One artist I was drawn to was Damien Florébert Cuypers. He is more of a fashion illustrator than a graphic designer so I was pleasantly surprised to see him there.

(http://www.damienflorebertcuypers.com/)

His style is to capture the essence of people by drawing quick sketches using simple Crayola crayons.

He was offering ‘one minute portraits’ and after looking at the others, I thought, ‘why not?’

Mine is at the end! It made me laugh when I saw it.

Damien at his stand.

Kanye West

Me! It’s quite spot on!

Sketch cover mock up of Mr Yang fights aliens.

Here is the blurb:

By day, Mr Yang is one of those deadpan, dry but hilariously blunt, strict teachers we all had when we were young. 

At night, whilst trying to balance marking with his social life and sleep he is rudely awakened by aliens kidnapping a homeless person in his local Peckham neighbourhood. After bothering to get out of bed to investigate, what he discovers threatens the survival of the human species and mother nature itself.

Mr Yang and a pupil he teaches must fight their way out of a UFO ship to escape being dissected by aliens. 

Mr Yang and a pupil beat aliens wanting to dissect them!

Mr Yang fights aliens will be a 25 page full colour comic book containing action, comedy and slice-of-life situations as well as finely rendered cityscapes based in South East London.

 The humour is aimed at an older teen/young adult audience.

 At the moment, I’ve finished all the art, and once I can get funds for it to be coloured by Joel Benjamin (http://www.joelbenjamin.co.uk/) it just needs lettering and printing.

 As colour printing is expensive it will be definitely be available for digital download when it’s finished, but I would like to check some print options too.

 There’s nothing like holding and turning pages yourself, rather than it being digitally fed to you, but then again, there’s less tree choppage.

 I’m hoping to self publish the book in a few months time, so see you then…

I bought a copy of ‘Rosie and Jacinda’ by Zarina Liew & Richy K. Chandler. (http://rosieandjacinda.com/). For an independent comic, it was pretty good. It was very well drawn and coloured by Zarina and the pace of the story was clear by Richy. There’s only so much you can tell in 20 pages and this was a good effort.

Zarina was also doing live fashion sketches and I had to ask for one!

Here it is:

I like her style and was happy with the way it turned out.

You can see more of her art here:

http://cobaltcafe.co.uk/

Pencilled, inked, the coloured using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

The details required a lot of concentration to get right. But it paid off in the end!

He chose me to do the commission after he saw one panel from a comic book I’m working on called, ‘MR YANG FIGHTS ALIENS’, where I drew Tower Bridge to set the scene.

The black and white picture is available as an A4 print for £25 (p+p £3) if you email me at illustratorlam[at]hotmail.co.uk

When he asked me to do it, I asked the client what part of the bridge I should draw, he wanted something specific and different to a usual portrait of the bridge, choosing to focus on specific details that he liked.

He was immensely happy, which makes me satisfied.

One day, I’d like to do the same for interesting architecture across the world, especially cities. I love the New York skyline.

The original picture was pencilled and then inked using a Stabilo bionic worker pen. I then coloured it using Photoshop.

Now that I’ve got a few commissions out of the way, I will be returning to work on my own graphic novel. I really wanna finish it…

Happy holidays!

So. I drew some tigers a while ago and have been practising my colouring skills since then.

http://illustratorlam.com/2010/03/26/year-of-the-tiger-better-late-than-never/

Whadyathink?

This is available as an A4 print for £25 (p+p £3) if you email me at illustratorlam[at]hotmail.co.uk

I drew the initial picture using pen, scanned it, vectorised it in Adobe Illustrator and then coloured it in Adobe Photoshop, by creating a darker layer and using the background eraser tool and doing flats with the wizard select tool.

I have been working on a new comic which I will show soon…

Jason Brook’s portrait of myself. I look younger and prettier here!

Yesterday I went to FIG’s art fair near Bond Street above Rupert Sanderson. I went for inspiration and to look at different styles and techniques. I knew that original work and limited prints by many artists were on sale, but I had  no idea that I would be meeting and chatting to both David Downton and Jason Brooks!!

Both have carved the visual language used in fashion illustration, definitely for my generation.

I remember seeing Jason’s work long ago, when digital illustration techniques were still uncharted territory. The first thing I noticed about his work was: Damn. He draws some quite attractive ladies. The second thing I thought was: How has he communicated so much with only a few simple lines?

The body language, pretty faces, attitude and personality all in a few lines. To express so much with so little, he really has the skill of discarding all the non-essential elements right down to the essence.

He was drawing a lady at the fair and it looked awesome, so when he finished and looked round and said, does anyone want a go? I leapt for it. It didn’t take all that long and he used a brush pen. After he finished the drawing, he told me it was a pleasure drawing me (!) and I asked him about how have comic books influenced him.

He spoke about how he is working on a sketchbook about Paris to be released sometime soon. I’d love to his style in a comic book.

After the commission I went over to David Downton and said to him, I saw your Cate Blanchett and Julia Roberts pieces and they blew me away.

He then replied that, although you see the one image, at home there are countless unsuccessful attempts. He then used his hands to gesture the size of the pile of paper discarded.

I asked him if he was doing commissions and he said that he didn’t have the self confidence that Jason does and that he finds it hard when people are circling him and asking questions to paint at the same time, which made me chuckle.

But regardless of that, his final pieces have such an inspiring dynamism and a forgotten elegance that it makes all the hard work and unsuccessful attempts worth it.

Using watercolours myself I know that there is a serious skill at controlling or knowing the way the colour in the water spreads when using a brush, which is not something that a computer can mimic, even with the top of the range Wacom tablets.

They were both very pleasant to chat with and very down to earth.

Their contrasting styles are like the flip sides of the same coin, but they’re both modern masters when it comes to the field of fashion illustration.

www.fashionillustrationgallery.com

www.jason-brooks.com

www.daviddownton.com

Coloured by Joel Benjamin!

Click to see in full!

At a GCSE art exhibit at the school I work at, staff were allowed to show their own work, so I decided to put up a comic strip I had drawn  for the “Publish You” anthology of alternative comics as part of Alternative Press.

The strip is a biography of Annie Yang, a woman who was tortured in China for practicing Falun Gong until she managed to get asylum in the UK.

Originally in Black and White, I had an awesome illustrator friend of mine, Joel Benjamin, do the colours to make it stand out amongst the other bright pieces on display.

In his own words,

“Joel Benjamin was born and raised on the east coast of the UK and spent much of his youth reading comics and drawing. In his teenage years he became obsessed with skateboarding and spent much of his time lurking around the streets of his hometown with his skater buddies. After studying fine art at Norwich school of art and design he made the sensible decision to go to Lincoln University to earn a degree in Illustration. Since then he has been working as freelance illustrator, creating illustrations for clients in the UK and US. Joel’s work expresses his love of nature and the great outdoors as well as his enthusiasm for music and human culture.”

Check out his work at http://www.joelbenjamin.co.uk and his blog http://www.teasteam.blogspot.com

This is the 12^th year that Falun Gong practitioners have been persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Falun Gong (or Falun Dafa) is a traditional cultivation practice that improves one’s physical health through meditation exercises and develops one’s spiritual awareness through the principles of the practice, truthfulness, compassion, tolerance.

In 1999, under orders of Jiang Zemin, then Premier of China, the CCP launched a persecution against Falun Gong practitioners after an official report showed that 70–100 million had taken up the practice. As the number exceeded the members of the CCP,  Jiang Zemin targeted Falun Gong for fear that such a large group would  undermine his power. And so began a campaign that tortured, killed and raped ordinary Chinese citizens on the sole account of their beliefs.

Although other peaceful groups are persecuted such as Tibetan monks, Muslims and some Christian groups, Falun Gong is the most targeted because it is the largest. for more information, see http://www.faluninfo.net

Recent portrait

So. Haven’t blogged for a while, because I’ve been busy working. I decided to colour the portrait using Photoshop, using instructions from “The DC Comics Guide to colouring and lettering comics”. A very useful book. Here are a couple of things I’ve been working on:

Practicing foreshortening: MX aka Jack Ferguson from MX2. Here, the character is throwing a right overhand punch whilst using the left hand to guard his face.

Character Liz from MX2, a graphic novel I’m working on at the moment