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Ged Palmer, who works with calligraphy, typography and sign painting, on lettering tools
muscle memory I began sketching and painting letters about 15 years ago and have used pretty much everything I could get my hands on during that time. A real light-bulb moment for me was understanding the difference between typography, calligraphy and lettering – typography being the layout of existing typefaces, calligraphy being the written letter and lettering the drawn letter. I was drawing letters for many years before I learnt to write calligraphy with a pointed or chiselled tool. Learning calligraphy informed my lettering and then in 2012 I discovered the sign writer’s ‘lettering quill’ or brush. It can be used to write in a calligraphic ‘single stroke’ style, or used to construct letters based on drawn lettering. I’ve been focusing on painted lettering, signs and gold leaf techniques along with commercial lettering for the last five years.
Above: Ged Palmer painting the Poco café bar window. Right: Ged Palmer Anna Mae’s Mac ‘n’ Cheese van lettering.
I was living in Bristol in 2012 and got a job doing a custom logotype and branding for a restaurant on Gloucester Rd named The Gallimaufry and I somehow convinced the owner to let me paint the 13m fascia sign – then panicked and called local sign writer James Cooper aka Dapper Signs asking for help. Cooper was into the design and I was lucky that he helped me out and gave me the right tools for the job. I remember outlining a ‘G’ using a mahl stick to steady the hand, the enamel paint at just the right consistency and the long haired chiselled sign writing brush. I pulled that first half circle line in one stoke and though it had little wobbles and changes in weight it was pretty much a line I had been trying to paint for about eight years before that. From that point on I was hooked.
Sign writers talk about the ‘swing’ of a brush. That’s the little flick you get when you are painting a curve – your hand stops and the brush just kind of completes the curve with a little snap and that’s where you get the energy and the bounce that makes work look so lively. You can never reproduce that with pixels. Rhythm is interesting. When you’re working on technical lettering it is very exacting and laborious. Sketching a perfect Spencerian lettering piece where all the weights, angles and curves flow gracefully and all the positive and negative space is balanced is very time consuming. With calligraphy and brush lettering it is a lot more rhythmic. Loading the brush with paint or ink, pulling strokes. William Hogarth and many others have spoken about the ‘life’ of a line and the lines you make when you’re in the zone reflect a lot about the rhythm of your body, your breath, your posture, how many coffees you’ve drunk etc. Trying to do calligraphy when you’re pissed is completely impossible – I’ve tried that a few times as well. Practice is absolutely the most important thing. Once you have the forms in your head and the muscle memory then you just have to find the right rhythm with the strokes and you’re away! gedpalmer.com
a g a g e M ke
e r g in m a gI ge M E me rg ing I m a a k a e g M 5 E m e r g in r e s e g g I M 15 a e m m g I E a 15 E m e rg in g m n a i e g r k a m a I g I ge e rs g n m i 1 g m 5 r I e 15 E m e rg i M E m g n ng a g a k e i m g r I Im e - M r s 15 E m e g n m i g I a g ake r e e - M r s 15 E m g ing r e a k e r s 15 E m varoom showcases some of the most striking image-making from the crop of 2017 art school graduates, guided by the AOI’s global network of professional bodies and educational institutions. The images on the following pages are a sample of outstanding work from Kristiana to Kingston to South Korea – from children’s stories to social observation to fashion and politics, there are new rhythms emerging. Follow these young image-makers as they take the pulse of changing times
Rhythm
Vebjørn Pedersen Kristiania University College, Norway — Course This is a self-portrait, and the idea behind it is being attracted to the wrong thing at the wrong time. For me that thing has oftentimes been drugs. Whatever one might use to escape from reality, might seem very attractive, like a pretty chandelier, but eventually it’ll burn you out. The chandelier is like a sun, and I’m a moth to its flames. Materials used: Graphite, charcoal and pitt oil base on paper. vebjornpedersen.com
Harry Sussams University of West of England, UK — Illustration and Visual Media As part of my project entitled ‘Nomads’, I gathered research into different nomadic cultures around theworld, and created a series of short narratives. I drew inspiration from the variety of extreme landscapes that are home to nomads,and the relationships they have with the natural world around them. Materials used: The line work is made with pencil, which I then scan into Photoshop and digitally colour. harrysussams.com
Illustration is a way of telling ‘‘stories. I love designing, sketching, writing about and creating fantastical worlds for my own enjoyment in the hopes that someone else will like them too.
’’
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Illustration to me is taking an idea, ‘‘like a text, a song or a mood, and turning it into something visually stunning and beautiful.
’’
J
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hilippe m e m o h l e
Since the 1980s, the work of French illustrator, Jean-Philippe Delhomme has explored with visual wit and elegance the worlds of fashion and culture. Characterised as a fashion illustrator, Delhomme talks to varoom editor John O’Reilly about the demise of blogs, taking on photography and how Hockney liberated his use of colour
Portrait of Jean-Philippe Delhomme Photograph by XXXXXXXXXXXX
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Profile: Jean-Philippe Delhomme
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While Jean-Philippe Delhomme’s loose-limbed figures, his impressionistic comedy of manners have been a much-admired favourite of fashion world since his work for British Vogue in the late 1980s, he is more widely known for his more recent blog The Unknown Hipster which ran from 2009-2013, collected as Diaries by August Editions.
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Delhomme wasn’t driven by the appeal of high fashion or the fashion world. “Fashion was an occasion to do paintings and draw people, to me it was more like a landscape, a bit sociological if you want but it was also a subject, something you could make something interesting out.”
His main inspiration came from documentary photograWith its neat strapline “information without the invi- phy, “people like Walker Evans, Weegee, David Bailey, tations”, sardonic wit and a cast of characters from William Klein. Bruce Davidson was a big inspiration. art, fashion and street life, The Unknown Hipster Think of a book like Bruce Davidson’s Subway.” harnessed the creative forces flowing through DelWriting about his 1980s documentary project Subway homme’s work for the past 30 years. His non-fiction (1986) Bruce Davidson reflected on the “secret handnarratives are a transitory sociology of modern life, a writing” of the train interiors, the graffiti that mad the version of Baudelaire’s famously celebrated flâneur. walls, windows and maps a public canvas. “I began Executed in a line and contours shaped with psychoto imagine that these signatures surrounding the paslogical and cultural meaning, the appeal of Delhomsengers were ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics,” wrote me’s imagery is its insight into fashion’s ephemerality, Davidson. “Every now and then, when I was looking at its passion for temporary form. one of these cryptic messages, someone would come Delhomme’s eye for environments and etiquette, for and sit in front of it, and I would feel as if the message psychology and shape has been tuned in making had been decoded.” work for magazines such as Apartamento, Interview, I.D. magazine, Libération, The New Yorker, Vogue and Wallpaper. He is also a writer of four novels and articles. Delhomme was also a student of graffiti art and street painting culture in New York. In college, his ambition was to create poster work inspired by the 1950s and 1960s image-making of illustrators such as Raymond Sauvignac. “I was excited by the possibilities that as an illustrator you could do poster work and have art in the street and participate in the street.” A college friend was the daughter of Philippe Koechlin, the art director at Rock & Folk a big French music magazine (at its peak in the 1980s it sold around 150,000 each issue). Rock & Folk gave him his first commission while still at college, doing small black and white cartoons on music culture and bands. By the 1980s photography had displaced illustration as the medium of fashion and other than La Mode en Peinture, published by Assouline, filled with fashion illustration, few fashion magazines were giving such high-profile space to illustration. “The first commission I got with fashion illustrations was for British Vogue,” says Delhomme. “I think it was 1988, they gave me eight pages. It was very bold of them.” Vogue’s editor was Liz Tilberis and the Art Director was John Hind, who also taught at the RCA, “he would send me pictures of the clothes and I would come up with the ideas to interchange the clothes with pieces of art. It was the first fashion series that I did. They were doing interesting work.”
Splotched Jeans, 2016, gouache, illustration for Glenn O’Brien sartorial column Ask Maximus, Maxim magazine.
I think the 1970s was more ‘‘difficult than today for young
illustrators because now people think doing illustration is like being a lawyer
’’
It’s no surprise that Delhomme was captivated by this visual theatre of commuters, partygoers, dressed for work or going out, their clothes expressing their own performance and identities as professionals or cool kids, framed by mysterious handwritten messages. “All that is very striking to me,” says Delhomme of Davidson’s work, “because you have the photography, faces, people, you have the landscapes behind the windows of the subway, then in the subway train there is the graffiti which looks like paintings by Pollock. The same as painting, documentary, all those things coming together. That was very exciting.” Delhomme’s skill is being able to unpick the many-layered visual textures of a space, to see documentary reality as an already manufactured space, coded, created and crafted with design and expression.
Children’s Books
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Innovators — Children’s Books
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lesley barnes author and illustrator brief: Jill and Lion is the follow up to my first
book Jill and Dragon. It follows the further adventures of Jill and her faithful companion Dog, as they make their way through Jill’s huge yellow book.
materials: Paper, pencils, cut paper and Photoshop.
research: I collect books – sometimes
to read and sometimes just to look at! I think most of my research comes from my eclectic library of books old and new. It’s surprising where ideas can spring from. I don’t think there was a specific book that inspired Jill and Lion, I do however remember a story, might be a Grimm’s Brother Tale or folk tale, where a king has a lion who keeps all his secrets hidden in his mane. The funny thing is that the lion wasn’t even really part of the story, he was just a sidenote, but one that fascinated me! I think he partly inspired my love of lions!
process and rhythm: I think the
creative process is very much like a piece of music and in a picture book the words and pictures can combine in a kind of dance. Creating a narrative is like finding the rhythm of the story you are telling – once you hit that beat it’s just a matter of keeping the flow going. The whole basis of Jill and Lion was to explore the notion of a ‘journey’ through the book. Jill, Dog and Lion spend much of the story literally racing through pages on a roller coaster train ride. I wanted to capture the ebb and flow of the narrative journey in a visually exciting way.
Sarah McIntyre on Lesley Barnes’ Jill and Lion When I found out this issue’s theme was rhythm, I immediately thought of illustrations by Lesley Barnes. I first saw her work at a table she was sharing with Isabel Greenburg at a comics and illustration festival in East London. I bought a long-printed panorama strip with Russian folktale characters and firebirds wheeling and swooping along it, marveling at the way she had managed to combine a highly intricate style with so much movement. In her latest book, Jill and Lion, the curlicues of the railway track set the looping rhythm of the pictures and provide a sort of musical staff onto which she lays characters and patterns like notes in mesmerising repetitions.
resistances: Sometimes your own
anxieties and worries can disrupt the flow of the narrative and stop the creative process dead in its tracks.
insight: I spent far too long on Jill and Lion.
It can be easy to get lost in your own head and somehow you need to keep a clear plan without too many detours into self-doubt.
distractions: When you are in the middle of a big project anything can become distracting! Sometimes this can be a positive thing though. If I’m stuck I often go and look through my books and I’ll end up getting inspired again.
At the end of the book, her rigidly limited, retro colour palette relaxes with the addition of green into a slightly wider mix, echoing the sense of relief and freedom the lion feels as he escapes his circus confines and returns to the jungle. The story is very metafictive and quite abstractly complicated – I’d recommend this for ever-so-slightly older children and grownups who may very well love copying the intricate patterns in their own sketchbooks. But even small children may enjoy the colours reminiscent of ice cream and sweets, and enjoy the sparkle and fizz of the fireworks on its pages. Sarah McIntyre’s books include the comic Vern and Lettuce, and Jinks & O’Hare Funfair Repair with Philip Reeve. Her most recent picture book is The Prince of Pants, with Alan MacDonald. She campaigns to get proper credit for illustrators at picturesmeanbusiness.com
numbers: There are 194 (count them!)
acrobats in the gatefold spread in Jill and Lion. three have party hats, two have umbrellas and one ringmaster leads them all!
rhythm: I think that the saying ‘dance to
Opposite and Above: Jill and Lion by Lesley Barnes, cover and spreads, published by Tate Publishing, 2017
the beat of your own drum’ is very apt for any creative pursuit. Don’t be afraid to go your own way – trying to follow fashion or imitate someone else is not the way to be successful or happy. lesleybarnes.co.uk
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Roundtable: Rhythm
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Rhythm is fundamental to everything we do, from using and moving our bodies in the act of image-making, to managing the flow between process and end-result, to getting ourselves ‘up to speed’ for our interactions with clents. Matthias Sperling, Ryan Belmont and Phoebe Halstead bring radically fresh and different perspectives to this in our roundtable, exploring the rhythms required to synchronise the professional and the personal, creative vision and client demands, and how to manage the distractions and attractions of our constant feed of digital communications. Matthias Sperling is a choreographer and performer, whose work has been presented at such institutions as Tate Modern, the Southbank Centre and the Royal Opera House. The first results of his two-year science research collaboration have just been published in the journal PLOS One.
the body in motion John O’Reilly: How does rhythm arise in your work? Ryan Belmont: As an Art Director for the internal Nike brand design agency, I work with people of different skills, typographers, designers, architects and people from the creative industries. We have to see rhythm from a visual sense of course, but rhythm is so related to sport in a very simple way – it’s about movement. We are always trying to interpret the moving body; we actually use choreography to help us to do that sometimes. We like to use people who are at the forefront of illustration and photography, virtual reality, animators to really push the boundaries of that visualisation and representation of the human form.
Ryan Belmont is Art Director of Nike Lab, working in Nike’s internal agency in London. As Art Director he gets to work on experimental, collaborative communications highlighting Nike’s product innovation.
Rhythm is intrinsic to the idea, but not at the forefront of our work as an objective. We talk about visualising ‘flexibility’, or ‘cushioning’ and ‘comfort’, these ideas start to pull you into places where the rhythm becomes different. There have been quite a few projects, such as the Hyperfeel shoe promotion, where they have used rhythm, not in the brief as such but in the end result.
Phoebe Halstead is an animator at Scriberia, and a founder of First Hand, a unique collective of collective reportage illustrators. Clients she has worked for include the Royal Institution, Channel 4, IBM, and The Times. Halstead created these drawings during the Roundtable discussion.
Roundtable moderated by varoom editor John O’Reilly
For the launch of the Hyperfeel shoe, Nike collaborated with a creative studio called Field. We brought them in to create films and represent the feeling of different terrains. The product we brought out was about becoming closer to the ground and we tried to see what they could create with the humanform running, breaking it down into different sounds, feelings and visual representation. Field created a runner mapped and formed of sand. How does it materialise as a human form? A beautiful sound and a beautiful figure, the form dissipated, there was diffusion. It was an interesting take on the human form, seeing it in these very fine grains of sand. There were four films, each mapping a runner, and Field represented different elements; one film explored running in the rain so it was made up of bubbles, like diffusion
particles pulling the body together. Another film expressed trail running, which is all about running in the forest and the mountains, so the body was made up of leaves and wind which would attach and create the body in different ways. JO’R: Yes, we think of our body as being bordered, but it’s part of an ecology. It’s about relationships of flesh, wind, rain, sweat, equipment, perhaps the sound of your running playlist, the body as something more than human and other than human. RB: It was a very good take on that, breaking the body down into fine particles and those particles were elements.
Social media has ‘‘ changed the rhythm of everyday life ’’ Matthias Sperling: I thought I would talk about rhythm in relation to two pieces I made recently. The first one, Now That We Know, is something I call a science-fiction performance-lecture, where I am the performer talking on stage about an imagined future for dance and choreography. Letting the lecture sink into my body, I am exploring how I might move in relationship to it as I am talking through it. The question I ask in the piece is – what will change, if and when science discovers precisely how our bodies give rise to our minds? The other piece called Loop Atlas, for galleries, has a very strong relationship to rhythm, it asks what can choreography conjure up through rhythmic repetition? I work with a very simple choreographic task I call ‘looping’ where I rhythmically repeat a movement over and over again, while gradually allowing the shape of it to change. It is kind of hypnotic repetition, constant presence of the same movement but at the same time very slightly changing. JO’R: Variations?
Matthias Sperling: Yes, slight variations that add up in time to get to somewhere very different. I have a version which also involves live video capture. This allows me to add a kind of layering. The sound is something that I generate with a loop sampler. First, I make the sound myself, then I start moving, I have this foot pedal which triggers this video system to project what has just been recorded. It’s just layering these time slices, it starts to produce this crosstalk between these different layers in time. Each layer is usually one or two minutes long and I am always continuing to perform this looping task where gradually it changes and each time I stop to press the foot pedal, I go back to where I left off. The layers towards the front are more recent in time and the layers at the back are more distant in time. RB: Looking at the piece I expect to see a clearer transition between one layer and another, but it feels so natural, the loop is really natural. Phoebe Halstead: Is it something rehearsed or is it something you are creating in that moment? MS: It is something between. It is something I am working on live, I have a rough map which I have decided in advance and what happens along that rough map is different each time. A performance is about 30-40 minutes.
Varoom 36 the Rhythm issue Rhythm is present in the way creatives work, our stance before the page or screen and the ebb and flow of a career as an illustrator. The wit and style of visual social commentator Jean-Philippe Delhomme is explored in a profile where he covers the demise of blogs, taking on photography and how Hockney liberated his use of colour. Innovators across the fields of advertising, children’s books, street art and more are selected by our industry experts, including Luke Choice’s striking, swirling work for the Rugby World Cup and Anna Haifischm’s new graphic novel, The Artist. Outstanding work from an international selection of Emerging Image Makers is showcased in this issue, from Norway to South Korea via the UK and Australia graduates also reveal their thoughts on what illustration means to them. In The Commission, The Client, The Creative animator Stephen McNally, Iranian filmmaker Majid Adin and production company Blinkink reflect on the making of the new Rocket Man animation for Elton John’s classic song which draws on Adin's experience as a refugee. All this and an intriguing Rhythm Roundtable discussing how new technology is rapidly changing the rhythms of image-making, of collaboration, and how we manage the rhythm of everyday life. UK Subscription: £24 USA Subscription: £39 Subscriptions and single issues available from the AOI Shop: www.theaoi.com/ Varoom is published by the Association of Illustrators Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA