple, either. Aside from the important role eros & romance have played in the course of my life generally, human gross anatomy is one of the areas of drawing I've been interested in for longest.

The Chinese lung emerging from clouds is both a specific, dominant icon of asian art and emblematic of a general fascination with the creatures of myth & legend, the kind of fanciful stories in which the knight in shining armour might often figure, bridging the gap between real and imagined histories. The suit of armour as a beautiful, supremely functional yet conceptually horrifying object has been with me for a long time, too.

Ever since I was a baby tracing the foliage on the old William Morris fabric covered sofa my parents used to own I have loved twining patterns, which in my mind have become emblematic of the constrained organic formalism I adore in indian & persian art.

Probably the least familiar to most people is Japanese tokusatsu hero Ultraman, a visual icon of Japanese pop culture which from the crass to the esoteric has saturated my consciousness for most of my life. I grew up in the eras of Power Rangers and Pokémon dominating the playground discourse, and mass-produced Japanese commercial/aesthetic culture has only expanded its reach since then.



The speech balloon as well as being tied to my long term typographic & calligraphic dilettanism is to me deeply redolent of so many of the comic books I've grown up with.

This last worked out as a digital element, both as a necessity from a craft point of view, since a stencil or resist of so delicate a shape is beyond my skill and means to render as smoothly as I desired, and an opportunity to work outside my comfort zone, tying somewhat back into the "what you would like to get from the course" part of the brief. I intended for the 'tail' of the speech balloon to roughly mimic the sinuous blue body of the lung as it coils though my head.

Final illustration, the speech balloon element is digital

close-up of the traditional element

The most important lesson that has been impressed on me so far, working on the first part of the course, is to do with process. As a hobbyist there's rarely a need to deal with rigid goals or deadlines so the biggest challenge in embarking on a formal illustration course is that for the first time I have to examine my process and begin to define a sustainable, efficient workflow. From what I've gleaned by talking with other hobbyists and practicing illustrators everyone's process is different, and we all experience our private malaises and agonies at different points. Hopefully I can absorb the many valuable time-worn lessons around me while staying away from a predetermined rote of what I "should" be doing, and refining my own practice as a streamlined, repeatable formula.