On The Trading Floor

I recently illustrated the London Stock Exchange's book '1000 Companies To Inspire' for my old college-mate, art director Rob Patterson at Wardour Communications.

The cover was a bit of old-school Molework - all fineliners and simple but busy-busy detail on paper, inspired by my 50-something illustrations for Ernst & Young - hinting at all of the UK's countries and their biggest industries. Drawn on an A2 sheet, it was scanned and given a careful vectorisation so that Rob could suggest myriad colour combinations to the LSE team.

The book turned out really well - however, the extra-exciting bit came next! Rob and his team decided to curate a live drawing event to celebrate the day of publication. Deep in the Stock Exchange building in Paternoster Square, London (home to the London publishing trade, prior to it being destroyed in WW2), and right in the shadow of St Paul's cathedral, the trading floor opens every day at 7am...which is when our event was set to start. Not my usual start time - unless I am on a Virtuous Gym Day - but I was willing to give it a go!

The idea was that some of the 1000 companies listed in the book - all firms who've done exceptionally well, created significant numbers of jobs and contributed heavily towards an overall growth in British revenue - would be invited to attend on the morning of the book launch. And I would be there, pens in hand, already busy adding their companies' names to the board in brightly-coloured inks.

There were a few things to work out - what to draw on, how big it could go, would I have time to create an entire piece, how long would it take. Rob worked out that a large, robust paper-based print with some of the book's cover illustration already present would provide an immediate focus for guests, and it would look like I'd been working on it all night.

Into gaps in the illustration carefully edited in by Rob I would write the company names, in trusty Poscas pre-bought by Rob in a frenzy of pen-buying not seen since his college days! Poscas are renowned for their 'every-surface' reliability and nicely opaque ink, and a bagful of yellows, blues and whites was duly thrust into my palm on arrival at the Stock Exchange at 6.30am.

There was a lot to like about this event. First, staying in a 4-star just down the road from the venue meant a delightful 5.30am walk with commuters, cyclists and paper deliverers through historic London, over the Blackfriars Bridge and past Amen Corner with its ancient, monastical roots. Buildings I'd seen more recently in pictures towered over me, a foot-based rather than the usual engine-powered journey allowing me time to stare up at them. The weather was beautiful. Second, having a big pile of pens handed to you, along with a hand waved in the direction of financially-important selection of breakfast treats, certainly took the edge off any tiredness.

I'd visited the LSE the night before as I treated myself to a solo dinner at the famous Paternoster Chop House, next door to the Stock Exchange. (I'd taken a sketchbook and drawn the diners between courses, and while sipping the eye-wideningly delicious coffee; none of them knew, and some of them (the Boris vs Hunt arguing ones to my right) turned up at the event the next morning, not showing the slightest sign of the 4 bottles of red that came to the table.) I'd seen my work dressing the LSE columns - one of those times you suddenly get all bothered about your 'idiosyncratic line quality'...

Inside, the building was festooned with my art, piles of books ready to give out. Jessica at another fave client of mine, Premm Design, had created all of the huge boards and posters in the building - no mean feat as it was splashed on a real variety of screens, boards, windows and walls.

Female staff arrived in Pantone-correct green dresses and heels, while smartly-suited men walked in with excited faces - all of them looking as if the most studious class in school had just been told a special school outing had been organised for the day. An animation had been made from the work too; everyone paused to watch as the sound boomed and the animation played across the floor-to-ceiling void, all while the Nikkei, Dow Jones and FTSEs flashed green and red in a rapid-fire succession of results. Cue: applause!

Work had begun and needed to continue at a cracking pace - 50 names to add, by 10.30. Jennifer from Wardour read them out to me replete with correct (and sometimes stylistically incorrect) spellings, a colour was chosen, a position for it, and a lettering style. Sometimes with little illustrations, sometimes not! Everyone was keen to know where their name was, and could they please pose with it??

The event was over in a flash. Happy traders and company directors mixed with creatives and watched drawing possibly for the first time since school; they ate posh snacks, drank coffee and biggedr up their own incredibly impressive achievements. Warmth and good feeling filled the building, but it was suddenly time to go and eat/sleep/sit down/rest.

Since I was working most of the time it was hard to take photographs, but thanks go to Rob for some of these and this one in particular taken by an LSE staff member - Jennifer from Wardour (hours away from heading to Glastonbury), and me and Rob about to catch up on our 25 years on the planet since we graduated together in 1993!

Thanks also to the staff who made me very welcome, and gifted me this beautiful metal official Stock Exchange pin. I had to swear to imbue the virtues and values of British industry and trade...or something...which I did, and duly pinned the glittering crest onto my shirt.

Now who's boss.

Walking Each Other Home

"We sit on the edge of a mystery. We have only down this life; so dying scares us - and we are all dying. But what if dying were perfectly safe? What would it look like if you could approach dying with curiosity and love, in the service of other beings? What if dying were the ultimate spiritual practice?"

So begins the new book by beloved, world-renowned spiritual teacher Ram Dass, and his close friend and fellow teacher Mirabai Bush. This book is the 'follow-up' to Ram's other writings, arguably the most famous of which is his 1971 'Be Here Now', which has become a classic manual for conscious being, and an account of his spiritual journey, consulted and referred to by millions of humans worldwide. I was given the opportunity to illustrate this book at the beginning of this year, and as a long-term yoga practitioner (*cough* as I picture my yoga teacher noting my recent absences!) with a growing, more recent interest in the 'self that can't be shown in Instagram' - the spiritual self, the one that's hardest to recognise, be true to and look after - I grasped this opportunity with both grateful hands.



My yoga teacher had talked of Ram Dass many times and I'd seen his books in her collection, so I knew he was culturally very significant, and much-loved; he's a bewilderingly curious character. Born Richard Alpert, he began life as an academic and clinical psychologist, a colleague of fellow clinical psychologist Timothy Leary at Harvard University, before establishing the Harvard Psilocybin Project with Leary, which is precisely what it sounds like - experimenting with and documenting the beneficial effects of hallucinogenic drugs - and the 'Good Friday Experiment', the first double-blind study of drugs and the mystical experience in 1962 with Walter Pahnke.

Now this already sounds like a fulsome life well lived. But by now, this person was also a published author and on the Board of Directors at Cambridge, Massachusetts, with several foundations to his name (did I say his PhD was on 'achievement anxiety'?) So I'm leaving a lot out of his story, as there's so much to tell - but we can cut to the travels to India, and the study under a spiritual teacher which led him to be the character we know now. For more about Ram's life, read his easy-to-digest life story here.

So. It’s long been said that I get all the ‘difficult’ topics, illustration-wise — constipation, period pain, cancer, erectile dysfunction, IBS, depression, dementia, contraception, Crohn’s — all handled by my pens. This new book is about dying, and how to do prepare for it with grace and awareness...so I wasn't surprised to receive the commission! It's another potentially difficult subject of course, and an obviously upsetting one, which was partly the point of its creation - we just don't like to think about it. But becoming older and more fragile physically, 86-year-old Ram and his friend Mirabai wanted to explore the journey towards death, grieving and loss, with humour and a lightness of touch, so that we may read it too, and look forwards with our eyes calm and open. After all - it's coming. We just don't know when or how.

I know - it all sounds very idealistic, and rather lofty when you're sitting at work stressing about finishing the next job, how to pay for this and that, worrying about the car repairs and when you'll next get time to watch another Glow/clean the bathroom/send that next promo. But Ram reminds us in the opening pages that 'we have a real deadline'. And that, of course, made me laugh; we do, and I'm a great one for thinking there's always time tomorrow, so reading parts of this book were...maybe a little sobering.



But it's a light read, and it's beautifully written. The illustrations, a mixture of real and digital ink, are sprinkled generously throughout the book from full-page images to tiny spots, and each one was a pleasure to do. I worked both in the studio and in an Edinburgh hotel room where I was based at the time for an on-location job, working on this book in the evenings. All created in shades of blank ink, and eventually turned blue for the pages, the limited palette made for some challenges with regard to contrast and clarity, but I enjoyed having parameters.

The subject matter did not spare the horses either - the request to illustrate a burning ghat had me peering sadly at image after image online, before realising this was simply the kind of visible send-off we're just not used to seeing. For them, it's not only healthy, but desirable and normal. After that, the drawing was easy. Animals and plants play a large part in the book because of Ram's location on the island of Maui, and the wicker coffin was a very meditative thing to create. My favourite illustration in the whole book however is not the busy full-pager of birds and leaves and lettering - much as I loved doing that one - but the simple, lone rock. Who knew that I would like the simplest of drawings the most, used as I am to cramming in detail. In fact, the feedback I kept receiving was to 'give air' to the images. Always keen to give 'value for money', I can lean towards crowding my illustrations, so as I did them, they moved from writhing detail to very minimal. (There are over 40 illustrations in the book, so to see them all, you'll have to buy it!)

Interestingly, within a couple of days of starting the first test image, I was involved in a distressing incident which resulted in a man's arrest and my having to give a statement to the police. The night it occurred I missed my deadline, which then took up all of my focus and worry. With the reassurance of my overseeing agent (thanks MP) and a sympathetic client, the immediate anxiety about the deadline gave way to the gravity of what I'd witnessed, and I was able to put the deadline anxiety aside and settle into some quite time dealing with the incident and the people involved before returning to the job a day later. When I look back at the piece I was working on at the time, I can see the franticness of the work, and the eagerness to compensate the client with what I felt was necessary in the light of the missed deadline - but then I also see, as the pieces progressed over the weeks, a sense of proportion introducing itself; a lightening, a calming, and a more conscious approach, despite a very big list of illustrations. Which is all very, very interesting.

I aim to read the book from start to finish now - a little at a time - and enjoy the placement of the illustrations the designer has chose. You can buy a copy direct from the publisher and most good bookshops. Choose carefully - there are myriad other, more deserving independent book shops that would appreciate your hard-earned money aside from Amazon (and who pay their taxes!)

Thank you to Jennifer from SoundsTrue for the opportunity, to Matt for helping me stay focussed on this lengthy, sprawling job among myriad others, and to Ram and Mirabai for writing the book. I hope did your words justice.

Dreadful Young Ladies

Dreadful Young Ladies by Kelly Barnhill was published in February to a ripple of curiosity on Twitter - 'who's done this cover?' 'Does anyone know this cover artist?' 'Who DID this?'

I've never experienced this before, and certainly the cover is one of my favourite covers ever, so I'm finally happy to put my name to this gorgeous, murky, witchy collection of stories about women and girls using powers they shouldn't have to do things they shouldn't be doing...or should they? Grief and hope, jealousy, loss, power and love all surge through this ornery family of tales in this, the author's first book for grown-ups.

The characters live in unusual worlds different from, but eerily familiar to, our own. I can only urge you to read it for yourself; I rarely get the time to read an entire manuscript, usually having to work on sections selected for my by the editor, or getting half to two-thirds of the way through it in order to glean clues for the cover. But this one I read cover to cover.

Commissioned by the wonderful, patient Laura Williams of Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill, this hardcover needed a legendary treatment. I had a slightly slow start, aware of the impact this book was going to have for both the well-known writer as her first adult fiction, and the publisher. But once the stories had been consumed, sketches started to flow - from this peep into the mind of the writer - or is it one of her characters? -

to this typographic treatment based on fairy-tale lettering undermined by the bugs, webs, eyeballs and bones of the supernatural element to the stories:

 

I looked at further type treatments, suggesting we build the macabre feel into the letters themselves, with a rather Gothic and energetic feel:

- before settling on this insect-woman with wings crocheted together from story elements. The human-moth woman's enormous braid was inspired by an earlier illustration from a poetry book for Andrea Gibson which was not included for being potentially controversial - it had a serious political tone, for a seriously political poem. I was working on the two books quite close together, and the rejected braid just fell into place as the centrepiece of this giant (tiny?) insect:

Once this was approved, came the job of inking it in. Check the time-lapse of this happening!

The artwork took a couple of days before being laid over a hand-inked background texture:

and falling stars. Then the inside of the book needed little icons for its chapters, so I created a whole set of numbers and chapter headings, with dark little wing-dings to break up text:

Satisfied with the job, Laura and I sent the whole massive, multi-layered file off to press and  put the book to the back of our minds until publication day.

And then one day in January...it arrived.

I struggle to describe how beautiful the book is - because I didn't expect the other 50% of the cover to be so beautifully complemented by Laura's breathtaking choice of paper and print. A skin-feel stock hugs the black, gold-embossed hardback, and the cover itself shimmers with a layer of pearlescent ink underneath the CMYK:

The pages are artfully studded with my inked decorations, brave chunks of white space adding to the tension:

  

and check out the shimmering as you turn the cover in the light:

This is one of my favourite covers ever, and I think that's down to a few things combined. The subject matter appealed to me straight away, and was pitched to me enthusiastically by Laura who described me as having precisely the right blend of skills and vibe. Thanks Laura! Second, the artwork is only half the story of this cover - the paper and finishing bring the whole thing to life, creating a curious, slightly unsettling-feeling object which, without even looking at the words, you want to pick and turn around in your hands.

Thank to Laura for commissioning me, and to Kelly for writing the book. She's writing two more, and I can only hope that one of those might make it my way. We know Oprah liked this book, having added it to her to list this year:

And in the meantime, you can fead some reviews of the book here, and if you're in the US buy a copy here, or in the UK, from here.

Publishers Weekly

Washington Independent Review

Library Journal