Faces, portraits, head and shoulders are endlessly compelling but don't crop up too often as subject matter for the commissioned works I receive, so I tend to work on them in my own time. There is so much scope in the abstracting of shapes and features while still retaining the sense of a character. This imagined portrait image developed from a simple pencil outline of a face and evolved into a more mask-like interpretation with echoes of an actor on stage.
Perhaps there is nothing that affects the mood of an image more than colour. I was taught to 'use colour sparingly and only for a special purpose'. It is a maxim that has somehow stuck with me over the years despite it being rendered redundant at the merest glance at any period of art history or indeed contemporary illustration. Nevertheless I do tend to work with a restricted range of colours. This is a little graphic experiment I worked up running a simple image through different colourways to see just how differently it could be perceived.
This is the realisation of one of those images that sometimes just seems to appear, fully-formed, from nowhere. Stylistically the figure is a throwback to the kind of scuptural forms I used to illustrate over twenty years ago, gender-free and without the encumberance of hands or feet. Could probably work well in colour but I so love black and white!
Many years ago I used to have a small photographic darkroom that would be periodically set up in the kitchen so I could make my own black and white prints. I also liked to experiment with photograms - making images on photographic paper with objects or drawings on tracing paper with varying degrees of thickness. Areas of the photographic paper that would receive no light appear white while those exposed through transparent or semi-transparent objects would appear grey. Although the process was exciting the equipment was crude and it wasn't too long before I focussed instead on working with traditional illustration materials. However the photogram process itself has always stayed with me and these days the technology offers the control to realise the kind of images I could only imagine back in the day. This image is based on that process, decreasing the transparency on selected areas.
Although I am not a medical illustrator (which is a specialism) I do get to illustrate medical topics quite often. The point of those illustrations is usually to convey an important health issue to the reader but equally they often provide an opportunity to include anatomical detail. I do enjoy the rendering of organic shapes, hence this small ongoing series of 'Imagined Anatomies'. Essentially an exercise in the grouping of various organic elements and presenting them in a harmonious composition.
A selection of three from initial pen drawings/studies.
