Building up my Portfolio on Behance

A quick post to let everyone know I'm uploading a lot of my past and present illustration and character design projects to Behance, a great FREE portfolio hosting site.

Here's the link to my portfolio.
There'll probably be a lot of my work on there that very few people have seen. I hope you like it.

Elmer Fudd & Bugs Bunny's ancestors

If you ever get the chance to read a copy of STRUWWELPETER by Heinrich Hoffmann you will be richly rewarded. Not only are the cautionary tales, originally written and illustrated in 1844 by Hoffmann for his 3 yr old son, amusing in themselves, but it becomes quickly apparent how much they have influenced popular culture ever since.

Where would Tim Burton be if it wasn't for Shock Headed Peter with his wild hair and long twig-like finger nails and Conrad, the boy who wouldn't stop sucking his thumbs and had them chopped off by "the great, long, red legged scissor-man"? (What Hoffmann's 3yr old son thought of that, history does not recall.)

But most interesting for me is the story of the wabbit... sorry, rabbit... who turns the tables on the hunter, a theme harking back to the Middle Ages and forward directly to the emergence of the Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny partnership in the late 1930's and early 1940's.

Struwwelpeter would have been a well known children's book by the Warner animators as it was translated into many languages, and not forgetting the large number of German immigrants who's children may have carried their favourite book across the Atlantic with them.

Like the Animal Frolic Toba Scrolls from 11th century Japan and the illustrations of Heinrich Kley (who I'll post about soon), humorous drawings of anthropomorphic animals say so much more about the human condition, satirising mankind's desires, weaknesses, irritations, injustices and foibles than a 12 page essay or pious sermon could ever do.

Original Artwork on Sale at Etsy... NOW

Winter Scenes Set 1

In the next couple of days I'm going to be listing a small pile of original ACEO/ATC sized (2.5x3.5 inches) artwork in "Mark Mason's Curiously Drawn Print Shop" over at Etsy. ACEO stands for Art Cards, Editions and Originals and ATC stands for Artists Trading Cards.

Miniature pieces of original art and limited edition prints have become very popular over the last few years and I've decided to respond to requests for artwork by producing my own. There will be more to follow.

In total there are 53 original pieces, and I'll also be listing a VERY small Limited Edition Print run of the images.

I've divided the artwork into Series and Sets. Each set in a series comprises of only 5 images and 1 title card. I've kept the sets small because if people want a complete set, they only have to buy a total of 6 cards. I really dislike the seemingly never ending series, I think it's dishonest to genuine collectors, and especially at a time when we're all watching our money.

So, in this initial collection of original illustrated cards I've got 9 sets:

Winter Scenes 2008 Set 1

Winter Scenes 2008 Set 2

Animal Portrait Studio Set 1

Animal Portrait Studio Set 2

Hokusai Artists Set 1

Hokusai Artists Set 2

Japanese Lanterns Set 1

Kanji Animals Set 1

Kanji Animals Set 2

Here's an image of the Japanese Lanterns Set 1

All the images are produced on heavy stock acid free watercolour paper using quality watercolour paints, pastels and coloured pencils. The Winter Scene title cards are edged in silver leaf, and the Hokusai Artists sets are highlighted in gold leaf.

All the artwork will be either initialled or stamped with my personal seal, depending on the style of the image, and the reverse will be signed, dated and contain all the details about the image and the set that it relates too.

Christmas Print

It's been a very busy year, with one thing and another, but I found the time to get a small 5x7 inch seasonal print produced which I'll be sending out photomounted to a card this Christmas.

The colour and style is inspired by woodblock sketchbooks by Hiroshige who produced some amazing images with just a couple of blocks. A real inspiration.

The main challenge I gave myself on this print was the cutting and printing of the black lines. In every print I've produced I've wanted to get the linework finer and although I've a long way to go, I'm pleased with the result.

It's called "Sally, George and a view of the Valley" and depicts a slightly stylised rendering of a view of Pendle Hill, the small town of Clitheroe, where we live and Clitheroe Castle. (No little English town is complete without it's own castle, and Clitheroe can boast to having the second smallest Keep in the UK.)

Pendle Hill dominates the landscape around here, and looks different every day. In an odd way it's my Mount Fuji, and I'd like, at some time, to produce a series of images in a similar vein to Hokusai's 36 Views.

I used 2 Magnolia blocks, one key block and one blue which I printed 2 impressions from. The first was a pale blue, and the second was a Bokashi effect in a darker blue at the top of the sky and over the figures in the foreground.

The seal in the top corner reads (so I'm reliably informed) "Let your heart fill with wonder".

All the prints (around 45) were trimmed and photmounted onto slightly silvery matte cardstock and will be posted out over the next few days.

Monkey Magic. Journey to the West

A quick mention of the new website for the fantastic Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett opera "Monkey: Journey to the West". I was fortunate to catch the opera, filled with acrobatics and sword skills during it's premiere performances in Manchester in 2007, and have been waiting ever since for the music to be released on CD, which it is just about to be.

Listen to 3 tracks HERE.

If you get a chance to see Monkey, don't let it slip by. The character designs, costumes, music and performances are great. I hope they've improved the subtitling design since the Manchester shows.

I'd loved to have had the chance to work on the animated sequences too.

Speaking of which, the BBC has commissioned the Monkey team to produce animated idents for their Olympic coverage. View it here. It's lovely to see some quality 2D animation fronting such a big event.

Tests for new print set

My studio table today.

I've not posted for a few weeks because things are a little busy at the moment,

but at last I'm able to show you the first test prints of a new woodblock project I've started on.

I've given myself the task to produce 3 animal and 2 haiku calligraphy prints per season.

These are my "Spring" animal prints.

The baby rabbit and robin picture is called "Sakura" (Cherry Blossom), the Japanese characters for cherry blossom are hidden in the branches of the tree. The grey rabbit and blue tits print is entitled "Rabbit Calligraphy" (Although I've hopefully got the Japanese characters for rabbit and calligraphy right, I don't know how to say it!). The rabbit has written the word "spring" using his brush and ink. The final image of the kimono clad dancing mouse is called "Harukaze" (Spring Breeze).

I've searched for Japanese script haiku that reflect the seasons and also include a reference to animals and I've carved 2 of these. The Spring haiku I've chosen are:

New Year's Day: the clouds are gone and sparrows are telling each other tales.

(Ransetu)

Serenely gazing up at the mountain - a toad.

(Issa)

I'm keeping the designs quite simple, and, at most, only using 5 blocks, although a block could contain more than one colour. The original drawings were pretty loose and sketchy and so I'm trying to keep the prints that way too.

I'm using Shina ply and each image is about 5x7".

The aim is to do a print run of 30 to 40 of each image, of which 20 will be set aside for the final stage of my project. The remaining prints which are good enough will be sold individually (I estimate around 5-10) as a very limited edition.

So, the final stage...

You may have noticed that 2 of the test prints are on the same piece of paper. This is because the paper is going to be folded down the middle (with the reverse side of the images facing each other) to form the 2 sides of a book page.

When I've produced a set of 3 Spring, 3 Summer, 3 Autumn and 3 Winter animal prints with 2 seasonal Haiku for each (a carved block of Japanese characters), a "chapter" title for each season and a couple of information pages, I'll bind them together using Japanese papers and bookbinding methods to create 20 5x7" original print books for sale through Etsy.

So don't be expecting the books any day soon. It will probably be around this time next year (at the earliest) as I've got to fit in the small task of earning a living doing the day job. The "extra" prints will be available throughout the year, as I complete them.

I realise the economics of this project don't make any kind of business sense; but sometimes the pleasure in just producing something that a few people may really enjoy is reward enough.

I'll be printing these from next week and then I'll have to start thinking about the Summer prints.

Hydrus Watercolour tests. The results are in...

The completed test image.

6 months ago I started a test to check the lightfastness of Hydrus Fine Art Watercolour by Dr. Ph. Martin's as compared with Winsor and Newton Artist's Watercolour which has a measured lightfastness rating. Previous posts on how, and why I decided to run this test are HERE.

As you can see from the above image, and compare it with the image from the start of the test, there is no fading. The slightly lighter appearance of the red at the top righthand side is due to my application of the watercolour and can be seen in the original image too.

The Hydrus colours are the top 3, the Winsor and Newton are the 3 at the bottom.

I was expecting to see some evidence of a faded edge line where I'd placed thick card to create the unexposed areas, but there is none.

This test sheet has been sat in a south facing (ie: direct sunlight) for 6 months. The area on the far left has been unexposed, the next section exposed for 2 months, the next for 4 and the far righthand side has been exposed for the full 6 months.

The weather has been bright and sunny on the whole. You would never put a watercolour painting in direct sunlight, so this has been a tough test for the pigments. The Hydrus colours have stood up to the task brilliantly, and I'm now confident that I can produce water based woodblock prints with either the Hydrus colours or the Winsor and Newton watercolours without any fear of fading.

The good thing about the Hydrus colours is that they're so quick to use straight from the bottle and diluted with water. One drop of colour goes such a long way, and by using the pipette each bottle contains, it's easy to keep a record of mixing and diluting measurements just in case you need to remix another amount. I just wish they were more readily available in the UK. I had to order mine via mail order in the US.

I hope others will find this test useful when deciding which materials to use for their art projects.

The Curiously Drawn Print Shop

"The Curiously Drawn Print Shop" on Etsy has opened it's doors with it's first 2 prints; my Year of the Rat postcard and "Sparrows", a new, improved print run of my Baren Exchange 34 Chuban print.



I'm hoping to slowly add to the number of items for sale over the next few months, so please keep an eye on the shop at CuriouslyDrawn.etsy.com, or this blog.

New Animation Player Added.

I've added a new element to the bottom of my Blog page; a nifty little video player from the bods at YouTube. You can either press play and sit back and watch a run through of the clips of my animation, or click on the small 3 squares button to find pop-up thumbnails of each clip.

I hope you like it.

900 Year Old Animal Caricatures by Toba Sojo

Toba Sojo (1053-1140), Japanese painter-priest, who painted the Animal Caricature, or Choju Giga, scrolls, which are considered among the finest examples of Japanese narrative scroll painting.

Toba Sojo was a Japanese nobleman of the Heian period who became a Buddhist abbot. The famous set of 4 scrolls representing caricatures of animals and people (in the Kozanji, a monastery near Kyoto) are attributed to him, but modern scholars now believe that he was the author of only the first two scrolls painted during the second quarter of the 12th century, and the remaining 2 by an anonymous follower of the artist who worked during the early 13th century.

The Animal Caricature scroll can be viewed HERE. At the top of the page are a row of numbers in little boxes, numbered 1-18, in reverse order. Click on [1] to see the far right hand part of the scroll and work your way up to [18]. The scroll reads right to left.

It's such a beautiful piece of illustration. The linework is highly skilled and delightfully economical, the poses and actions of the animal characters are so finely observed and the pacing of the events portrayed give a real feel of a passage of time: the areas of landscape without characters add timing to the scroll, as does the monkey being chased by the rabbit, in effect "through shot" as the scroll would have been rolled right to left.

It's just beautiful, and produced around 1130AD! (I'd have believed anyone who'd said that it was produced today at 11.30AM.) How did Toba produce pictures that look so contemporary when drawings from Europe and the rest of the world in that period look so much of their time?

E. H. Shepard, T.S. Sullivant, Heinrich Kley, Beatrix Potter, A. B. Frost, Harry Rountree and Disney's Nine Old Men could all find a common connection with the animals in this scroll.

Like a lot of Heinrich Kley's animal illustrations, a lot of the finer satire is lost on us, but what we miss in 900 year old satirical comment is more than made up for in the subtle references to the timeless human condition and the sheer pleasure of the energetic animals wrestling, swimming and frolicking, all rendered in a free, humorous spirit which show Toba Sojo's mastery of brushwork and remarkable feeling for animation.

I've stitched all 18 images together as one long image which can be scrolled through to give the best impression of what it would be like to read as a scroll. It's too big an image to post, but it's an easy enough exercise to do in Photoshop, and well worth the effort.

Hydrus colour fade test.

I've just purchased a couple of bottles of Dr. Ph. Martin's Hydrus Fine Art Watercolours to try out for watercolour painting and woodblock printing. I couldn't find a single reference to their lightfastness on'th internet although the marketing blurb says that they're produced using pure pigment, not dye and that they are all permanent and lightfast... we'll see...

I'm going to run a test over the next six months to compare their lightfastness against Winsor & Newton Artist's Watercolour. I'll paint stripes of colour using red ,yellow and blue from both products and leave the paper partially exposed in a south-facing window.

Every two months I'll expose a little strip of the colours to the light, and after six months I'll have a colour chart of results ranging from unexposed, through two and four months to six months.

I hope the results will be useful to anyone else wondering about this product.

I'll post update images every two months.

Sherlock Fox and The Case of The Bust Bust.

Here are a couple of images for a portfolio illustration using digital painting in Photoshop.
Below is the hand inked A3 black and white drawing...

... which was scanned into Photoshop. The whites were made transparent (I'll post how to do that sometime soon) and then I slowly started adding the colour, which each element on a new layer to allow for changes along the way.

This is the finished illustration:





All the colours were applied just using the Paintbrush and Airbrush tools, it's essentially painted using traditional techniques, but with the advantage that Photoshop allows you to manipulate opacity and other options with layers.