WIP for restaurant branding project. Victorian era characters in brush and ink. An extremely enjoyable project as I have had the opportunity to do deep research in texts and artworks to establish costumes and personalities and the client is on board with that, and the time that takes. Gentle humour is part of the brief and I love doing something with physical media.
Corporate Values Illustrations Working with a mgmt consultancy who have run a series of workshops with their clients around the client’s values, establishing what those mean. I was given a list of 10 statements per value and devised illustrations for each. All Adobe Illustrator. I enjoy the thought process and exercising my Adobe Illustrator skills. The typography is also a font I created myself for this kind of work (I love doing that too). Although I engage my brain and work hard on these they are ultimately forgettable – not like the work above, which went through multiple drafts and generated a vast pile of paper! But they pay well.
Personal Work: Comics. Some WIP. I have always been hugely interested in comics / graphic novels since I was a child and as a child created comics which I photocopied and distributed at school. Thereafter, I stopped making them. I have done a deep dive on the reasons for that and the simplest explanation is a lack of confidence in my drawing / writing ability- BUT, I have also been plagued by terrible difficulties in organising myself, especially in personal work. Work for clients has always been easier – thanks to clear briefs, time pressure and the need to earn money. But my personal work has always veered all over the place stylistically, and various ideas for comics or writing projects have come to me and been abandoned because really I couldn’t work out how to put one foot in front of another.
About 6 years ago, aged 40, I was diagnosed with fairly severe ADHD and given psychotheraphy and medication to alleviate this. This transformed aspects of my life but I didn’t really apply the things I learned to my personal work. Eventually at the beginning of last year I felt extremely low and unfulfilled and really pushed and interrogated myself to understand why – the answer that came back was that I wasn’t working on comics, which had always been so important to me. I forced myself to sit down and work out how to approach the process, and using that knowledge worked several ideas I had had into outlines, then scripts, then rough artwork. It was tortuous but I kept at it. I am currently working up three stories and love doing this. I have a strong conviction that I will finish them, and my drawing and related skills have advanced dramatically. This all makes me extremely happy.
The images below are from two comics. The dialogue layers are switched off. First image is finished linework for a page. The following pages are from another comic- 2: finished linework and some overlaid texture 3: nearly-finished linework with rough layer visible 4: finished style for one panel.
