The Fantastic Photography Of Erik Johansson.

I discovered Erik Johansson’s fantastically imaginative photography completely by chance a few days ago which is probably the best way you can discover anything. Erik’s from Sweden and here is what he does with his time…

About Erik Johansson:
“My name is Erik Johansson, I’m a full time photographer and retoucher from Sweden based in Berlin, Germany. I work on both personal- and commissioned projects and sometimes I create street illusions. I don’t capture moments, I capture ideas. To me photography is just a way to collect material to realize the ideas in my mind. I get inspired by things around me in my daily life and all kinds of things I see. Although one photo can consist hundreds of layers I always want it to look like it could have been captured. Every new project is a new challenge and my goal is to realize it as realistic as possible.”

View more of Erik’s amazing work on his website which is HERE.

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The Dying Art Of Courtroom Art.

For a while when I was younger, I thought about becoming a courtroom artist.

See, I used to naively think that the courtroom artist was permitted to sit in on whole trials, perfecting their sketches and then selling their drawings on to the newspapers at the end of the day for big money! But this is not so.

I recently read a newspaper interview with a 68 year old courtroom artist named Patricia Coleman which was a real eye-opener. Born in Texas, Patricia worked in graphics for a Houston TV channel before emigrating to the UK in 1987 where she swiftly began working as a courtroom artist.

Mainly working for ITV News, Coleman has covered almost every major legal event for the past 26 years. She says:

“There have been lots of cases and they have all been different and there are different ways to work at them as well. Sometimes I get to sit inside the court but most of the time I have to observe and then run outside the court, find a quiet spot and do the sketches from memory.”

Did you hear that? From memory!

This is not an easy thing to do at all and I should know. Because I just tried it myself.

Here’s Patricia Coleman’s courtroom sketch of infamous British serial killer, Rose West:

As an exercise, I stared hard at Patricia’s sketch for exactly 3 minutes straight and then I quickly turned away and gave myself exactly 2 minutes to draw my own version from memory. This is the best I could come up with:

…As you can see, my version, whilst slightly resembling Rose West, is not a patch on Patricia’s which was done in a similar time frame.

As mentioned before, Coleman has covered pretty much every major British legal event of the last 26 years and I always imagine that it would be difficult not to let the things you overhear during trials influence your drawings. I mean, we all know that Ian Brady is evil but it’s not the courtroom artist’s job to paint him as being evil, right?

Here are some more of Patricia’s sketches…(Click on them to enlarge)…

“Some of them have been very memorable and the most upsetting was the Lockerbie trial in Holland. At the end of the trial, they read out the name and age of every one of the victims and where they were from and it seemed to go on for so long. I found it just so sad. That is one of the saddest things ever.”

Courtroom Artistry will soon be a profession of the past. Earlier this year, Channel 4 screened a version of Nat Fraser’s murder trial. 6 weeks of proceedings condensed down to 2 hours for television. It was fascinating.

Cameras are being granted unlimited access to courtrooms more and more these days and while I think that is a very good way to educate the public on exactly what happens during a trial, it will mean the end for the courtroom artist. And that’s a sad thing.

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Behind Al Cook’s “Necropolis”: Nailing Him Up.

This feels like a wee secret art class!
But it’s not.

Today I’m going to show you the ‘Behind The Scenes’ drawings of “The Crucifixion“, the latest installment of Al Cook’s “Necropolis”, my comic strip. Actually, ‘Behind The Scenes’ isn’t exactly what this is. It’s more like a collection of daft and drunken squiggles and the illustration panels they turned into.

First thing’s first. I doodle ALL the time! Doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m doing. Whatever I’m doing, I’m usually doodling whilst doing it. I’ve been doodling images of Christ on the Cross since I was a wee boy and so it seemed like a good idea to use those as the basis for my next strip.

I usually don’t like to plan things out as much as I did with “The Crucifixion” and I almost never do any ‘preparation’ drawings but here’s how it all happened…

* 2 scribbly drunken sketches done at a bar:

* Planning for the layout of the first couple of panels:

* The completed first and second panel illustrations:

* Quick sketches to give me an idea of what should be in shadow etc…

* The completed illustration panels:

* Idea sketches for the look of the Roman headgear…

* Halfway through applying the biro ink to the pencil lines of the final illustration:

* The completed illustration:

* A layout sketch done very quickly by the looks of it:

* The completed illustration:

* I found it quite difficult to illustrate someone removing a Roman helmet. The angle of it bugged me for a week. I must have drawn it 20 different ways before sketching out this idea:

* The completed illustration (Which I’m still not happy with):

* I wrote the comic strip as I went along and one of the main problems with that is that I don’t work in order. Like my brain, I’m sort of out of order. For instance, the first panel was first one drawn and then I worked from the middle panel backwards and then from the end panel backwards. It’s just the way that works best for me but sometimes, …sometimes I get stuck for a line of dialogue and have to improvise on the spot…

* Note to self:

* The final illustration before I drew over it with black biro pen:

* Detail:

* The completed panel:

* I fished this out of the bin 3 days after I’d put it there. Sometimes the best ideas are the first ones!…

* The finished illustration:

You can view the fully finished strip HERE.

If any of this was of any help to you with anything drawing or illustration-related then please drop me a line.

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Al Cook’s “Necropolis”: The Crucifixion.

Awrite n’ that, big man?
Here’s the latest unfunny from my comic-strip, Al Cook’s “Necropolis”.
Share it with your pals if you have any.

View this as it’s meant to be viewed by clicking HERE.
Keep up to date with the twits on Twitter HERE and if you have any hate mail or death threats please ONLY use the Facebook Page which is HERE.

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Jessica Harrison’s Porcelain Horror Figurines.

Never you mind what I was originally looking for on Google. All you need to know is that I found something much better by accident. Porcelain Horror Figurines made by artist and sculptor, Jessica Harrison! Enjoy…

Here’s a little bit about Jessica Harrison from her own website…

Born in St Bees in 1982, Jessica moved to Scotland to study sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art in 2000, going on to do an MFA before completing a practice-led PhD in sculpture in 2013 funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Her research considers the relationship between interior and exterior spaces of the body, but looks neither inwards towards a hidden core, nor outwards from the subconscious, instead looking orthogonally across the skin to the movement of the body itself, using the surface of the body as a mode of both looking and thinking.

Moving beyond a bi-directional model, Harrison proposes a multi-directional and pervasive model of skin as a space in which body and world mingle. Working with this moving space between artist/maker and viewer, she draws on the active body in both making and interpreting sculpture to unravel imaginative touch and proprioceptive sensation in sculptural practice. In this way, Harrison re-describes the body in sculpture through the skin, offering an alternative way of thinking about the body beyond a binary tradition of inside and outside.

Jessica’s website is HERE

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