The Rackham.The Black HenThe Knucker Hole DragonThe Alp LuachraInitial sketchbook doodles.The Water House.Mining Droid II.Creature Under The Rock.Day 29 of Inktober. 4112 likes on Instagram.Day 28.Hillside Cityscape II.Sketched out and the inking started.Finished.Spaceships.
I’m now happily accepting a new round of illustration commissions for 2023. If you’ve ever wanted to own some original art – and you like my work – now’s your chance.
Commissions
If you would like to buy an original drawing, email me at rob [at] thisnorthernboy [dot] co [dot] uk , and let me know what kind of thing you are looking for. While you can ask me to draw absolutely anything, it’s probably best to stick to subjects and themes that you’ve seen me produce already. I’m not saying I’d never draw a portrait of your cats, for instance, but it’s unlikely. Some subjects I love to draw are:
Ships and Lighthouses Isometric buildings Robots Astronauts Spaceships Imaginary places
What you’ll receive will be a black and white pen drawing, on good quality, 220gsm cartridge paper. If you would prefer a colour illustration – let me know and we can have a chat.
You can also request for the illustration to be landscape or portrait in orientation.
I can’t guarantee that every request will be something I’d be happy to draw – but I’ll do my best. If you take a look at previous posts on this blog, or on my Instagram page you can see the kinds of thinks I like to illustrate..
What will this cost?
For an A5 (148 x 210mm) commission I charge £95 + post & packaging. For an A4 (210 x 297mm) commission I charge £175 + post & packaging. For an A3 (297 x 420mm) commission I charge £275 + post & packaging. For an A2 (420 x 594mm) commission I charge £475 + post & packaging.
When you email me to request a commission, if you can include the address you’d like it shipped to, I’ll work out the cost of postage and let you know. If you’re happy with the overall cost I accept payment by PayPal or Bank Transfer.
When will you get your drawing?
I aim to complete and post all illustrations within six weeks of receiving payment.
PLEASE NOTE: This post is regarding private, personal commissions. If you want to discuss a commercial proposition – illustrations for a book, game, or anything else that you would be selling, then please get in touch directly.
I’m currently working on my Innsmouth story, and debating what form the final ‘thing’ may take. It’s being written directly to twitter, and also catalogued here in a regularly updated blog post. I do want it to be a physical product at some point. My initial thoughts were that I’d publish each chapter in a little book. Nothing fancy, just an A5, stapled, two colour book, printed on uncoated stock. Maybe collect all the chapters together in a slipcase at some point along with some prints or postcards. Sounds pretty nice I think? As I’ve been writing more and more of the story, I’m also thinking that perhaps, maybe, it’s becoming and actual book. The kind of thing I’d approach publishers about. That’s maybe a bit further down the line though.
In the meantime, while thinking about how or what to produce, I got to thinking about Kickstarter as a funding avenue for it, and it struck me that I’d never shared the stats from my last project. My Weird Field World book, surpassed all my wildest predictions. I set the funding goal high enough to cover all my costs if I sold 150 books. In the end I sold 800 exactly through Kickstarter, while having enough funds to order a couple of hundred extra copies that I sold through my store. I really enjoyed the process of crowdfunding, and Kickstarter was a pretty simple but powerful platform for it.
So here are some stats about the campaign. Nothing particularly scientific, but interesting – particularly if you have any thoughts about running a campaign of your own.
Original funding goal – £2500
Final total – £32102
Backers 900 (ten withdrew after the campaign ended)
Initial goal reached in just 36 minutes.
527% funded in 24 hours.
Average pledge – £35.67
34% of backers came from Twitter.
Just 4.5% from Instagram and 2.4% from Facebook.
8.5% organically through Kickstarter.
8% of backers went for a digital download of the book
57% went for just the physical book
33% went for book plus other rewards
36% of backers were from the UK
28% from the USA
4.25% from France
3.6% from Canada
2% from Germany, Australia and the Netherlands.
Furthest a book travelled – 11,659 miles to New Zealand
And least travelled – less than a mile.
US states with most orders – California 41, Texas 23, Washington 19, New York 15, Illinois 13.
US states with zero orders – Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, N Dakota, Rhode Island, S Carolina, S Dakota, W Virginia, Wyoming.
If you’re thinking of running a Kickstarter I would highly recommend it, and if you have any questions – feel free to ask.
At the beginning of May, I travelled to Iceland. Somewhere I’ve wanted to visit for many, many years. It did not disappoint.
Iceland really is the most remarkable place. It is staggeringly, jaw-droopingly, beautiful. The landscapes can seem impossibly vast and ancient. The people are incredibly friendly and welcoming. The food is fantastic. It’s expensive, but definitely worth visiting.
I travelled with my dad. Flying in to Keflavik airport and hiring a car on the 1st of May, and we spent the next two weeks driving around the entire ring-road, plus the Westfjords – for a total of just over 3000km.
Below are a selection of my photos from the trip. I’ll do another post soon breaking things down in to areas or sections of the journey.
A mastodon (mastós ‘breast’ + odoús ‘tooth’) is any proboscidean belonging to the extinct genus Mammut (family Mammutidae) that inhabited North and Central America during the late Miocene or late Pliocene up to their extinction at the end of the Pleistocene 10,000 to 11,000 years ago.
Mastodon is also a social media platform (kind of).
If you are a user of social media, you’ll be well aware of the shockwaves that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is having. His libertarianism, free speech absolutism, and – let’s be honest – general dickishness, doesn’t sit well with many Twitter users, and many are preparing alternative profiles and presences elsewhere. One of those places, is Mastodon.
Strictly speaking, Mastodon isn’t a social network platform, it’s an open-source protocol, and one of the uses of that is to create very ‘twitterish’ server instances. It sounds complicated, and it certainly isn’t as straightforward to get your head around as Twitter, but once you’ve set up an account, the experience isn’t dissimilar to early Twitter. One of the very confusing elements for new users, is that Mastodon is decentralised, and hosted across many different servers, all with slightly different rules, topics etc. But, the key thing to know when signing up is that regardless of which server you choose – ‘art’, ‘social’, ‘gamedev’ – you can follow people on any other server, and their content will show up in your feed just like on Twitter.
So, I’m there, and many other creators, artists, journalists, actors… are also creating accounts. It’s well worth a look. As there’s been a pretty big surge in interest lately, it can get a little slow at times, but stick with it.
This is the fourth guest post on this blog, and it’s the most unexpected. Previous guest posts have generally been about the quest author’s work – art, process, methods etc. That’s what I was expecting when I asked Alex to write me something. In an unnecessary show of modesty, Alex decided to not write about himself or his work, but of something much deeper. It’s very good. And you should definitely read his post below, but first, as Alex is too modest, I’ll sing his praises here.
Alex Connolly is an Australian designer and illustrator, living in southern Japan. He’s worked for Neill Blomkamp (director of District 9, Elysium and Chappie), Marvel (I don’t need to add anything here do I?) and Double Damage Games. I first saw his personal work and was blown away. Alex produces incredibly technical mechanical sci fi illustrations. Incredibly designed, but perfectly believable. Check out Alex’s work on his website and twitter.
And now, for Alex…
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Ember in the Palm
First of all, I want to thank Rob for the opportunity to write for his esteemed blog.
Our creative agency, while not exclusive to, would be a lot different if it weren’t for the strange and dexterous marvels known as the human hand. No sooner free from the constraints of quadrupedalism, our ancient forebears took to all manner of evolutionary endeavours. Fast forward beyond the adaptive wonders of our Homo habilis ‘Handy Man’ origins, and we arrive not just at the mechanical deftness of our closer relatives, but breakthroughs in creative cognition.
In three parts, I want to select particular moments in the history of visual communication that celebrate the hand as a creative constant through time. These are not necessarily definitive, more personal picks from a smorgasbord of creative pursuits as we tumble through time.
The first part deals in the very definition of a touchstone.
Turning Point I – Wonderwall
Parietal art or ‘rock art’ can be traced almost 40,000 years into prehistory. It is a strong visual demarcation that helps to define our ancestors as not just reactive wanderers, but as possessing an intrinsic creative drive to reflect and record. Naturally, given our physiology and biological perspective, it stands to reason hands feature as some of the oldest rock art in existence. These are our most practical tools; our dexterous and articulated arguably as important as the brains that operate them.
As such, the oldest rock art currently recorded are hand prints. Two particular locations featuring these antediluvian artworks are the El Castillo cave paintings in Spain and on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, dated to 39,000 BCE and 37,900 BCE respectively. There has been some speculation as to which species of early human was first to be artistically inclined for its own sake. Conjecture has yet to prove whether Neanderthals committed to stone art in the same way as Homo sapiens, but it is understood that the latter were responsible for both El Castillo and the Liang Timpuseng artworks.
Both locations were used by early humans as shelters for generations, featuring an array of figurative and symbolic artwork across hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years. Hand art, a form dominated by negative space, has the artist — a shaman or perhaps a leader — place their palm against the rock face and spray ochre or some other form of intentionally-selected stain via their mouth or through a hollowed bone or reed. Theories as to meaning suggest anything from ritual to merely an act of self-actualisation, from ownership to leadership.
In the end, all share intent. Marking a moment in time in communal space, iconography that is not merely acknowledged by the artist’s contemporaries, but by generations thereafter. Ancestors such as Australopithecus garhi and Homo habilis are often associated by their primitive tool creation and usage, but said usage was largely survival-oriented. In the case of parietal art, it speaks to complex preparation such as the gathering and production of medium, and the conscious capacity to undertake an act that does not directly translate to survival.
Often perceived as the bare minimum of creative expression, the synaptic leap that could afford such action remains profound. Considering we are the recipients of this moment in time, it elicits what German philosopher Rudolf Otto called the numinous; an arousal of spiritual emotion or an overwhelming sense of awe.
While cave art soon came to showcase cognitive development of the visual cortex, in the ability to render wildlife or spiritual conceits, the state of modern visual communication arguably started with the outline of a hand.
In the next section, I want to share development of another aspect of visual communication; one that took the hand itself as a canvas, creating an ancient artform that crossed cultures and class.
Turning Point II – Shrubs in the Desert
Before hands were pressed to walls in ancient grottos, Neanderthal tribes inhabiting the Iberian Peninsula were known to practice the art of self-beautification, a breakthrough in symbolic-thinking that predated the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe by 10,000 years.
This concurrent development in consciousness is evidenced by the discovery of discarded shells containing trace elements of foreign pigments. In essence, crude palettes within which to mix lepidocrocite, haematite, pyrite, and charcoal for the purpose of crafting body paints. Studies suggest that a driving factor for this paradigm was social pressure, as Neanderthal tribes began to condense in lower Europe, and eventually amplified by the arrival of Homo sapiens. Therefore, survival required an intensification of visual impact. This was, in essence, a primeval social mantle atop a Darwinian core, as groups encountered each other and vied for best first impression. It can be argued that little has changed.
Make-up has been a staple of self-expression ever since Humankind’s cousin started mixing hues, expressed throughout history as a signifier of wealth and importance. Egyptian pharaohs associated beauty with spirituality, leading to a ritualisation of cosmetics. Certain minerals such as Malachite and Galena gave the distinctive aqua-green and black tones of Ancient Egyptian eyeliner, with the production thereof being prohibitive and exclusionary.
Such exclusion has meant that visual communication and its development was often the providence of aristocracy. Monied strands of society who, by merit of position and patronage, inferred artistic appreciation as an upper class pursuit. But not all visual art is beyond the means of the underclass, and in the case of henna, can appeal to and be practiced by all levels of society.
Made from the rugged Lawsonia inermis that flourishes in arid climates, Henna has been used in beautification since the Bronze Age. A powder is ground from the leaves of this resilient plant, then mixed with liquid such as lime juice or tea. After resting, it is applied to the hands, feet or hair, where the now-freed Lawsone molecule binds with keratin, leaving behind a robust, rusty red that lasts for weeks.
The plant’s abundance, and relative ease of preparation, meant that time was the only prerequisite to usage.
Henna usage has been recorded from North Africa, throughout the Middle East, to the Sub-Continent and as far as the Malay Peninsula. As impressive as geographical spread is the cosmetic’s sheer universality in the societies who used it. The Hery Sesheta embalmers used henna to decorate nails prior to mummification in Ancient Egypt, and Cleopatra herself used it both in body decoration and in hair dyes. The North African Tuareg and Amazigh tribes took to using henna to adorn their hands with the same ornate patterns they wove into their Ehan tents. Practitioners of all regional faiths found henna an excellent way to bypass texts that forbade permanent tattooing, or frowned upon adornments such as jewelry that could conceivably convey idolatry.
It was brought into Persia through the Rashidun Caliphate’s westward conquest beginning in 633 AD, and while indigenous usage on the Sub-Continent was speculated to have started earlier, the later Mughal invasion of India in the 16th Century cemented it as a social norm. Contrary to association, the country was one of the last places to take up this art form.
Henna design variation naturally between region and culture. From Mali’s fish bone style to the aforementioned angular geometry of the Algerian nomads, from the ‘dipped fingertips’ of the Hebrews and Copts to patterns produced by string guidelines across Persia; each hand possessed intricate and highly meaningful adornment, reflecting the culture within which the owner existed.
More importantly, this was across the entire socio-economic spectrum. From the poorest castes to the richest nobles, henna was a cultural constant. Mummified remains of peasantry in Ancient Egypt, their rudimentary interment a far cry from the careful preservation of deceased nobility, still exhibited henna pigment on their scarified remains.
Requiring a level of symbolic interpretation, and aside from practical creations like weaving, henna’s prevalence is visual communication that existed against prohibitive conditions like literacy and status. This highly personal beautification of one’s own hands remains unlike most artistic pursuits in the ancient and medieval worlds at that time.
In the next and final post, I want to present a critical moment, where the physical and the virtual collide to leave an indelible mark on creative culture.
Turning Point III – Futureworld
It was seen as a dancing band of light displayed on the curved display of a cathode-ray tube, signal voltages rendered in visual form. Ben Laposky’s oscilloscope arrived in 1950, offering the first rudimentary glimpse at a simulated visual future, even if a byproduct of test machinery.
Twenty-two years later, in a graduate program at the University of Utah, Fred Parke and Edwin Catmull carried what Laposky had started to then-unimagined levels. All it took to leave an indelible mark on visual communication was an industrial-grade research computer and Catmull’s left hand.
At the time, Catmull was undertaking a research task not in the field of art, but science. It specifically related to the difficulty of rendering and animating curved surfaces on the hardware of the day. This processor-intensive computation favoured simple geometric patterns where vector coordinates could be rendered in relation to each other with comparative ease. As a technical challenge, the human hand was selected to map, compute and animate, as it required the problem of simultaneous movement to be solved. Moreover, rendered not just as rudimentary vectors, but via a technique called texture mapping to give definition and dimension to the model.
The two made a plaster cast of Catmull’s hand, then set about charting the contures of the model into a series of triangles. Three hundred and fifty interlocking triangles were then measured in relationship to each other using a computerised drafting tool that logged coordinates in three-dimensions, which in turn slowly replicated the cast within a custom CAD program Catmull had coded.
Once all the information was transferred to the computer, so began a case of manipulating vertices in a simulated three-dimensional space, and ensuring that neighbouring sections acted accordingly to realistically portray articulation. Texture-wrapping was then applied over the wireframe, which accounted for light sources and calculated shadowing. It was a new form of sculpture, a simulacrum of the organic in an electronic landscape. And while the painstaking minute-long animation occurred clumsily frame by frame via off-screen photography, this digital hand was a crucial jumping-off point for computer graphics and animation.
The ramifications for rendering figurative complexity within a synthetic space would cause ripples beyond calculating and testing engineering theories; one minute’s worth of hand-waving would set the imaginations of artists on fire. Without it, genre-defining authors like William Gibson may not have conjured their ideas about virtual reality in quite the same way, if at all. CG may not have come of age in cinema quite so quickly, had Catmull and Parke been satisfied with the crude cylinders and quadrilaterals of the era. This was a watershed moment, in every one of its three-hundred and fifty interconnected pieces.
From the spattered negative space on rock walls to the philosophies behind Univers, visual communication has been a constant but ever-evolving way for humankind to relay their ideas through shape and colour. Environmental and extraneous contact points throughout history supercharged our capacity to render, reflect and record our ideations of the world, with an intent to instill or share them with others.
Cognitive development in the visual cortex, alongside increasing social elements, suggested that early humans put as much intent into parietal art as the Henna artists of the ancient and medieval worlds. Henna art itself a broad concept that traveled the trade routes, or found contemporaneous usage on account of the plant’s ubiquity. By the time the artform had arrived in the Indian subcontinent, it had spread far and wide, and was used to convey its own myriad stories.
And while it started as a painfully rudimentary process, the mitochondria of Parke and Catmull’s painstaking work exists within each and every 3D project; from Hollywood effects to a kid teaching themselves Blender.
That inherent creative drive, however it bears out, is something to be treasured and cherished. Particularly as visual artists, where the uncanny and ineffable conversation between brain and hand presents itself as an artistic communication, Otto’s numinous is never far away.
Even when the blank page is a burden, or our creative batteries feel flat, therein remains the powerful original spark, one that was pressed against a rockface at the dawn of time.
•
Huge thanks to Alex for this fascinating and unexpected guest post. That last sentence will stay with me for a long time. Once again, do have a look at Alex’s website and follow him on Twitter.
Hi all, just a quick update to say I haven’t forgotten about my blog, or those who read it. It’s been a bit of a crazy year, and time for writing, and the headspace I sometimes need to do so, has been in short supply.
I am intending to get back to writing more regularly, and hopefully I can kick that off in a few weeks time.
Until then, here’s a recent mecha illustration for you. Drawn on the iPad, in Procreate. I’m working digitally quite a lot at the moment. Commercial work – I’m doing some concept art for games – means fast turn arounds and frequent iterations and amends, so digital works well.
Quite a bit probably as it’s been a while since I’ve blogged.
I’m just over a, thankfully mild, bout of Covid. Omicron finally caught up with me after two years of dodging it. It does seem like this latest variant is getting just about everyone this time. Stay safe and well everyone. Get jabbed, wear a mask.
Work-wise – I’ve been doing some concept art for a sci-fi video game which has been a nice change of pace. Producing lots of variations of spaceships, refining and finessing them. Lots of fun. I also did some illustration work for another video game, this time a fantasy/gothic themed one. Again great to do something a little different. I think I learnt quite a bit working on both of these, and as there’s likely to be much more work from both, plenty of opportunities to level up.
Personal work – I’ve continued working on both my Innsmouth and Weird Field World projects. Adding illustrations and background writing and fiction and fleshing out the worlds. I still have plans to produce a book of the first chapter of Innsmouth. And of course, book two of the Weird Field World – titled (somewhat unsurprisingly as) Weird Field War is in the works.
Raptor 01 – a new enamel pin badge, based on a design from my Deep Space Fleet II poster. You can buy the badge here. There are plans to launch a Kickstarter at some point to produce a whole fleet of enamel spaceship badges.
I’m still out and about as often as I can taking photographs. I’ve had a slightly dodgy achilles for a while now, so I’ve had to take things a little easy. One of my favourite recent photos, taken at the London Wetland Centre.
Iceland – I’ve wanted to go to Iceland for a very long time, and I’m finally going. At the beginning of May I’ll fly out, with my dad, for a two week road trip around Iceland’s ring road. It’s 825 miles through some of the most amazing landscapes, and I am very excited. I’ve got a drone for the trip, so fingers crossed the weather allows me to use it to capture som of this big sweeping vistas. I am very excited. Expect several blog posts about my trip once I’m back.
And that’s you all caught up. Is there anything you want to read about? Any ideas for future posts? Let me know in the comments.
I’m now happily accepting a new round of illustration commissions for 2021/22. If you’ve ever wanted to own some original art – and like my work – now’s your chance.
Commissions
If you would like to buy an original drawing, email me at rob [at] thisnorthernboy [dot] co [dot] uk , and let me know what kind of thing you are looking for. While you can ask me to draw absolutely anything, it’s probably best to stick to subjects and themes that you’ve seen me produce already. I’m not saying I’d never draw a portrait of your cats, for instance, but it’s unlikely. Some subjects I love to draw are:
Ships and Lighthouses
Isometric buildings
Robots
Astronauts
Spaceships
Imaginary places
What you’ll receive will be a black and white pen drawing, on good quality, 220gsm cartridge paper. If you would prefer a colour illustration – let me know and we can have a chat.
You can also request for the illustration to be landscape or portrait in orientation.
I can’t guarantee that every request will be something I’d be happy to draw – but I’ll do my best. If you take a look at previous posts on this blog, or on my Instagram page you can see the kinds of thinks I like to illustrate..
What will this cost?
For an A5 (148 x 210mm) commission I charge £85 + post & packaging.
For an A4 (210 x 297mm) commission I charge £150 + post & packaging.
For an A3 (297 x 420mm) commission I charge £250 + post & packaging.
For an A2 (420 x 594mm) commission I charge £450 + post & packaging.
When you email me to request a commission, if you can include the address you’d like it shipped to, I’ll work out the cost of postage and let you know. If you’re happy with the overall cost I accept payment by PayPal.
When will you get your drawing?
I aim to complete and post all illustrations within one month of receiving payment.
PLEASE NOTE: This post is regarding private, personal commissions. If you want to discuss a commercial proposition – illustrations for a book, game, or anything else that you would be selling, then please get in touch directly.
Green. I seek out green places more and more as I get older. The combination of peace and the sounds of nature seem to give me an incredible sense of well-being. Advocates of ‘Forest bathing’ have a point. At this time of year, particularly, the colours are incredible. Fresh, vibrant, jewel greens. White and yellow of Cow Parsley and Cowslip. The unexpected violet-blue of a glade of Bluebells. But green, always the green. Dappled sunlight and mossy roots and rocks. There’s a path I’ll always take.
I now have a new Instagram account solely for my photography.
I’ve just got back from a week spent up in York with my parents. I miss Yorkshire, and a few days roaming around the countryside in good weather made me realise just how much.
One of those days was spent at the RSPB site at Bempton Cliffs, on Yorkshire’s East coast. 300′ high chalk cliffs alive with seabirds, and cliff-top meadows full of life. It’s an incredible place and I really do recommend visiting if you’re ever in the area.