Artist talk by William Simpson

I was lucky to attend a visit from the story board artist and illustrator William Simpson. He has worked on comic strips for 'Marvel' and more recently story boards for the 'Game of thrones' TV series. I’m interested in fantasy art and Game of Thrones so I thought it would be a good opportunity to go to along to the lecture.

Unfortunately I was sat at the rear of the room and found it difficult to hear most of the discussion. It was interesting to hear about all the different jobs William Simpson had worked on for comic books. He talked about how he first started out with art and how he progress on to getting paid work. some interesting things were said about designing  for "Game Of Thrones"Will talked about some of the problems he faced when designing some of the unusual things in the story.

The following day we had an opportunity to meet William in our studios. Unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to talk with Will as he was busy doing interviews. I was disappointed because I was looking forward to meeting him.

Narrative Illustration. Life drawing

I attended another life drawing session recently for my studies. Today we were drawing a model we had previously met. The session began as most do with a series of warm-ups and challenges. I was challenging myself to try and fit all of my drawings on to one sheet of A3 paper. I found this to be a nice challenge and a bit of a thinking exercise when the paper began to fill up. We tried something new during this session as we had all been asked to bring in our favourite illustrated book, I decided to bring “The Arrival”. Our model had to stand in a pose from each book, which led to some interesting drawing opportunities. One task was to draw the model crossed with a dragon. This section was a lot of fun and I am happy with my outcome, the image seems more interesting because of all the small drawings knitted into the piece.

Narrative Illustration Artist research. Julie Morstad

Whilst searching though some illustration reference books I came across the work of children’s book illustrator Julie Morstad. Her style instantly struck me for its use of interesting textures and overall sombre look. Her work is recognised for it's cute characters washed out colour pallets and interesting use of texture. She has worked on illustrations for many recently published books which include “How To”, “Singing Away the Dark” and “This Is Sadie”.

The illustration to the right is an example of Morstad’s work from the children’s book “Singing Away the Dark”. The book has a very sombre tone probably caused by the colour choice and layout of the illustrations. This image also highlights the amount of texture which Morstad uses in her images. The image is quite simple but I think this benefits its overall look, a lot of Morstad’s work has used negative space around her characters but this one has a painted background.

The next illustration is called “Boat” and shows the more recognised drawing style that Morstad uses in her work. A lot of These pencil illustrations are borderless which means they may have been used as vignettes in the books. Even if they were not then I think the lack of a background helps the image to blend into the page. The colours are more toned down compared to the previous image I talked about. I think this really complements the pencil drawing look. Also in this image the boat has not been coloured in, this seems to be another part of Morstad’s work as it appears regularly in her work.

The example to the top right is called “Thimble” and is another good example of an illustration which uses negative space. I think the colours on this piece work particularly well on the spools in the background. This illustration seems more playful to the previous examples and its quite fun to see the little character stumbling around with the Thimble on his head.