CSM Degree show: An illustrator's point of view

I visited this today, as I reckoned this would be the quietest day. Saw lots of interesting pieces, some excellent, some good, a few rather pedestrian. I have to admit, most of my favourite things were in the illustration pathway of the Graphic Design area which is no surprise given my own specialism in this field.

Of all the artists I saw exhibiting, there were two who were of significant note.

The first was Jamie Coe, who had produced a thoughtful and touching graphic novel, House of Freaks, as part of his final project. The 24 page story revolves around two brothers in a Circus Freak show. I  thought this work was laid out well with good storytelling and pacing. Jamie is also a proficient draughtsman, which is becoming harder to find these days. I thought the cover was a good piece of artwork in its own right.

His sketchbook also shows a keen eye for detail, as well as a good sense of humour.

                               

Definitely a future Graphic novelist/illustrator to watch.

His website

www.jamiecoe.com

And blog

http://jamiecoe.wordpress.com/

The second artist I noticed was David Tolu Graham. Again, he's produced a fine body of illustrations and animations during his time at CSM.

Among my favourites was his Graphic Novel, Mr & Miss Translation in La Dolce Vita, a short slice of life story about a young couple trying to watch and understand a foreign language film without the subtitles.

                                           

The second were his character designs of angels from a imaginary faith, using the different signs of the zodiac as a starting point for their creation. There's some really lovely line work using a biro. This character is based on Gemini, the twins.

He also has a pretty cool blog at

http://davidtolugraham.blogspot.co.uk/

and his website

www.davidtolugraham.com

Be sure to check them out.

See you soon.


All illustrations shown are copyright of their respective creator/s

An effort at a comic book page

Those who have known me for some years now, will know that I've always been drawing little comic stories. None of these have been published, in fact most are unfinished, having never got much beyond the inking stage.

Anyway, with a bit more time on my hands of late, I felt it was time to step up to the plate and actually see a project through to its conclusion, particularly with colouring and lettering. So to ease me into it, I've started work on a serial - like comics of old (Flash Gordon, Terry and The Pirates, Send for Kelly etc). The aim is to draw and colour one comic book page a week (or two if i'm feeling really confident) and post it online. I'm hoping between late June and late September to have started off a story of about twelve to sixteen pages.

Lettering digitally was something I'd never tried before, but a friend of mine recommended Blambot - a website with specially designed fonts just for comics and cartoon strips. What's more, a number are free to download - provided you acknowledge Blambot (Thank You, Nate Piekos).  So after downloading a couple of free fonts, I was away.

Anyway, here's a preview - the story is a reworking of my final Foundation project, using the same Anubis character, but this time placing him into South Dakota and hitching him up with an English guy driving across America to San Diego. It isn't a final work - I still need to add highlights and clean up some of the bleed areas and I still want to play around with the lettering a bit more -  but it should give the gist of my work. It's a bit small - but that's partly due to the file size, so please forgive me.

That's all for this week.

The Blambot website is

www.blambot.com