Inkymole

The ERR Bill, in more detail.

2013-05-02T11:31:00.000+01:00

Following my article on the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill (ERR) on Tuesday, the AOI spent a day pulling together as much information as possible about it, and its legal implications for illustrations.

Where my article served as a call-to-arms (the equivalent of an emergency briefing by megaphone) and dealt with a series of slowly-emerging indicators that something like this was imminent, along with personal experiences and with the potential consequences of infringement 'at the coalface', the AOI's will give you a technical point-by-point breakdown of the Act in full along with some chapters on their previous involvements in instances where copyright legislation is threatened with change or compromise.

I'm glad to have brought this to so many people's attention and am relieved to see the AOI examining this in detail. Three members of staff spent well over a day putting the feature together so I strongly recommend you read it. The AOI exist, after all, to inform us of and expand upon such legislation, and to advance and protect illustrators' rights. Take some time out with your cup of tea and biscuit later to absorb their their efforts.

Meanwhile I'll be gathering together some of the tips and ideas shared in the hours following my original post which deal with things like metadata, embedded ownership information and watermarking. Thanks to everyone who contributed! Tuesday was a great day for input, shared concerns, swapped ideas, open opinions and the pooling of resources.

Incidentally published above is the image mentioned in my article; tested with Google Image Search, found to be in unauthorised use, and removed from the offending website by a user foggy about her rights, and relying on ignorance and Tumblr for her defence. Try an image of your own - you might be surprised what you find! Simply drag your image to the camera symbol as shown in the screengrab. Large brands have Brand Police (yes that's a real thing) to carry out such vigilant searches on a daily basis, in order to protect their brand, its marks and reputation against inappropriate, damaging or unauthorised mention or use, and this is the closest thing we have in terms of a tool that does anything similar. Try it out!

The best to you all, fellow crayon-wielders! United we stand, and all that.

Mole.

Angry Robots are the best.

2013-04-30T16:15:00.000+01:00

Well you already know that if you pay any sort of attention to my news feed - cage fighting, Jason Statham, Iron Men, Transformers, Robocop, horror films...

But I'm talking in this instance about Angry Robot the publishers. Marc Gascoigne and his team publish sci-fi, fantasy and 'everything in between'. And I can tell you, it's a juicy change from norm, and coupled with the teen fiction, gets my creative fluids flowing.

I've done four books for them, the latest being announced in a cover reveal by them a couple of weeks ago. The second instalment of a trilogy by Emma Newman, Any Other Name deals in gargoyles, secret organisations, magic, deception and arranged marriage. The cover was thus ripe for a little ink-heavy scribbling...obvs. I love them because quite frankly I can settle into my comfort zone of black, detail, swirls, splots and hidden things...and the moon. I love a good moon.

Below is the cover to Any Other Name and its predecessor, Between Two Thorns, and the other two books for Angry Robot, by Cassandra Rose Clarke. Check out my furious Manticore - it's female, you know.

An Act of War (or, If You Create Anything Visual At All, You Will Want To Read This.)

2013-04-30T12:46:00.001+01:00

OK. This means war.

For many months now I've been considering a return to that relic of the 90s, watermarking. As of ten minutes ago, that consideration became a steel-hard resolve. Allow me to tell you why. Because you'll want to know.

When I learned about Google Image Search, I decided to drop in one of my images to see how it worked. Within seconds, I'd found that image being used without permission or payment on a perfume website. The owner was easy to find, but her breathtaking ignorance was something else. 'If I hadn't found it on Twitter, I'd have contacted you to ask permission', she bleated.

What? And 'what?' again? I reminded her in idiot-proof terms that it is illegal to steal an image and use it without either asking or paying for it. She knew, she said, because 'I'm an illustration major myself so I know this is how you earn your living'.

Quite. Idiot indeed. She took the image down immediately, with an apology, but nonetheless I was mad, and more than a little unnerved. But she had, presumably and if this is even on her radar, relied upon this being an 'orphaned work' and thus usable by anyone.

Orphaned what? Quick time-travel back to 2008. We went to the ICON Illustration Conference in NYC where I drew a piece on their creative wall about the horror that was the then-proposed Orphan Works Act.
Cute name, but the meaning of it is far from cute:
'An orphan work is a copyrighted work for which the copyright owner cannot be contacted. In some cases, only the name of its creator or copyright owner is known, and no other information can be established. A work can become an orphan because the copyright owner is unaware of their ownership, or the copyright owner has died, or the copyright owner is a company that has gone out of business, and it is not possible to establish to whom ownership of the copyright has passed. In other cases, the author and origin of a work simply cannot be determined, even after great diligence has been conducted.'

'Diligence' in this case can mean a simple internet search. The woman in my case didn't even try - she just took her chances. But if she had, she would have been considered to have carried out a search of due diligence.

Why is this important? Well, in the US anyone can use an image they've found if they have satisfied themselves that although it has a copyright holder, they cannot be traced. How they do this can be as rudimentary as a web search. The Orphan Works Act required anyone who wants to be sure of protecting their work to register in, in a huge central register (the Copyright Act 0f 1976 meant that this requirement to register your copyright in an actual step, introduced in the 1909 Copyright Act, had been eliminated). In 2008 the Orphan Works Bill was introduced by three Members of the U.S. House of Representatives overseeing intellectual property legislation - it attempted to attach further conditions to try to protect both the copyright of those people whose images were theirs but difficult to locate, and the rights of what are termed 'good faith' users - academics, writers and librarians perhaps who wish to use an image 'in good faith' and for which they can find no owner despite an 'exhaustive' search. The bill was fought hard in that country by creative bodies, organisations and lobbyists, and eventually the bill died having never passed the House of Representatives (although it was passed by the Senate).

At this point, I'd like to remind you that copyright is regarded in most parts of the world as a basic human right. Ownership of your creation is automatic, and legally considered to be an individual's property. It's enshrined in the Berne Convention and other international treaties, where it's considered to be a basic human right. What this means in practice is that you can go after somebody who exploits it without your permission - even if pursuing them is cumbersome and expensive.

Fast forward back to 2013. Having been sent link to a paper cutting artist's website, I viewed the work it and right at the top of the page was a piece of new work under which were the words 'Just need to work out how to make this more 'me' (nabbed the design)'.
Yep. She said that. Either foolish and very naive or horribly arrogant, her rather derivative works are being sold at reasonable sums of cash. Horrorstruck at the brevity with which the statement was made? I was.

All of this is occurring against a backdrop of ever-more common examples of illustrators' work being appropriated by clothing, bag, jewellery and other companies for use on their goods. A trickle of angry posts and blogs with assorted side-by-side 'My Original vs Their Copy' jpegs are appearing in my daily read, sometimes with triumphant outcomes, sometimes not, but always accompanied by a nervous weariness that, very soon I, along with my creative comrades, will need to dust off our weaponised illo-suits and come out fighting, our intellectual property hiding behind us like terrified bear cubs in need of legislative or self-protection from the tedious but increasing horrors of the 'nabbing' of images.

I thought I had left watermarking and its associated paranoia behind as a relic of the late 1990s, never having to add that extra layer of type over an image, relieved at the welcome spontanaeity of 'jpeg > upload > share'.

So this morning came as a shock. With great stealth, and without it having appeared on any news programme, our lifelong, ancient, inherent right to our own automatically-generated copyright, which has existed as long as time itself, was altered by our own coalition government, courtesy if its Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act, nauseatingly-nicknamed Instagram Act. Were you consulted? No. I wasn't either. Gory detail here.

Here is the key paragraph from the clearest article doing the rounds this morning:
'For the first time anywhere in the world, the Act will permit the widespread commercial exploitation of unidentified work - the user only needs to perform a "diligent search". But since this is likely to come up with a blank, they can proceed with impunity. The Act states that a user of a work can act as if they are the owner of the work (which should be you) if they're given permission to do so by the Secretary of State.'

Which means what, then?

'In practice, you'll have two stark choices to prevent being ripped off: remove your work from the internet entirely, or opt-out by registering it. And registration will be on a work-by-work basis.'

Since applications like Tumblr replace any naming conventions with a string of numbers and/or letters, a carefully-labelled piece (the equivalent of a label with your name on sewn in your school gymn pants) will instantly be removed, and once it's been reposted only a handful of times, it can be near-impossible to cite the original creator of the thing you liked and wanted to share. Insta-orphaned?

I have spent my entire teaching career reassuring students of the simple fact of automatic copyright. 'Besides,' I would posit, 'exactly what can you do with a 72dpi image? Not much'. I feel teary at my own naivete; though I still refuse to believe the web-using population at large are a bunch of evil, lazy fucks who get a buzz from nicking hardworking people's creations, I still feel a teeth-clenching predictability at having to eat my own words, courtesy of the 'handful that do'.

So. On the eve of embarking on my new website, built from the ground up, I realise this is a site that will need to be built to take all of this into account. I will need to spend longer online preparing my images, labelling them, cropping them. I will tool them up in armour plating. I will use links to my site instead of just plopping an image in there. I will metatag everything. I WILL use Photoshop's info-embedding tool. And I will hunt you down if I see you using my images. And I'll be checking.

But more importantly, I will go on using the web and sharing the joy of my creations. I'll keep Facebooking things I've made and want to show you. I'll carry on Tumbling a thing I'm excited about.

Why? Because Fuck Them, that's why.

To Have And To Hold.

2013-04-28T18:07:00.000+01:00

My terribly efficient agent and friend Aaron and his wife-to-be Chris are getting married in July. How could I not offer to do their invitations for them?

Our copy was received in the post this morning. They’ve done the right thing and foil-stamped these expertly in white on a nice stiff manila board, replete with brown envelopes, round postage stamps and the cute little RSVP cards I put together to go with them. Hand-written addresses of course…

The type was created with black ink on paper (what else, I hear you sigh?). The original artwork is travelling over to NYC with our friends Kama and Dave in May, who will hand-deliver it to Aaron.

It’s going to be a beautiful wedding!

To infinity and beyond!

2013-04-26T09:44:00.000+01:00

I've done massive illustrations before and they scare me when I have to draw them 'actual size' (unlike my brave compadres Solo One and Carl Rosati, who just draw big and fearless).
So when I say the biggest illustration I've done was over 550 square feet - it was, but the actual artwork was only about A1.

This is another big beast. At 70ft this Holiday Inn Express billboard in Times Square towers over the streets of Manhattan showering onlookers (uplookers?) with mathematical formulae. They were provided by mathematician Professor Cody Worthington, and the job was commissioned by Ogilvy NYC by Dagmar Wong, through Bernstein & Andriulli.

The little guy at the bottom isn't real...but I believe he is named for the professor who helped with the math(s)!

Since the piece is actually made up of 10 separate A3 sections of inverted soft pencil drawings, it was all hands on deck in the Inkymole studio with the fingers of Brook Valentine (link) taking some of the strain. Each separate section was scanned at such a high res it weighed in at a whopping half a gig, thus the transit of a composited piece via an upload link would have made for a very slow and possibly unmanageable file - the whole piece had to be assembled in house at Ogilvy. The centre lock-up was created in coloured pencil, scanned here and overlaid.

Most important was the scaling - the lettering had to be around 6" when on the board, so all calculations had to be worked back from that. The actual equations themselves were drawn from quantum physics, Butterworth's Lowpass Filter, Radar Equations, Matched Filtering, Electrodynamics, Calculus, Harmonic Motion, Newton's laws, Projection Slice Theorem, Gamma Distribution and more. And yes, of course; we understand every single one of them now!

Here's Justin at Ogilvy experimenting with a test piece of my lettering, blown up and pinned to a window:

Here's a section of untreated formulae:

A detail of the lock-up drawn in in coloured pencil:

You can see the billboard up until mid-June. I wonder what it looks like with those lights on?

On Girls And Pens

2013-04-23T23:44:00.000+01:00

This is the latest tattoo I've designed for Taylor Mali, New York based poet and teacher.

This is nicely demonstrated on Brook Valentine's fine canvas - don't worry, he's used to seeing photographs of his words emblazoned across assorted female body parts. He attracts those kinds of moves - as he puts it, 'I got interesting photos sent to me of the last tattoo you made for me. Here's one of the ones I can show you.' (Cue photograph of girl pulling knickers aside...you'll need to scroll...)

An imposing and deep-voiced gentleman, Taylor performed at 'If A Girl Writes Off The World' in New York City, along with Shappy Seasholtz, Christine Aptowicz, Bernard Dolan and Sage Himself. Since then, I've offered the use of my pen for his temporary tats as and when a request comes in and time allows.

If you like temporary tattoos, let me know. We've done lots of of them but have few left, and we might do some more. Meanwhile, here is one of my favourite poems by him, 'The Impotence of Proof Reading':

And my second favourite, 'On Girls Lending Pens'.

My So-Called Life

2013-04-12T16:58:00.001+01:00

In this blog, two stories combined in a strange and spontaneous way.

In summer 2011 I lay on a beach on a little holiday and announced to Leigh my retirement from chick-lit in favour of the teen fiction that seemed to have been gradually replacing the women's lit for a while. I had got a bit typecast ('scuse the pun) - the Louise Bagshawes, Sophie Kinsellas, Cecilia Aherns and so on) and I was increasingly being asked to do work that wasn't 'me'. Plus, there were plenty of up-and-comers who would be happy to take up that mantle, and good luck to them!

So. It turned out to be the best decision I'd made in years as work rolled in soon after of a type which seemed to suggest 'you were right Mole', including series such as this one, the Rachel Riley Diaries! Number 7, the last one in the series, went off to press last week, but won't be seen on this blog for a bit as it's too new. And it's different from the first six...!

Like my other favourite teen author, Hayley Long, Joanna Nadin has been twice nominated for the Queen of Teen Award; she also has a previous life as Tony Blair's Special Advisor, and as Labour Party Policy Writer. Hmmm, impressive. Equally impressive to me was her working for a pop star (I get the feeling we're the same age) - over to you Joanna:

'I have certainly had a random career path, from being an assistant wardrobe mistress (I got to wash and iron clothes for Fine Young Cannibals’ singer Roland Gift, who was very famous in the 1980s) to reading the news on local radio, to writing scripts for the Prime Minister, and advising John Prescott what to say on TV. Working at Number 10 was incredibly exciting, and without a doubt the best “real” job I have had. And I still write speeches for Ministers now. I just get to do it from the sofa, instead of the corridors of power. As for deciding to become a writer – it was a kind of happy accident, really. I spent so much of my time as a teenager (and later on) inventing a life for myself, like Rachel. A life where things “happened”. But reality never worked out quite like it did in the script. And I felt cheated, until I realised I could give other people the adventures I had wanted for myself. That’s how I ended up writing my first book. Rachel was written as a kind of testament to what I saw as my tedious youth. Because at the time I was desperate to get out. But looking back, it was actually pretty exciting.'

As the news breaks mid-blogging session, I learn we both grew up Thatcher's children with Dads tutting and frowning concernedly at the TV. A fellow outspoken teenager with a mouth as big as her ambitions, I too dreamed of changing the world but through drawing not writing. I may not be changing the world, but on a day when arguably one of the most controversial leaders has just been announced as having passed on, and all that that means, I feel privileged to be drawing for people like Joanna, whose detailed, charming, highly gigglesome stories speak directly to my perma-teen...the same teen who still wears her '85 Top Shop hoops and wanted to marry Limahl but who was always impressed that Margaret Thatcher was a woman - a terrifying one, a misguided one maybe, but a woman. With earrings and everything.

Read about Rachel Riley and her So-Called Life:

http://keris.typepad.com/chicklet/2008/05/interview-joann.html
http://blog.oxfordchildrens.co.uk/tag/rachel-riley/

And the books can be bought here:
http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780192794512000.do#.UWLD

Graham Robson.

2013-04-02T12:28:00.000+01:00

Graham is a student at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, and is about to take his startlingly ready-for-the-universe folio out into the galaxy to try to make a living from his rather charming drawings of animals, characters and journeys.

He also makes books, by hand. A self-taught bookbinder, he designs and prints his own endpapers and packages his books beautifully in hand-cut paper covers.
We were so enamoured of his productiveness, attention to detail and enthusiasm for making things that we decided to put some of his sketchbooks in our shop. They were duly manufactured and sent to us with this typed notelet of instruction.

The one shown at the top is mine, with its special wrapping, and the blue one can be bought in our shop!

You can buy them here:
http://factoryroad.bigcartel.com/product/graham-robson-hand-built-sketchbook

Box of light.

2013-04-02T12:21:00.000+01:00

This is my lightbox, which I made at home in the garage with my Dad's help one weekend in 1990, when I came home from Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. I'd just started a Visual Communication degree, and needed one for the typographic projects that came thick and fast in the first term (26 briefs in one term, plus seminars and written work - a degree WAS a degree then - yep, controversial...)

Macs existed - there were three in the department - but they could only be booked by second and third years, who even then needed supervising. As first years we were banned from using them. And quite rightly so - our tutors were keen for us to work with real leading - that is, blocks of lead between rows of type - practice kerning on paper, use depth scales to typeset 6pt type with a 0.35 Rotring pen; to understand ems, picas, x-heights and descenders; appreciate ascenders, bowls and serifs; to recognise and avoid orphans and widows and to get the right number of dots in an ellipsis.

I loved it all - typography was very nearly the thing I did especially when Bob The Hunky Viking Typography Tutor told me 'I could have a career in it'. The poor chap would be rolling his flashing blue eyes at the liberties I take with letterforms now.

But the lightbox was crucial to tracing those first beautiful characters, and I haven't stopped using it to this day. Made of an old drawer, a spare plug, a strip light from B&Q and a bit of white perspex (from the perspex shop in Digbeth) it traces photographs, enlarges work, creates 'real life' layers outside of Photoshop, and many other tasks.

I've never replaced any of its parts. Proper workmanship you see: Dad + Garage + daughter's request + a screwdriver = 23-year warranty...and counting!

In a Trance.

2013-04-02T12:09:00.000+01:00

Danny Boyle's Autobiography was re-issued recently with a new cover by me. The shot of him is lovely - what a nice face! - and it was therefore easy to produce the energetic type and little drawings around this beaming director who clearly loves his job.

The cover is an illustrator's joy as it is both embossed and treated to a spot varnish on the main title and motifs. If you see a copy make sure you stroke it.

If you wanted to buy a copy you can get one from Faber and Faber's website (because we don't to Amazon now, do we?)
http://www.faber.co.uk/catalog/danny-boyle-amy-raphael/9780571301867

Personal Journals

2013-03-19T10:30:00.000Z

If you know me or my work, you'll know just how immense the period of 2006-2007 was in terms of personal work and the impact that it had on me and my work, and in fact everything really that happened after that.

In 2005 we - Leigh and I - came up with the idea of creating a body of visual responses to the lyrics of a man whose albums we'd been listening to for several years - Sage Francis. It was as simple as that really, but nothing could have prepared me for the slog, the tears, pencil-wringing, hard work and challenges that the idea would bring.

On October 23rd 2006, in a draughty building leased by a charity in Brick Lane, E1 (now a Burlesque club and restaurant), Sage Francis performed to a pin-drop quiet room crammed with excited faces, the exhausted artist and boyfriend hiding in the wings, and thus 'If A Girl Writes Off the World' was born. The show lasted for just under two weeks and marked the end of a year of stone-cold solid work, and the beginning of a firm friendship.

Sage wrote about his experience of the show on this blog, and it made various press. There was even an interview. But the greatest impact it had was to give me a chance to prove I could remember how to make personal work, and not to be afraid of the most frightening thing you can imagine doing. Parachute jump? Well, you wouldn't get me doing one now, but there were moments leading up to the show, with costs mounting and blank pieces of paper staring back at me, and 300 people coming from around the world, that I would gladly have swapped what I was doing for that.

The New York showing of the work, logistically probably the most difficult thing we've ever pulled off, with the ground floor of a Chelsea market space all to myself and a massive cross-Atlantic crate of delicate work, led directly to becoming part of my NY agency Bernstein & Andriulli, and formed further friendships with Bernard Dolan, Anthony Saint James and many Sage fans and colleagues.

Sage and I have worked together on things ever since then. I would love to do more for him, but we are both busy making a living and the making a living and the projects we want to do don't always co-incide. When they do, the results tend to be...pretty good.

So this book is more than just a chance to reminisce and play with paper. It's 10 years since Sage's pivotal album, Personal Journals was released, the one that fueled the visual content of the entire show, and 6 years since the Manhattan show. The dates get blurry, but I know anniversaries have arrived, and this book was an opportunity to revisit some of the artwork which didn't make the final cut, or which formed a tiny detail probably unnoticed by most.

Designed by me and hand-built five minutes from where Richard III was found slumbering in his hidey hole, these are half lined paper and half plain, with 8 mailable postcards and gold and silver foiled covers, featuring a close-up of the pencil piece 'Runaways'.

If you want to buy one, they're in our shop
http://factoryroad.bigcartel.com/product/inkymole-sage-francis-personal-journal-double-sided-notebook

If you're thinking of buying one in the US, get one straight from Sage's shop instead - his are signed
http://www.strangefamousrecords.com/news/personaljournalsnotebooks/

Thank you Sagey Franks. I'll always be grateful.
x

Austen Power

2013-01-30T23:01:00.002Z

It's the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's 'Pride & Prejudice' this week. At the weekend the Wall Street Journal's 'Arena' magazine ran the story with my pic, done in a day! (Editorial deadlines are among the tightest).

I've never read any JA, always preferring the coarse and unaffected darkness of the Brontes - but should I?

Artwork was commissioned by Manny Velez.

Shelf Stacker

2013-01-30T22:44:00.001Z

I went into WHSmith recently to get some bits, some stamps and the like. It looked like I'd been in there and bought off the staff to line up a load of my books - but this is honestly just how I found them, all within a few feet of each other. If I'd been with somebody I'd have laughed my head off, but since I was by myself, I'd have looked like a nutter, so just did what anyone else would have done and iPhoned it.

I've now done over 250 books. I reckon I'm on around 260-something - it seems a lot, but remember I've been doing it a long while! I just rarely get to see so many on sale on one place (apart from the charity shops when everyone's finished with their Louise Bagshawes! Yep...they're all mine...)

Motivate!

2013-01-22T12:35:00.000Z

This was a nice job. Done super-fast in the week before we went to New England for Bernard and Desarae's wedding, I worked with San Francisco agency Attik to produce a series of full-page ads for Scion, highlighting Toyota owned Scion's “Motivate” campaign. This is a forward-looking scheme that promotes entrepreneurship by awarding a small amount of capital, a vehicle and business mentoring to emerging creative businesses. I drew up three really detailed and bouncy illustrations covering the areas of design, fashion, and music, then created a nice hand drawn logo for the campaign. I also had to draw some little tiny cars! I didn't think I could draw cars.

All done over the space of about ten days, and in the bag with just a few hours to spare before the flight to Boston.

The Scion “Motivate” website shows these illustrations coming to life in assorted animations, and tells you a bit more about the scheme. If you're in the US, there's a good chance you'll have seen the ads dotted about in print.

Bernard & Desarae.

2013-01-22T12:31:00.000Z

2012 was a good year, for all sorts of reasons. One of them was the wedding of our dear friends Bernard and Desarae, in the beautiful setting of the hills of Spencer, Massachussetts.

We've known Bernard a long time. Poet, writer, activist, musician and partner to Sage Francis, BDolan has informed our music libraries and idealogies for almost as many years as Sage himself. He performed at the opening to our 'If A Girl Writes Off The World' show in Manhattan, as Evel Knievel, and as Bombzo the Clown - one of our most memorable evenings ever - and this big, warm, creative human has had a place in our hearts ever since.

So to be asked to make his wedding stationery was an honour indeed. The wedding was, of course, never going to be ordinary, and a whole eighteen months ahead the punk marching band, the puppy groomsman, the record-label stablemates, the cowboy boots and the tux were already in place, and the stationery had to reflect what guests could expect. Their bees, their little house in the woods, and their pets all needed to be in there.

The final Save-the-Date artwork was exchanged an hour before a gig in an unsalubrious Big John's over a plate of chips on BD's UK tour - here's how it developed from sketch to final:

The invites came a few months later, and looked like this. My favourite bit on the whole thing is Cupcake, the pug. Ella, the kitty, is in her cowboy boots, and we met both of them at the wedding, naturally.
In fact, I'm gonna blow up the doggy so you can see her, right here. She was as cute as she looks, but not so anxious as I've drawn her here. And she was SOLID.

The original sketch had a bit more bat action - culling the bats was in the end the only concession to tradition:

And in September, high up on a New England hill, the wedding took place in a barn, under hot sun which forced all the guests into shades so we could ALL look like record company execs. Bride Desarae not only organised virtually the entire wedding, she was instrumental in making two pale English vegans feel welcome and most handsomely catered for (our own dessert table? come on!), was the model of a perfect hostess throughout the whole event - no mean feat at your own wedding - and was beautiful on the day, a sparkly princess wearing crystals and that precious vintage ring which formed the centrepoint of the illustration. We spent time with a lot of people we don't see very often but who play important parts in our lives. I'll always be grateful we got the chance to be part of this very personal event, and that my pencils helped to create it - it remains among my favourite jobs of all time. Thank you Bernard and Desarae.

C'mon, Vogue!

2013-01-22T11:35:00.000Z

Free make-up arriving in a bag direct from Vogue HQ? Go on then!

Rebecca Mason at British Vogue asked me to illustrate an article on some of the golden rules of makeup for their January edition - you know, those rules you follow religiously as a nervous teenager but then flagrantly disobey as an adult! Quotes were taken from key makeup artists behind some of the biggest global brands like Dior, Nars, and Clinique and drawn using the actual pencils and liners they'd sent. Going from an ultra-fine liner pen to chunky pink lip gloss was a bit of a challenge - scale had to alter, and you can't apply any where near as much pressure as you can with a pencil or pen - but I conquered the learning curve, two versions and several hours later with a face full of the stuff. Well I needed to put those rules to the test didn't I? Here's the evidence.

Running on 45rpm.

2013-01-22T11:24:00.000Z

As well as illustrating, there are a lot of things that go on here which involve things besides pencils. For example, a few people know we make these 45rpm record adapters, and have done for years.

I was interviewed in December by Computer Arts magazine for their 'My Design Classic' feature, whereby one is asked to pontificate on a piece of design which, for any number of reasons, has stood the test of time. Mine had, of course, to be the humble plastic 45rpm adapter. Long in love with the little shape and its iconic meaning, its power of suggestion, its universal symbolism, it was the obvious choice, one which pre-dates my love for any particular font or image.

We're what's known as a 'long-tail' business - one which makes a very niche product for a very specific market, but one of which there are so many, they collectively can rival large companies - and as such we'll never retire on these. But we are the only people still making them, and we sell all over the world, to record labels, collectors, Northern Soulers, promo companies and jewellers. We can make them in hundreds of colours - and, as it has nothing at all to do with illustration, It's always been a healthy diversion. There's nothing like wrapping up an order of 'stuff' when you'r used to emailing over a file.

The story is in the article itself, but it's posted at the end in its entirety, in case you don't fancy squinting at a jpeg. The more-readable PDF can be found here.

And the adapters themselves? In the shop, where else?

'I can't remember when these things first came to my attention, but I was quite small. I am of an age when you could pop into Woolworth's with £1.40 on a Saturday and buy a 7" single, and they would often come in a plain bag with one of these - a dink, spider, 45 adapter, whatever name you know it by - in the middle.

Designed out of necessity, it's endured as a symbol of music, dance, rebellion, teenagers, mods and collectors the world over. It's also something that has been adapted and customised for individual bands and movements, yet its form-follows-function necessity means that it always comes back to the universally recognised shape it is now. Even if you didn't know what it was for originally, you know what it means or represents. And I love them.

When 7"s were produced mainly for the jukebox market, they were designed around the machinery - big record players with inch-and-a-half fat spindles onto which a record once selected would drop, through the corresponding hole in the centre. When people began buying singles for use at home, the earliest record players (once moved beyond the 'gramophone!') had these wide spindles, but quickly began to be produced with the 8mm-or-so spindle we now know (I could give you the exact measurement in tenths of a millimetre, should you need it...) But record plants could still only produce singles with those ginormous holes in the centre, so the 45 adapter, first designed by Tom Hutchison for RCA, was created to fill it - snap it in, bung the record on, and hit Play. No more wobbling and sliding. As a shape, it's beautiful. Not only does it have absolute symmetry, and the ever-comforting continuity of a circle, it has personality - little limbs reaching out for the edge of the record, and gripping firmly - 'it's OK! I got it! Put the needle down!' It is additionally a symbol of an era in high-fidelity when a turntable wasn't an optional USB-enabled accessory - it was essential, and the warm organic sound of vinyl was the norm. It has the trustworthy, timeless feel of a long-established serif font - if it was one, it would be the delicious Cooper Black.

Much of my life has been shaped, flavoured and directed by music - I studied it, played it, did my courting to a non-stop stream of newly-emerging music, witnessing the birth of brand new genres as we did so. We ran a pirate radio station, made records, and met some of our dearest friends through music. This little shape is symbolic of all of that - we put it on our first ever t-shirts, we used it on our flyers, we became obsessed with the different shapes, materials and colours this elegant object was produced in.

So it was inevitable I'd end up making them, I suppose. When we discovered they weren't produced anymore, we decided to make our own. We're now the only people manufacturing them, and after four years of research, development and prototyping, they've been made to our own design right here in England for years. Niche - maybe. Nerdy - certainly. Big in Japan? You bet. But they're a timeless example of semiotics, and seeing one is like walking in under a big neon sign that says "Music Spoken Here".'

Lady in Red

2013-01-22T11:15:00.000Z

You might have driven past this lady on a billboard this January - the new Kellogg's girl. I drew her with inks for the latest instalment in the Special K 'What Will You Gain?' campaign, and she's become an inked-in girl rather than a photographic one.

Or rather...she WAS. Although I did the dress which is pretty much the 'hero' (ad-speak) of the piece - by hand using three shades of red ink on paper - this was one of those jobs which started out magnificent but ended up a bit sad, in the 'tears-in-the-eyes' sense, not the sarcastic sense. For I was commissioned to create the girl and dress in one illustration, and I did, via several versions of our K girl - red hair, brown hair, eyes to the side, eyes straight ahead, reds lips, open lips, brown lips, and so on.

The result was this organic-looking thoroughbred beauty with her subtly confident sensual gaze. As is sometimes the way in the world of advertising, despite a bloody behind-the-scenes fist fight, she was scrapped (already three days past the original pre-Christmas deadline) by an unknown but higher-up link in the feedback chain. So my lovely girl was substituted for one formed from a combination of digital brush strokes and photographic features...which is the one you see on the billboards.

The art buyer, creatives and I fought the good fight, and were annoyed of course, but such is the way of advertising. Shit happens, (which is going to be the official title of one of my lectures these days) but thanks to this blog, I'm able to show you the 'proper' version right here!

Colouring in for a living No. 2

2013-01-22T11:00:00.001Z

I thought I'd got a 'dream job' when Crayola asked me to work for them. (I don't really believe in 'dream jobs' actually, same as 'dream houses' or 'dream holidays', since my 'dream' if I had one was only really to earn a decent crust through drawing, which is where I ended up. Posh clients and status weren't really part of the deal.)

But...I digress. Crayola crayons? Why of course! And could I be paid partly in dosh and partly with goodies? Yes, I could! So I made these covers for their 'Wild Notes' notebooks, on sale only in the US I'm afraid, along with a pretty box to put things in, which as anyone who knows me will know, is exciting, as I'm extremely into compartmentalising and containers. And notebooks, as one glance at my desk will demonstrate.

Here are the covers, available from Target stores and other good toy shops in the USofA. Thanks Fran at Bernstein & Andriulli for posting these over. The Crayola lorry hasn't yet been seen reversing up to the studio's double doors, but there's still time.

http://www.crayola.com/products/wild-notes-1-subject-notebook-product/

His Master's Voice

2013-01-15T11:45:00.001Z

Today the news of HMV entering the hands of the administrators broke. It IS a shame, of course it is, for the founders of the business (although no longer with us) and the 4000+ staff who are possibly about to lose their jobs.

But this is clearly a business that could not compete with the likes of Amazon. Either because they failed to see the future of music and film buying or because they did, but didn't make the necessary changes and plans to enable the company to absorb them. And because Amazon will eat everything in its path, skilfully dodging taxes en route.

A shame. But use it, or lose it. Our source of power comes from our wallets and purses. If you choose carefully who to spend your money with, you have the power to affect who stays in business and who doesn't. There's a reason the likes of Tesco and Sainsbury's own such an enormous chunk of the British grocery-buying public's budget.

So if you have a local record shop, patronise it. Even if you have to order in what you want and wait a little bit. The Record Store Day website will find your nearest record shop for you.If you have to order online, order music direct from record labels - Ninja Tune are an excellent example of this, along with online stores such as Bleep, Boomkat and Juno. For harder-to-find stuff, there's, predictably, Hard To Find in Birmingham (shop and online), Music Stack and the deeply impressive Discogs, where you can bash that long-sought record into their search engine and find copies wherever they lie - and buy one!

I'm sure at this point my record-buying friends will be only too pleased to suggest further outlets which circumnavigate the behemoths.

Books don't have to come from Amazon either - The Green Door Bookshop is a beautiful little outlet for children's books - and good grief, while we still have Waterstone's, bloody well use it (their website states robustly that their taxes are all paid within the UK). If you're in London, you're spoilt for choice - one of our favourites is Bookseller Crow in Crystal Palace - physical and virtual - and the charming little chain Daunt Books is now online too.

Elsewhere localbookshops.co.uk will find your local book shop for you via a search for the book you're after, or via your postcode (a search for independant book shops in my area found eight). There's always the British High Street legend WH Smith (also online) - we may not pay that much attention to it, but we'll all be mourning when that's gone too. Use them. Their selection of stuff may be patchy and mainstream, but have you actually tried asking them to order you something? They can do it for you, again if you're able to exercise a little patience.

These gems are out there - use them. I saw a meme going round just before Christmas encouraging people to shop ''elsewhere', and while I applauded its sentiment, I got mad about its Christmas-centric message. Why not all year? Why not for all your stuff? I could write blog after blog on where to shop - the likes of Etsy, Folksy, artists' own shops, museum shops, Big Cartel shops and all manner of tiny 'long-tail'* businesses deserve your money far more than Amazon, and always offer more diverse, changeable but unique range of goodies.

Maybe I will write blog after blog, and share the love. After all, we're a nation of shopkeepers aren't we?

(Image created in homage to HMV, for our record label Blunt Force Trauma in 2005.)

*products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals, or exceeds, the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, but only if the store or distribution channel is large enough.

Read more: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/long-tail.asp#ixzz2I2gUoKa5

Christmas at the Wall Street Journal

2012-12-20T01:08:00.002Z

I did some fancy multi-coloured illustrations for the Wall Street Journal's Christmas gift guide. Here are some of the illustrations, from the Books section, and the big bow from the cover, in its three colourways.

The type was very relaxed on these, energetic and organic with the merest trace of digital tidying which even the most skilled CSI would struggle to detect. Most refreshing.

Jingle bells!

CHRISTMAS FACES

2012-12-20T00:50:00.002Z

This year's cards were a blatant representation of how excited I get about Christmas. I realise not everyone shares my wide-faced excitement, least of all the elves (Brook and Leigh, Anne and John) who played the part of 'tolerant exploited labour force' for two days without complaint or unionisation.

But the card design was drawn with ink, printed in full colour by our excellent local printsmith, the circles cut and drilled by our other excellent local printsmith, then the faces hand-drawn by me, followed by stamping, tying of neon ribbons, folding, sticking and posting. Lots.

More than that, however, the ink I used is special. Very special. You see, it's...oh, wait, home time already? Coming!

Happy Christmas all!

Christmas again - in April.

2012-12-12T00:37:00.002Z

If Christmas in August was weird, Christmas in April was even odder. This was done for Pitcher & Piano, independent bar and restaurant chain. I quite like the energy of this one...though you always spot at least three things you'd change once it's published!

http://www.pitcherandpiano.com/christmas

Frohe Weihnachten!

2012-12-12T00:33:00.000Z

I was drawing reindeer back in August, which is quite normal for an illustrator. In fact it's quite late to be doing Christmas stuff. Getting in the mood when it's sunny outside isn't that difficult - by this time of the year, the Christmas 24 Channel is on telly a couple of hours a day, so you can binge on terrible made-for-TV Christmas movies till the nausea kicks in..but by that time, you've drawn your picture anyway.

This one I loved doing. It was for Monika Winckler, at Ernst & Young in Germany. I like the German language a lot - it's deliciously multi-syllabic, crisp and muscular - and this was a delight to produce. They also turned the illustration into an animation for the company's annual Christmas identity. (My favourite bit on this is the gingerbread twins of robustly ethnic origin!) I like to see my work animated and I'd love to do more of it myself...when time and brainpower allow. For this one though, I was happy to let the clever German pixel engineers do it.

2012-11-30T12:38:00.001Z

Portishead.

It's Wear Your Old Band T-Shirt To Work Day, and this is mine.

Sadly, when I was going to watch the likes of Kajagoogoo and the Thompson Twins, I didn't have the money for a band T-shirt. I embroidered my own logos onto the classic early-80s khaki canvas bags that were de rigeur for schoolkids, and if you gave me a quid or so I'd have done yours for you as well.

Later on I refused to buy an Aerosmith/Monsters of Rock/Skid Row/Whitesnake T-shirt, though I had the sweaty front-row chance to do so several times. I wasn't a t-shirt wearing sort of girl.

So this is the oldest one I have. And it's probably the most significant. By 1995 we were Portishead groupies, having done our courting to the first Portishead album - a total revelation, musically - watching them perform for the first time on Jools Holland from our bed and marvelling at the dark, tearful vocals and massive, surly hip-hop beats. Those phrases sound like cliches now, and in fact a new term had to be invented to describe it ('trip-hop'), but at the time...nothing had ever sounded like them. Eighteen years later, we're still courting, and we have all Portishead's other albums (in duplicate) - and today's a good opportunity to revisit them. Though, the opening bars of Dummy still give me goosebumps; in fact, the album's so evocative I find it hard to listen to.

What's also still around eighteen years later is the T-shirt. I bought this at their Bath gig. We'd seen them on several stops on tour, and I wore it with a tiny black skirt. I don't remember what was on my feet. Probably not trainers, as I'd swore never to wear them (that changed as well). I probably did have some sort of thermal-ish top underneath, as I have right now (always did feel the cold) and black tights. The skirt in this picture is from 1994, having been bought in a charity shop with a matching waistcoat. I wore both to death, and still wear them, though the fabric's getting delicate. My hair was twice as long (it's growing back after a full-on urchin!) and red. The lippy I've done my best to match to the Body Shop one I was addicted to in 1995. And the eyeliner...hasn't changed much! Perhaps a little more skilfully applied now - I'm in less of a goddamn hurry. And I have a cold in this pic (ahh...the old self-confidence hasn't exactly rocketed in that time either!)

I've managed to listen to Dummy up to Wandering Star so far, and no tears. In fact I've written this blog to the album and realised how much there is to be bloody overjoyed about. The T-shirt's still here, the skirt's still here, Leigh's still here, I'm still here, the album's still here and it's still fucking marvellous. So far...so good.