Nice to see Jeff Soto reintroducing some of his old characters back into more recent work, the Walker and the Builder were what attracted me to him in the first place but he’s since largely moved on from them. Maybe one day we’ll get the Walker toy they were always going to do…
My good friend David Vallade has a new website, go have a look and commission him to draw something especially for you…
Drokk!! My Cursed Earth Judge Dredd commission from Mike McMahon finally inked. 
It’s been 15 years since the release of the first ever Scrawl book. Curated by Ric Blackshaw (with some contacts from yours truly) and Liz Farrelly, it was one of the first books to collect what later became known as ‘urban art’ or ‘street art’. Work that was informed by graffiti, comics, Hip Hop, film and more but strayed outside into new places. Vol.1 boasts an incredible line up of artists: Mode 2, Futura, She One, Kid Acne, Delta, Will Bankhead, David Vallade, Oscar Wilson, The Light Surgeons and some chancer called Openmind.
Shortly after compiling the first book (there were 2 volumes) Ric formed the Scrawl Collective, a loose affiliation of some of the artists in the pages to help them get work. Now, three of the artists who also came to prominence from the book – Mr Jago, Will Barras and Steff Plaetz are holding a ‘Scrawl Collective’ reunion exhibition of sorts. It’s called Triumvirate and opens Dec 4th at Rockwell House, 10-14 Hewett St, London, EC2A.
More details here:
A unique opportunity to buy items from the Mo Wax Urban Archaeology exhibition opens next week at the Saatchi Gallery.
Following on from the brief exhibition at the Southbank (featured here) ‘Build & Destroy’ is an exhibition of rare art works, proofs and merchandise from the Mo Wax archive. It will also feature new works and limited editions by various artists like Swifty, (who has been posting things on his Instagram recently) Futura and 3D who have worked with Mo Wax over the past 21 years. Build & Destroy also coincides with the major survey exhibition Post Pop: East Meets West at the Saatchi Gallery.
All of the works are available to buy and the exhibition is a rare opportunity for people to obtain original works and limited editions produced throughout the history of the label to date alongside newly commissioned pieces. More details here
Imaginary film sequel art show opening at iam8bit Gallery in LA next week. More info and images here on the Entertainment Weekly site.
This opens on Thursday at The Print House in Stratford and stays up for a month. I was drawn to it be Nick Stewart Hoyle‘s inclusion but all the other artists’ work looks amazing too. I’ll be checking it out – more details here.
A couple of weekends ago DK and I travelled to Madrid and played what might be the perfect template for all DJ sets in the future. Four deck AV set at 8.15-9.45pm to a receptive crowd on the top floor of the amazing Espacio Arts Centre. Pack up by 10pm, drop bags at hotel and go to a bar for beer and tapas, then go to a great seafood restaurant and be in bed by 1am. Get a good nights sleep and make it to breakfast at a normal hour. They don’t often happen like that…
These are the pencils for a Judge Dredd commission I’ve been waiting on for between 18 months and 2 years from one of the greats – Mike McMahon.
I asked for a full-on Cursed Earth scene, basically a recreation of either the cover or inside spread of Prog 61, the first issue of 2000ad I ever bought and he’s knocked it out the park.
I’ve enhanced the pencils in Photoshop here as Mick uses a very light grade – you can see the original plus many more commissions both penciled and inked on his excellent tugging your coat blog.
Now to wait for the inked version…
Kid Acne has just completed this incredible mural up in Sheffield which was commissioned by the Festival of the Mind. What’s interesting about this image is that it’s around 15 years old and was originally going to be the cover for DJ Vadim‘s side project The Isolationist when it was still called ‘Orators of Advanced Thought’.
Back in the late 90’s I was doing the artwork for Jazz Fudge, Vadim’s label and was introduced to Edna (Kid Acne) with a view to him contributing to some of the releases. Ed was finishing his college course at the time but painted a version of this as part of the final show I think (could be wrong here) and sent photos down to be scanned.
I can’t remember why they weren’t used but I still have roughs of it in the archive. What a great image and exciting way to end a terrace of houses, we’re seeing more and more murals like this springing up these days in the UK and that’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned.
Photos by Shaun Bloodworth (portrait) and Andy Brown (Yo! action shot) courtesy of Kid Acne. Check the video of the making below too.
THE BIRTH OF HIP-HOP / UNIVERSE RAP from Tom Sykes on Vimeo.
Gutted I can’t go to this as I will be away but a great opportunity for kids to get into comic-making… Download the first issue of Moose Kid Comics for free here.
You may remember me featuring the Madlib ‘Pill Jar’ album cover a while back when he put it up as a free download. Well, it’s still there but he’s added more tracks and it’s now available as a physical LP with that great cover image by Rogerio Puhl. Another couple of nice cover designs, courtesy of Jeff Jank, come for the Rock Konducta 1 & 2 LPs – taking classic Beatles and Black Sabbath sleeves and bastardizing them.
I bought this on spec a couple of months back, purely because I was intrigued by the artwork and wanted to know more. Derek Stenning has collected together a bunch of images he’s created centering around floating cosmonauts in various scenarios – titled the EK Series. I’m still to read it to uncover the full story but it’s beautiful to look at.
This is an interesting comic I picked up the other week out of curiosity. It’s a one-off ode to the masters of the art – Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and Wally Wood – by Sergio Ponchione who’s a new name to me. He manages to give a brief overview of each artist’s career, contributions to the medium and personal life whilst channeling a little of their style as he explains their importance to a budding young illustrator who’s not familiar with their work.
It’s an oddity whose only weakness is its shortness, this could have been expanded to 3 issues easily. As a love letter to the three creators it’s charming though, search it out as I will be doing for his 4 issue comic, Grotesque from Fantagraphics. Annoyingly it seems he was in London at Gosh Comics not 10 days again discussing the comic but I missed it.
A Kickstarter campaign to get a book with vinyl made has just 2 weeks left to run. It’s run by the Gamma Proforma guys who do a nice line in the more leftfield artists in their exhibitions. Check out this little film for more info and look at that line up of artists!
Visual: Jerry ‘Joker’ Inscoe, Poesia, sheOne, Nawer, Stendec, Moneyless, Phil Ashcroft, Derm, Robert ‘Tone’ Proch, Sebastien Preschoux, Sat One, Graphic Surgery, Felipe Pantone, O.Two, Roids, Clemens Behr, Christopher Derek Bruno, 108
Audio: Kidghe, Stohead, Luke Vibert, Divine Styler, Mike Ladd, Andrea Parker / Daz, Quayle, Cristian Vogel, Arovane, Einoma, Third Shock, Methodblack, Lyken, Monkphat, Plaster, Clatterbox, GFQ, Quinoline Yellow, Evac, Kero, Dalglish, Bogger, Northburg & Ed Devane.
It’s been a bit quiet on here of late because I’ve been very busy tying up the last pieces of the Frankie Goes To Hollywood box set with Philip Marshall and the deadline is this weekend with the book still to finish. We’ve had some 11th hour changes due to the USM legal dept. getting cold feet over the cassette front cover (there’ll be a lengthy blog post about the cassette one day) but also some higher res images arrived today of one of the Lo Cole gatefold prelims for the interior of the book. These were courtesy of a German fan who went out of his way to get a decent copy of the image from someone who had bought the rough draft painting when it was sold years ago. Now we can have a much larger version of the image rather than the low grade jpegs we’ve had for years.
But the subject of this post is about the Flick book* – maybe considered a throw away item to some, certainly the runt of the litter but getting as much love as the rest in its construction. The book features scenes from the TV advert that briefly aired around the time of the album launch in November ’84 with imagery based on Lo Cole’s paintings – a brief 40 second rampage into the Pleasuredome by the band accompanied by assorted mythical beasts. As pages are limited in the book the original film was broken down into an image sequence – 25 frames per second x 40 to nearly 1000 frames – which were then stripped down to essential frames and made into .gif files to see which few seconds of animation would work best.
*( this is a provisional cover design – it’s changed a bit since this version)
Luckily we can print on both sides of the page with this book so you can view two separate animations depending on which way round you hold the book. In an effort to get the best possible image quality for the book we went back to the sole surviving master copy, a U-Matic tape, and pulled the frames we needed. These were still fairly grubby looking with a dark caste over most, dull colours and lots of ‘noise’ across the image. In Photoshop I set up a series of image filters to find out how best to lighten the images and bring out the vibrancy of the colours without it looking too forced. It turned out that different scenes needed different amounts of filtering as the saturation kept changing so there was no chance to automate the process.
When I was satisfied I’d got the best colour and light balance there was still the subject of the noise and how to remove it, this is when you can see a texture like a grain across an image, usually caused by light or introduced by generations of copies. I use a great Photoshop plug in caused Neat Image (yes, terrible name but amazing results) to remove this. It takes a digital fingerprint of the image and then smooths out all the bumps without blurring the image, something some similar plug ins tend to do. See the process below, at the top is the original as it came to me, then the filtered version with enhanced colours and any dark cast taken away. Finally there’s the denoised version that will end up in the book.
Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I post original comic art alongside copious amounts of comics news and such. This is because I’ve collected it since the late 90’s, mainly from artists who have drawn for the British comic 2000ad. The original art collecting community is a growing one but the 2000ad-centric one is still small enough that most people know or know of each other.
A couple of collector friends of mine – Simon Beigh and Julius Howe – have started a regular podcast and Facebook page called Inky Fingers that talks about all things related. This can mean interviews with the artists themselves and collectors or musings on pieces currently on eBay and collecting tips. I was recently asked to chat about my collection on their latest podcast and I share time with the great Carlos Ezquerra in another interview. Check it out here...
Anyone of a certain age who was into sci-fi in the 70’s and 80’s will be familiar with Peter Elson‘s work, if not his name. His highly detailed spaceships and futuristic tech were as recognisable as Chris Foss‘s and I used to seek out the tiny ‘PE’ logo that he hid in most of his work time and again as confirmation that an image was by him.
*Special ‘Originals’ guest post – I don’t own this one* My friend David Rees recently bought this original painting from Peter’s sister (Elson passed away many years ago) and was kind enough to share these images with me. It’s fascinating for me to see the close up details of this piece – ‘Mission To Universe’ – that I first saw in one of the Steven Caldwell Terran Trade Authority books way back when. As far as I know there is only one book of Elson’s work collected, ‘Parallel Lines’, long out of print and shared with another artist of the genre, Chris Moore. That’s a real shame and he deserves wider recognition. The painting is shown next to the paperback which it was painted for below.
Found this online, no idea who took it, possibly Henry Chalfont or Martha Cooper. Always nice to see one of the classic whole cars from a new angle and in situ to see the scale and surroundings. It must have been incredible to see these running in the early 80’s. R.I.P. Dondo White, a true style master who made his mark and still impresses today.
Jim Mahfood comes with the goods two years after he did our ‘Caught In The Middle of a 3-Way Mix’ cover.
This is for SM&A Productions‘ forthcoming Visual Companion to Paul’s Boutique, due online on July 25th, the 25th anniversary of the great album.
They also commissioned Derek Langille to do a poster, he of the Sabotage comic fame.
“Yeah, you can’t front on that!”
