The Baskerville Project

On Monday I spent the day drawing a detailed letter V in Fry's Baskerville, for the Baskerville Project organised by David Osbaldestin at the Birmingham City University.
As a BIAD ex-student, ex-tutor and lettering geek, I was very excited to be asked, and was happy to be sat at a makeshift desk, complete with decaf coffee, packet of crisps, iPhone at side and all my tools, just like my studio. Except that my studio at home isn't painted green floor-to-ceiling with a million-pound motion capture camera known as Milo glowering in the opposite corner. (For more on the frighteningly large and strangely silent Milo, go here.)
The project is to honour the creation of the lovely Baskerville font in Birmingham in 1757. The video documentation from the day is being developed into a series of 11 animated films, which form the basis of a large scale HD multi-screen installation at Millenium Point, Birmingham, for the Hello Digital Festival. It's also being shown at the Plus Type Festival. The artwork is devised for a multi-screen installation of 11 iMacs on plinths arranged in a circle. Each iMac will be showcasing a short animated film, of each one of the artists creating their letter.
What a fabulous day it was! I began the day sipping coffee, saying hello to old colleagues and meeting new chums, and ended it bashing away at my first attempt at slate-carving, covered in grey slate dust with gritty eyeballs - courtesy of the charming Gabriel Hummerstone, all the way from Devon, who was charged with doing the letter B and let me have a go on the back of his slab. (I carved the slate the way I bang nails in - a little wimpy to begin with, but switching up to a bigger bashing tool soon solved that).
In between I'd watched Barry the copper-engraver from Dudley making his 'R' on a little sand-filled pocket, ancient briefcase stuffed with tools; met Evelin Kasikov the embroiderer making her 'S' from CMYK threads, seen the four pieces of Karen Lewis' 'A' come together effortlessly before my eyes, and seen Amy Brown's monoprint 'I' evolve on the desk opposite - beautiful. My 'V' was centred on the parallel development of the steel nib (my weapons of choice) which, if you don't already know, were invented in Brum in the 1700s, shortly after Baskerville. The world's steel nib industry was centred in the city, where famous names like Gillott and Mitchell made their nibs, only to meet a tragic ending when the Biro (pantomime hissing please) took over the market in the mid 1900s. The nib factories closed, tipping hundreds of thousands of nibs into the earth. Why am I not spending my weekends digging desperately with my bare hands to find them? Because they were steel, and therefore would, by now, be mere dust. I’m sure the sprits of all those unused pens still scribble away like lunatics when the sun goes down. It makes me want to cry. I was therefore pleased to be given a nice sharp consonant with which to make my point.
I biked back to New Street station thinking how bloody great my job is, being given the chance to do things like this, and admiring the skills of the people I'd spent the day with. I forget - it's easy to do - how many other ways there are to make things, and just how many humans there are creating, all over the country, the world, all the time. Here's to them, and to John Baskerville himself!

Further pictures from the day:
http://www.doesntcostapenny.com/index.php?baskerville-project

Other artists taking part:
Alex Hughes | Alex Parre | Caroline Archer | Barry Caine | Clive Colledge

The Baskerville Project:
http://www.baskervilleproject.com/node/44

Hello Digital Festival:
http://www.hellodigital.net/events/baskerville/

Plus Type Festival:
http://www.youplusus.net

Photos by the lovely Matt and Nathan at Smile:

Meet my devastating new weaponry.

A 48-colour box of Faber Castell brush pens with raked tiering and flip-top box, fastened by paper button and thread and supplied with free bottle of felt tip magic, which I am pouring all over my new work. They are shown next to my other artillery, the Staedtler Triplus set, three years old and still the blazin' squad.

All's Well That Ends Well.

My first ever paid job after my degree was as a propsmaker for the Royal Shakespeare Company, where I moved to Stratford briefly, stitching, gluing and mackling-together giant books, Capulet party invites and man-sized snakesuits for a season's productions. I grew up with my tongue out over pages in 'The Bloody Book ' - a weighty tome of Shakey's stories adapted for children and illustrated in full blood-soaked colour by Victor Ambrus, installing a lifelong love of Ophelia (whose pose I copied in the bath), Puck, Ariel, and the Witches whose physiognomies I then turned into 3D masks at college, as part of a new campaign for The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

Wizz forward to 2006, and actually I did do a campaign for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, through Palmer Hargreaves Wallis Tomlinson in Leamington. I did tons of illustrations, a map of Stratford, Tamworth pigs, sheep, shovels, ink blots and lots and lots of lettering, to be used on leaflets advertising each of the Trust's 5 properties. You can get a feel for it here.

Whoosh through another couple of years, and I've just come back from Stratford, spending a rain-sodden weekend with siblings in a Holiday Inn next to the alarmingly swollen Avon. As we wandered towards the Birthplace, siblings and I saw a sign with a familiar feel. Hey, you drawed that! shrieks sister. A sign? Wasn't in the usage, but hey, it looks smart - like what they've done with the herbs. Let's go inside. Oh, it's on a guide book too? OK...and look! A bookmark with my work on? A postcard set? Big posters in the Tourist Office!

As we walked around Stratford you couldn't avoid stumbling across some scribble or other by Inkymole, writ large and dangling overhead. The bus tour revealed more and more - I'm sure I spotted my Tamworth pig blown up into a poster somewhere around Anne Hathaway's cottage.

This is extremely pleasing to see (the signs on every house look lovely), and a gentle ambition fulfilled. Watching American tourists pose for family photos underneath signs brought a glow to my cheeks. I wasn't paid for quite such a vast spread of applications of the work - let's say it's more than a little beyond the scope of the original licence - but the Trust are benefitting from every new body through the door and every bookmark sold, and if my pen has helped another oak beam stay put, or added another few years to the life of a precious artefact, I'm happy. Now I am off to lie dead in the bath with pond weed around me.

Here's my note, Miss

To borrow unashamedly the format of my friend and fellow illustrator Jill Calder (jillcalder.com), whose work you need to feast your eyes on if you haven't already, here's a list of excuses for the one month radio silence! Hot damn, it's been a busy month, and blogging's taken a back seat to these little fellas:
- 5 book covers plus a cover re-design
- a dps for Renault F1 team
- a Christmas catalogue for an American client (deck the halls ALREADY!)
- a teatowel design
- planning our ground floor studio extension - no doubt more on that later - with a real live architect!
- painting the house front and back, which involves covering the previous owner's aesthetically-challenged render (it has taken weeks, many brushes, scaffold hire and a large chunk of our patience)
- entering the Images, Society Of Illustrators LA and Altpick competitions
- designing new 6x9 postcards with new photos by Anthony Saint James *future blog*
- making the next tattoos (2 in a series)
- mailing out 750 mini-promo items
- working out the Hallowe'en and Christmas projects
- making a brand new folio for Matthew, super-charged NY Agent, for his trip to San Fran
- seeing the Klimt exhibition at the Tate Liverpool
- learning to roller skate again on proper grown-up ones, and falling over
- buying proper made-in-the-UK running shoes
- phew...
- making vegan egg custards - and OMG, yummy:
- chocolate cake with mint chocolate ganache.

I hope you can let me off.

The Illustration Conference, NYC

We've just done ICON5 in new York. Taking place every two years, and sponsored by the likes of Adobe, Graphic Artists' Guild, Luerzer's Archive, Directory of Illustration and The Alternative Pick, The Illustration Conference is something that only happens in the US and only every two or three years.

Here's the official blurb about it, from Whitney, the lovely President who beamed her way through the conference:
"As illustrators, we don’t go to an office everyday, so ICON5 is a great opportunity to be around people who do what we do, to talk about trends and issues and to get re-inspired. ICON continues to gather the industry's best and brightest talent to present and talk about their work, their business, their lives, and their passion for illustration.'"

Well, I'm happy to say that as good as that sounds, it was actually much more interesting than that! See photos and a fulsome report on the Association of Illustrators' news page.

Ink and lace

I've just been sent the final versions of this ad campaign for the company 'Secrets From Your Sister', in Toronto, done for Jeff at Juniper Park there. I got the job via B+A. Hours of drawing went into these, with many miniscule alterations till they were finalised. There are three ads in the series, and they're sending me a tasty package of the garms themselves as my reward!
Go here to read about the company itself: Secrets From Your Sister

The Stepmother

Just created this illustration for the cover of 'The Stepmother' by Carrie Adams. I love the colours - unusually for me, no black! The 'new woman' arrives and upsets the long-departed Ex, who has subsumed her unhappiness for the sake of the their very happy three daughters. Bound to have a happy ending, though I'm looking forward to next week's book cover for Simon & Schuster, 'The Poison Garden'. Oh yes...right up my dark and treacherous street.

Association of Illustrators 'Guide to Survival'

I've just received my copy of the AOI's 'Guide to Survival' book, for which I created this illustration for the section on Fees.
I did it all with felt tip pens and pencils on A4 lined paper, and it's a picture of my brain when piecing together a quote!

Fair Trade Gorgeousness.

Here is the chocolate we made for both the Bernstein & Andriulli Book Launch goodie bags, and to give away at the iCON5 conference.

Read it and weep:
- 72% cocoa
- Fair Trade
- 100% Organic

By jove, you'll be wanting some of that then!

Made by Treasure Chocolates in Corby, UK by Franz Hippell, to Inkymole spec.

Packaging by Mole and printed by RCS, Retford, UK.

525 bars foiled, wrapped and sealed by Leigh, Joanne, Chicken, Anne Coleman and John Coleman.

We have a few left, if this is your kind of dark, bitter, face-smearing dirtiness.

'Beauty is God's Handwriting'

A quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, American poet, made into a tattoo for the Bernstein & Andriulli book launch, New York, July 2008. Worn by Mole, Leigh, Tracy, and Katie, in attendance.

Of course, they rub off after four days.

If you'd like one email me!

LA Woman

These were the bags I made for the Feb trip to LA.

Printed in full colour on white satin and sewn together by Anne Coleman.
Adorned with a removable nibflower badge, 58mm, each with one genuine 10mm Swarowski crystal attached.

They were given out with one of my notebooks inside (link) some stickers and badges (link) inside. Might make more - I am a bag collector anyway, but the next ones need to be more functional - and BIGGER!

New York, London, LA, Providence, Barcelona, Hinckley...

I have had such a frantic eighteen months that nothing's appeared here for ages. I'm so excited about updating everything! Shows, jobs, awards, prizes, new agents...my pen is wobbling at the thought.

New template, new images, new stories: watch this space. Or, watch these ones in the meantime:
www.inkymole.com
Inkymole on Directory of Illustration
Inkymole's MySpace
and
Inkymole on Bernstein and Andriulli's site

Fatboy.

This is my entry for this week's Illustration Friday, the theme of which is 'Fat' (http://www.illustrationfriday.com

He was painted on a wall for a club night in London.
He has been pasted up in other places and ultimately is awaiting permanent posting to the window of the local McVomit, where he will annoy for probably only an hour or so before being removed.
However the photos will have been taken and point made.