Illustration: advertisement for 'Spam'

I was, lets be clear about this, not very chuffed to be given an ad for 'Spam' as an illustration project. I'm vegan & pro-animal rights &"happy characters" surrounding a can of dead pig frankly galls me, so I chose to do something which fulfilled the requirements of the brief but seemed more appropriate to me personally than the jolly party bollocks on the form.

Hence the illustration: A happy spaceman with his can of pig floating in zero gravity, a happy boar-alien who'll be eating a canful of delicious human & a meat factory production-line machine with a massive claw for chopping bits off mammals.

The astronaut reminds me of some shots from films like Alien, with the obvious connotation of getting eaten by a thing with big teeth. It seemed a logical step for a "happy alien" which was happy at finding a chunk of meat, conveniently packaged in a space suit to keep it fresh, to be a sort of boar or pig, given the contents of 'Spam.' There are quite a few examples of pig-aliens in popular culture, such as the monster Aggedor from the Curse/Monster of Peladon series' of Doctor Who [Link] & I like the idea of humans being put back in their place in the circle of life, as dinner for big things with big teeth.

The "happy robot" was a little less obvious; I had no intention of going anywhere near the anthropomorphised fruit machine on the brief & instead thought it appropriate to use meat-processing factory machinery. The idea of mass-produced dead food turns my stomach in so many knots, so I went for something that looks like it could be used to put a man in a can. It goes without saying that a machine, an inanimate object manufactured to perform a single task, cannot be 'happy', & so I figured someone who was feeling really depressed about the whole butchery thing painted a smiley face on it to cheer themselves up. I hope cheered themselves up so much they used the claw on themselves for fun.

The background was modelled on this photograph: [Link], didn't have time to make it any more detailed & have no intention of going back to it cos this project weas bloody tedious. The robot itself is based on this delightful piece of butchering quipment: [Link], an automated system for chopping animals' legs off.

The original painting is acrylic on W&N Acrylic paper, roughly 20x20cm. The brief stipulated ""no seedy, violent or gloomy imagery", despite the animal-consumption industry being all of those things (udders, man, they're sex bits), so I restrained myself from too much gory spatter & carcasses.

"Plan ahead be sure you can produce the final artwork to the required standard in the time available."

HA.

Summer Work & 'Cocktail Party'

These images are characters designed as part of the summer project, in which we were to design seven people in the style of seven artists. I only managed 5 designs & with my impeccable professionalism, didn't quite complete it over Xmas & the new year. The images are all on brown packing paper which was originally padding in mail order boxes, hence the many creases.

'Party-Goer' after Aubrey Beardsley

Pencil & black ink - Brian Reade describes Beardsley's method: "he never, so far as we know, made preliminary studies, or took tracings from sketches, for any of his compositions... His usual practice was to begin his drawing by scribbling with a pencil, making a host of flourishes & loops & scratchy lines. Over these somewhat vague schemata he drew with pen & brush, & with a firmness of hand that led without considerable erasion to the finished result." Hence I have not rubbed out any pencil marks but worked straight over them with pen/brush. I do not know what process was used to turn AB's drawings into the familiar bookplate prints. I experimented with Photoshop processes to get a purely black/white image but didn't find a satisfactory method that was not impracticably time-consuming.

 'Beekeeper' after Heironymous Bosch

'Göring Ramsay' after Sue Coe & John Heartfield

I was inspired by Sue Coe's I had decided long before that one character would be a chef, but concieved the idea of an overworked, rushing cook. Having seen a little of Coe's work, especially the pro-animal rights themes, I decided a villainous character & decided to use someone about as anti-vegan as it's possible to get - TV chef Gordon Ramsay. That led me to thinking of butchery, which in turn reminded me of John Heartfield's photomontage illustration of Hermann Göring, the Nazi Reichsmarschall [Link to image]. The meat cleaver was an obvious prop in place of the axe. I saw a photograph of Ramsay in a similar three-quarter view pose to the Göring image & caricatured the scale of the head to resemble the photomontage. The comical facial expression is influenced by Coe, particulalrly the use of teeth, which are often prominent in her images. The icon on the armband is a Michelin Star. Sod knows how many animals he's shot on telly.

'Revolutionary Woman' after Edgar Degas

'Field Surgeon' after Rembrandt