An Interview with Kev Crossley

I recently interviewed the charming and polite Kev Crossley very early this year to get some insight into the mind of a professional illustrator and get myself use to talking to talented types such as himself. He's known for his fantasy pictures of fairies, buxom elvish eared girls and dragons within their earthly and nature orientated worlds, he is usually a common sight in conventions around the UK. He has worked with game designers on such projects as Tomb Raider. If you want to skip what I asked him and see more of his work or contact him then just follow this link here: http://www.kevcrossley.com/ or here: http://kevcrossley.deviantart.com/ Also all images in this post is by Kev.

Jim:  How did you get into doing illustration?

Kev:  Through the harsh years of High School it was an essential way for me to develop a sense of self-worth. I was a small kid, an easy target from the council estate, but I learned that if you did something special with your time, people respected it, and enjoyed it, and seemed to see you in a different light. That’s why I kept drawing; it kept the other kids off my back for a few hours every week, but it gradually became my first Great Love in life, and I knew from early on that I never wanted to do anything else.

My first professional illustration work came along in 2002. After University I spent 2 years unemployed, during which time I did paintings of plants, animals, pets and portraits for people in between job-searching! This work helped me get a job as a level designer/ builder/ 2D texture artist for a video game studio in Sheffield, and during my time in that industry I made many friends and contacts. Seven years into my career someone introduced me to someone they knew who worked for a US Dungeons & Dragons gaming company, and that person like my pencil drawing enough to introduce me to one of their publishing clients. For that first job I was asked to design and draw 8 demon warriors, for £20 each. I spent up to 20 hours on each one! The detail I put in was insane, but that job led to others with numerous other publishers, and the snowball grew and grew. For 6 years I juggled my growing freelance work with a full time studio job as a videogame concept artist, but something had to break, and in 2008 I made the jump to being full time freelance! So, hard work, good contacts and word of mouth got me where I am today. Although, it really hasn’t been as easy as that makes it sound!

J:  Do you have an agent or do you prefer not to have a middle-man?
 

K:  I don’t have an agent, and not many artists I know have one! I’ve always represented myself, and it’s always been down to me to find the work! Not easy! That said I’ve recently begun working with a guy who I became friends with online, and through him I’ve had a few successful jobs that have worked out well. I’ve really enjoyed this new way of working, and it’s also introduced an extra level of human contact into my working days, something you can become starved of when freelancing from home!

J:  How would you describe your work environment? And given the choice would you prefer to work at a studio, in a company or at home?

 

k:  My work environment IS my home.  My wife goes to work, I take my son to school and I then get to work! I work in various rooms in the house, (digital stuff is only done in my studio though) and I sometimes go out into the countryside, find a nice spot under a tree by a stream and do some drawing there. I do miss working in an office environment sometimes, but I was always more naturally inclined to work better alone so it suits me fine!

 J:   What time of the day or night are you usually at your most productive?

  K:   I hate to say, I’m at my absolute creative best late at night and into the morning hours; between 11pm and 3am. That’s okay when you’re young and single and don’t have to get up early, but not so easy to maintain when you’re all grown up with all the responsibilities that come with that. However, I do still chase an idea if the ‘juices are flowing’, and frequently stay up late drawing, painting or writing!  This is one reason why discipline is important. I’ve had to learn to get used to working early in the day, when my mind seems less inclined to want to! There are all sorts of methods to do this of course, but the simplest way is picking up a pencil and making marks! (A stiff deadline works wonders too!)

 J:  What Media and tools do you currently use and consider your speciality and is there a conscious or aesthetic reason why you use such media other then it being simple for you to handle?

 K:   I use pencils, acrylics, watercolours, inks, gouache, Photoshop, photography. I’m particularly fond of pencil art, so I would say that is my speciality.

I work using methods that give me the most pleasure, which is why I persist with pencils. Certain software applications make bold claims about their capacity to ‘perfectly emulate’ the experience of drawing with a pencil, but they don’t, and never will. Pencils get blunt in different ways, they snap, then you can make marks with the shattered tip, they get shorter as you sharpen them, forcing you to alter your grip and adjust your mark making. That might seem a pointless statement to someone who might spend all their time drawing on a tablet, but if you spend as much time as I do with real pencils, you’ll understand how special they are, and how vast their range is. Also, the quality of the paper/ card/ canvas that you draw on makes a huge difference, and that tactile quality feeds back through the pencil, up your arm and into your brain, again influencing your technical decision making process which in turn alters the way you develop interactions between tool and paper. (or card/ canvas/ bit of wood!)
So, I love pencil art, but I approach every other media in the same way. I learn how to use it then experiment until I discover a technique that I can lose myself in, and gradually, all the nuances unique to that media are teased out. This has been true for Watercolours, Gouache, Photoshop and Acrylics.

 J:  Do you have a fond memory relating to your illustration work?

 

K:  My favourite memories I guess, are associated with my private commissions, or the live sketching I do for visitors to the conventions I attend. There is simply nothing so rewarding as the look on someone’s face when you hand over a drawing or painting or sketch they’ve asked you to do for them. To give such joy and pleasure to so many people has been one of the greatest aspects of my life, and it humbles as much as it invigorates.

Does Sex Sell?

I Recently found this article (link below) Michelle Lee interviews her 7 year old daughter about her favourite superhero and her strong sexualisation in comics, comics by DC have been made with these super women in complete cheesecake postures and pin up gestures for quite sometime now and ever since DC comics rebooted their popular issues back to issue 1 (a gesture that I thought was to attract new fans) it seems more so apparent. The post and the comments it has garnered speaks for itself.

http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2011/10/03/sexed-up-starfire-doesnt-sit-well-with-7-year-old/

Now a friend of mine argues that the child was introduced to the character through a saturday morning type cartoon and therefore the comics are not for her... personally I don't buy that... people look at superheroes and their comics as literature examples and guides to teach kids right and wrong and somewhere down the line the writers got sloppy and if DC continues with this image they are not going to do well in the future as publishers of printed media. I believe comics as with any art form can appeal to both sexes and ages if done well and I think this has been why both Marvel and DC have lasted as long as they have.

Is This The Best We Can Do?

This is the final piece for the Art of Protest segment as part of the Dialouge Ignites Change brief.  This was really just born out of an idea that just came to me whilst thinking about the words of George Carlin and the current state of our political system if not the human condition. I don't like protest art that looks whiney and that usually is the case for me when I see such things, instead I was more inspired by Banksy and settled for this image for its cynical and anarchistic tone.

I was experimenting in a way that I could blend spray can with brush and pen techniques so to capture those mark making qualities but for what came out from it I think Screen Printing is really the way things of this style should be done, also this image here is a reproduction of the one I handed in and took longer than a Screen Print would to produce.

Below is a clip from George Carlin's 'Back in Town' tour and album, note how he says "this is the best we can do folks".

Dialogue Ignites Change (A Self Evaluation)

As part of my 'Dialogue Ignites Change' project I decided to work with Age UK where I would make an illustration based on the memories of an elderly person who may have dementia. I chose this because it's quite simply a personal reason to me, and I feel the best work in life is done with such reasons.

(Above: A man by the name of Pete was one of the few I spoken to, he shared a memory of this place that I took a photo of this week, it's a place where 'Rag and Bone' men would roam by and Pram Races set, so I'm thinking that's how this place should be illustrated, as if it were a set, or a stage of memory).

The most difficult part of this was coming to terms with my sense of efficiency, it takes a lot of patience to have a conversation with a dementia sufferer and although I can be a patient person I was in a situation where I only had a moment to talk and it dawned on me there that it is important to have compromise, stringing a coherent sentence out of them was far and foremost the most difficult thing to do with these people but what I learned was that a little persistence isn't bad if you keep reminding yourself what you want, if I couldn't get what I wanted after going round in circles with the person I had to respectfully walk away and look elsewhere. It's a philosophy I seriously need to apply to how I work.

(Below: Now known as The Queen's Head, this place would have been remembered under the name Turners Vaults by Pete, this photo was found through a search of an online archive, looking at how the world use to look by browsing these archives gives me an undescribable sense of discovery and pleasure)

From the work I've shown there wasn't a lot of feedback, which is good because people know what my goal is with this image. It's only a bad thing because there's hardly anything to comment on.

The project was a challenge due to my bad time keeping (still haven't slept since yesterday morning) however when I think about the opportunity I have had in this one breif I sense a profound resonance. For a moment I was lost in another person's world that use to be somebody else's at one time and I hope my work creates that feeling for another.

Quentin Blake

I found this really meaty interview from the very succesful british illustrator, Quentin Blake. He's been busy promoting himself like this since he started working for the NHS making murals for children's wards and showing off his visual world. Blake believes that the young illustrator should do their very best to draw as much as they can in order to be succesful. The interview is on The Guardian's website here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2007/sep/28/art.booksforchildrenandteenagers

There's another link from that page to this: http://www.campaignfordrawing.org/home/index.aspx

An Eye for Character and a Love for Batman

Everything seems to be going by in a blur recently and I really got to keep up with these blogs, Since I've been spending most of last week just being outside in the wintery cold and soaking up some things whilst preparing for my essay I decided to show some character designs I made a good while back. I'm a Batman fan, not so much a fan of movies and videogames but in the fact that I love to draw Batman, it may seem unusual to some but I never draw the comic book hero as most others.

I find the characters endearing in that it's easily open to reinterpretation, If you think about why Batman has so sucessful a legacy it is because he is actually easy to draw in a archetypal sense, I suppose the same goes for the villians The Joker and The Catwoman. So far I only started to do full colour studies of two of his villians that I deem worthy enough to show off. I've been busy so these studies always take second place above my college work.

Collaboration and Completion of the Wellspring Leaflets

My collaboration project for designing leaflets/flyers for the Wellspring center in Stockport gained a succesful mark. The experience has taught me to have trust in others and to be more lenient about work processes, creating these was very much a gamble and in retrospect there was no real way to change that so it very much demands adaptability, just like Darwin's ideas, strength lies in the power to adapt.

The next step of this is to refine the illustrations, since I wasn't aware of how they would look finished, such as the hatching looking bad when you blow up the image, things like that need to be changed. Five more leaflets have to be made around other topics and the idea that was recenlty given to me has to be explored. The idea was that the back of the leaflets can have an alternate version of the illustration instead of the same on the otherside. something like one illustration conveys the problem and on the back is the solution.