Portrait for promotional purposes
A realistic portrait as a promotional idea that can be constantly adapted throughout the year.
This illustration was for an opera singer residing in Germany. He is going to use it as a promotional device throughout the year, adding different elements for each occasion or theme. I think it’s a brilliant idea and imagine his clients will enjoy receiving these postcards.
Working from different photos and my imagination, we constructed a more smiley expression and ended up with a good likeness. The main thing of course with a portrait is always that the client likes it and this portrait was a success as far as that was concerned.
Although portraits are something I’ve done since boarding school, it’s always scarey until the final moment. Another very on-the-edge thing I’ve done was a three-hour-long stint as a pencil caricaturist at a launch for Fair Lady some years ago. That went off rather well too… in a sense I miss the excitement of that. Mmmm. Blog turns into meditation turns into insight and – Action.
Have pencils, will advertise. Meanwhile, if you need a portrait of yourself or a loved one, or even a caricature, do contact me.
‘We’ll just have to use stick-figures!’
When the budget needs to go to the bone… stick figures come into their own.
There was a new job involving the supervision of schools from my client for a certain African country north of here; but the budget was smaller than usual. So she came up with the novel idea of doing stick figures and because she was laughing, I thought she was joking.
It worked quite well and her clients were very happy because even stick-people can convey a concept, emotions, frustrating situations… Some of the frustrating situations appear in the first three pics – the disruption of a schoolday by lots of cars full of officials arriving, with everyone rushing to ‘make nice’; the intrusion into schooltime by socialising with the officials while the children do no learning; the distraction during classes by the Visitors.
Other images show the various types of schools found there, and though some are humbler than others, all can be well-run.
Hope you enjoy the show!
Bringing yoga to classrooms = Calm Classrooms
Together with Nia Thorpe, Jeanne van der Merwe is the co-founder of Calm Classrooms, a perfect name since it conveys the most important benefit of their programme, to bring calm to classrooms. The aim is to bring yoga to schools using classroom materials in the form of 35 yoga cards showing various selected positions. Since a calm child is much more teachable, this makes the learning experience more pleasant and beneficial for the teacher and the class.
In their own words:
The pace of the world in which today’s children are growing up, is only getting faster. Our aim with the Calm Classrooms cards is to encourage children to slow down from the inside out and provide them with meaningful tools for life!
The 35 desk-based activities that make up the Calm Classrooms card deck can be used as a behavioural resource. The resource is easy to use, and helps to create a calm, learning-friendly environment. Its benefits go well beyond the classroom too! Absolutely anyone can use and benefit from our programme – teachers, children, parents and therapists.
The Calm Classrooms cards are based on experience and research, which has shown that calmer children will develop the capacity to gain greater attentiveness and mental focus as well as manage stress and anxiety levels.
In addition, the activities were specially chosen for their suitability for the typical classroom space, and busy schedules. The cards have been divided into five exciting and accessible topics, enabling the teacher easily to draw on memorable, imaginative, safe and achievable activities with little disruption. The five Calm Classrooms topics are: Move, Focus, Relax, Breathe and Connect.
The Calm Classrooms behavioural resource is a simple way to make children’s lives happier and healthier, increase their capacity to learn effectively, manage their emotions, self-regulate their behaviour, and achieve academic and personal success.
Calm Classrooms offers professional development workshops and trainings for educators, students, parents and therapists as well as in-house training and development programme for schools.
You can view all the cards here.
Comics and cartoons: Tax course
This recent project called for comics and cartoons to be used in adult education in a specific African country.
The book focuses on the issue of income tax from a governmental department point of view and all that it entails.
From estimating how much tax was to be be paid and by whom, to the final archiving of the records, the small details were interesting to me.
It’s so easy to get it wrong in dozens of ways. For instance, I gave some ladies high heels but these were changed to flat shoes. The local way of dressing also needed to be kept in mind. Facilities and infrastructure are extremely simple and basic. For me it was like going on holiday to this country and visiting for a while.
Technical drawing CAN be interesting!
So – loose organic lines in a technical drawing. What fun!
Yes, really – every now and again one has something way out of the ordinary to tackle. As the client said, ‘It’s something a little more exciting for the technical drawing portfolio.’
I wholeheartedly agree. The last one was an almost-there but then the very patient client got what she’d asked for. I guess sometimes I can’t quite grasp that the client really is that adventurous.
Title-pages: English Poetry
Six titlepages for an English poetry book for 15-16- year-old pupils in South Africa.
These title-pages were formed from my own photography archives. Of all my work, this is probably the most pleasant imaginable. It combines my personal love for the English language (a refuge from the difficult grammatical structure of my mother tongue, German) and poetry.
Add to that the sheer enjoyment of combining images to convey a mood, and all the personal memories these images evoke, and one is in a very happy place.
This is the sort of work that invokes playfulness; deep concentration; digging deep into the formal laws of design to make it work, and reaching high into the ether for that spark of inspiration that makes the magic.
Having said all that, the client in this case corrected several false starts which were too complex. She simplified and clarified some of them a whole lot, which made them more effective in their message.
What a pleasure teamwork is…
Poetry Illustration
(Have made the reading time quite long so click the pic if you want to move on.)
Poetry illustration – when words and pictures dance the good dance
FInding the images to go with a poem can be a very fine line to dance along. Images that come up are personal to everyone who reads the poem. And yet many things about any poem are universal. They tug at common heart-strings; the language is designed to distil a lot of feeling and meaning into very few words. Illustrating poetry is up there as the champagne of illustration, for me at any rate. How can one not feel honoured when asked to embellish someone else’s work of art?
It’s intimidating but I love it intensely – probably because I love poetry with a large passion, so that quells the fear. It is very challenging though, to put into visual form what the poet has already put into a kind of word-image, so vividly are the images evoked, very often.
These are a few selected poems from a recent job for one of my favourite clients… who shall for now remain nameless. They are a publisher of educational materials, as you will have gathered.
Enjoy the poetry and you are most welcome to weigh in with your thoughts on any poem and/or image!
Le Weekend: Art Deco illies for Le Weekend
Le Weekend is a new wine range, launched by Karen Turner and Bruce Jack.
I was asked to assist with the wine labels initially, (see previous post) where I reworked the main figures in the picture. Then the client came back with the request for five illustrations in a similar Art Deco style, for the Le Weekend Wines website.
Art Prints online at last!
Art prints online, order please, and no pushing.
This is one of just over 20 art prints online now – all three portraits are now posted up on Society6.com.
Each drawing has at least six variations.
More will appear in the following weeks, featuring male nudes.
Style chameleon
For the third time in a few months, I’m drawing in someone else’s style.
It just suddenly struck me… I couldn’t avoid the absolutely horrible thought that maybe I’m not seen as having a particular style. The other side of that coin is that I’m a great counterfeiter which can be useful.
I guess it comes with the ’24 styles’ territory.
Robert Hichens’ style
A few months ago, the much loved illustrator Robert Hichens passed away, and one of his clients asked me to carry on with the job he’d been busy with, for schoolbooks in Namibia. That was a very poignant job. Some of the roughs were already done, and I had to bring them to the final stage. I investigated his facebook page to get a deeper understanding of how he drew and what was typical of his style.
I guess we all have definitive characteristics of our style which even in my case goes across all the styles I use. In Robert’s case, he would sometimes airbrush shaved heads with a tint of black, so there was a suggestion of hair. (Didn’t do it on this pic.) And he had a knobbly sort of stroke in his line, and whatever the figures were doing, the poses were easily readable and as simple as possible. I mentally asked his departed self* how on earth he did that knobbly line, and immediately the answer came – ‘scattered mode in Photoshop brush presets’. So I went there and it was all easy from there. He has a simple style for children’s educational books, easily ‘read’ by kids who are newly visually literate. It was strange and interesting, like visiting a new country and experiencing their language, going into their homes…
*Well what would you have done?
Tasia Rosser’s style
Another job involved three posters based upon book illies by Tasia Rosser, who was mentioned one or two blogs ago. Here the proportions of the kids were so utterly cute, and again I saw echoes of Robert’s style, in the simplicity and playfulness of the treatment. I had to keep telling myself not to get too realistic and formal which would move too far away from the cuteness…
Unknown artist; Art Deco style
Finally, the last example: a rework for a new client who’s developing work for a food and beverage label. For reasons of discretion, I will post only a detail at this stage. The background had started out as a pastel drawing. It then progressed through a simplification and flattening process using CorelDRAW by a second artist. Finally it arrived on my screen for ‘posterisation’. In this case that meant some hard edges in the Art Deco style popular on posters from the Thirties. I loved every minute of this. It’s not too far removed from my icon style but of course the subject was very sophisticated and specific to that time. After I’d completed the entire first picture in this style, the background was changed back to what it was, and only the figures stayed hard-edged. This worked better – it brought them forward and knocked the background back to where it belonged.
Having generated original work and reinterpreted the work of others, I cannot really say which I prefer more. Working out an original composition takes time and effort, but it’s also fun and one has a degree of creative decision-making and control. Fortunately, (so far) I’ve been lucky and really enjoyed what my cohorts have come up with.
It’s been an honour to complete/enlarge/reinterpret their work and their styles.