Volker Gerling

Volker Gerling takes sequential photographs which he then makes into flip books. Such a simple idea but the results are potent portraits snap shots of those brief intimate moments of a life or lives that hold the beauty of our transient souls.

 

Portraits in Motion by Volker Gerling.

Efealcuadrado I

Efealcuadrado is a Spanish illustrator who has a beautiful variety to her mark making, creating very expressive and evocative sketches and drawings.

Bubbles and dirty baths

I am working on two different (maybe 3) projects right now.
One is an incredibly detailed realistic study of crab claws the other two are secret. I find I need to balance producing detailed work by doing more exuberant, experimental work and processes, and so I found myself bubble printing yesterday.
My bubbles are all black as I wanted the scummy effect of a not so clean bath. But of course you can print your bubbles in any colour and I am sure I will be making some coloured ones soon. Strangely for such a simple technique, I had to experiment in order to get the effect I wanted, and get quite technical.

Instructions 

Ingredients
A shallow tray (I used a roasting dish)
Washing up liquid
Paint (I used acrylic)
a hand whisk
a drinking straw
Paper cut to the size you require.

Technique
You make a shallow tray of coloured water diluting your paint.
Add a squirt of washing up liquid.
Stir it all up
Use your straw to exhale into the water and produce a carpet of bubbles over the surface.
If the print is not clear enough add more paint. If the bubbles not bubbly enough add more washing up liquid.

What I found is that blowing with the straw makes a nice even carpet of bubbles all the same size. But I did not want my bubbles all the same size, I found that if you whisk up your water you will make lots of small bubbles and then I used the straw to add larger ones. This produced a good variety and a range of marks. I also over printed many of them to fill in gaps or give them more impact if they were too light.

Jill Calder II

Jill Calder's vivid, vivacious paintings are like screen prints with their powerful juxtaposed colours and stencil like passages through the layers.

Jill Calder I

With clever and dramatic use of contrasting colour combined with dynamic mark-making and line, Jill Calder's illustrations for the brutal historical story of 'Robert the Bruce are stunning, eye catching compositions. 

This is another book that threw itself at me from the shelves of the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

"I wanted to create a book that would appeal to adult's as well as children . . . I was quite nervous at first, as I hadn't really done anything historical, or illustrated a picture book before. But I did a lot of research. I borrowed hundreds of books, visited the National Museum of Scotland and Edinburgh Castle and scoured the internet, looking for armor, clothing, books, art and everyday objects anything I could find from the 12th to the 14th century." Jill Calder 

Jill Calder spent a year illustrating this book by James Robertson published to correspond with the
700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn by Birlinn Books.

Rosemary Mohicans

Sometimes you need a rosemary mohican.

Playing with People

Yesterday I took a break from major projects, to work on 'People'. I like to be challenged by Illustration Friday's themes. This week it's 'people', though I find increasingly people are just uploading old work or completely unrelated work, which makes it less interesting to view the submissions.

Using a free magazine that I had been given in Edinburgh I made collaged people. I like the mattress lady best, I love the rosy colour and her upholstered body. 

I gathered more free printed material from the supermarket before Freya got home and she wanted to try it, so she made a lady . . . and then a sausage dog . . . and a burger dog!

This would be a good school project to explore the idea of 'you are what you eat'. 

Michael Foreman

I briefly made it over to the Edinburgh Festival yesterday and spent a couple of hours at the Edinburgh Book Festival, where I was thrilled to find this book; 'The General' by Janet Charters. It was originally published in 1961 and reprinted by Templer Publishing in 2010 to celebrate it's 50th anniversary.
It is a book to cherish, about peace and beauty and an end to wars.
It was of course the illustration that drew me to it as it looked so much like my favorite illustrator Gerald Rose's work. In fact I was not so surprised to see that it was illustrated by Michael Foreman, as he attended Lowestoft Art School the same as Gerald Rose, but it did make me wonder about who was teaching at this school and whether Michael and Gerald had fallen under the same tutorship.
This was Michael's first book, his style developed into solid washes of colour and I had many books illustrated by him as a child. This less finished style is a revelation to me in Foreman's repertoire, I really love the quality of line and the use of colour, humour and space in these works.

Yoko Yamamoto III

I sought out further images by Yoko Yamamoto. In the image above, I especially admire the way Yoko has used the legs of the birds and animals as music notes.

Yoko Yamamoto II

Illustrations of music, that dance across the page, by Japanese illustrator Yoko Yamamoto whose work is often an incredible visualization of music. Yoko's work is quite dreamlike and rarely constrained by rules of composition, free flowing illustrations that you swim in. Her work reminds me of Marc Chagall's in it's compositional style and its sentiment.

Emma Crocatt

Emma Crocatt's style reminds me of 1950's graphic printed textiles and some how also of fuzzy felts with their simple elements composed in flat colours. Yet this young graduate is recreating in her work a retro atmosphere of seventies British TV with programs like Mary, Mungo and Midge.

Emma Crockatt and Nanna Prieler

A happy and wonderful collaborative work by Nanna Peieler and Emma Crockatt.

Heart

'Heart' is Illustration Friday's challenge for this week and I have found it a challenge as a heart is unfortunately such an over familiar cliched symbol. 

My hearts have appeared as the tears of love lost; hot, sore tears for a broken heart.

Nanna Prieler

Nanna Prieler (NANNA) is an Austrian illustrator with a strong naive graphic style that is softened by the way she gives her work an imperfect, almost sponged, texture breaking up the solid blocks of colour and giving a more playful approachable image.

Jana Glatt

Brazilian illustrator Jana Glatt's 'O n o m a t o p e i a' are simple, fun illustrations of animal language. It always intrigues me the way we have different interpretations of animal sounds in different countries.

Carla Sonheim

Carla Sonheim has been finger painting and I love the results. Sometimes the simplest of techniques yield the best and most surprising images. 

Iona Levitz

A beautiful patchwork of abstraction by American artist Iona Levitz.

"These paintings are autobiographical, they are a metaphor for a moment in time. The work is layered, as is life. Each layer visually informs the next until the final painting emerges." Iona Levitz

Douglas Florain

Douglas Florain is an artist and Poet from New York who has been a cartoonist for the New Yorker and has written and illustrated many children's poetry books.
It is great to find someone spanning the genres of art and design so successfully. These are some of his abstract paintings which have a wonderful fluidity and richness of colour.

Britt-Marie Oskarsson II

More flower play and plant collage, today by Swedish artist Britt-Marie Oskarsson.

World Elephant Day

It is World Elephant Day today so I did a piece to celebrate. I have called it 'Getting Over Your Fears'. 

As elephants are supposedly afraid of mice, I have balanced my elephant on a supportive troupe of friendly white mice.