The
Great Slowing Down
So in the 70s and 80s I
became much too fast at knocking off illustrations. I didn’t start that way …
at first I used to laboriously crosshatch and/or stipple practically all of my
art. In the beginning I seemed to have unlimited time to produce artwork so I
never thought very much about trying to speed up. Then one day I was handing in
a job at the Star Weekly when the art
director informed me that they would need to break the story into two parts and
they needed an illustration for the second part almost immediately. Yikes! So I
went back to my home studio (I had a full time job at McClelland & Stewart
in those days) and started working a lot faster and with fewer interruptions
and managed to get it done … but I didn’t like it as much as the first one and
started working out how to avoid getting trapped like this in the future. I
first figured out how to simplify at my day job. I did catalogue covers and my
first book jackets in this streamlined style. My points of inspiration were Milton
Glaser, John Alcorn and other artists connected with New York’s Push Pin
Studios (who I’d first heard about when at art college). So over the years I
developed this style … sometimes with a bit of stippling for old time’s sake … though
I did take to sometimes using Letratone© which I considered a bit like
cheating). Full colour pieces could slow one down if the artwork needed to be
pre-separated … think amberlith, Xacto knives, mylar, Scotch tape, registration
marks, and multiple layers (without really knowing what it was going to look
like until a colour proof was made by the printer).
I got so proficient
that at some point in the 1980s I was illustrating a textbook and zapping off
an average of four illustrations an hour. I read somewhere that an illustrator
I knew was planning to no longer illustrate for educational publishers because
they didn’t pay enough money. But I was earning something like $200 an hour so
long as I could keep up the rate I was then at. Seemed like more than enough
money. While working on this project I became aware that I was working so
quickly that I was starting to lose track of what I had done before. I even saw
some pieces and had little or no memory of having done them. This was not good!
So I determined to slow myself down.
Probably just as
well as this was the late 80s when my design work started to dry up because of
my refusal to become computerized. I gave it much thought and then I evolved my
El Whacko© style … base drawings with outlines on both sides of the base art
plus stippling and cross hatching … I’d ditched all my Letraset and Letratone at
the curbside so there wasn’t any danger of cheating.
First real chance I
had to use this new slower technique was for a book called It Takes Two Judges to Try a Cow. I methodically planned out the
drawing and then traced it onto a board. Then I did an initial drawing in
fountain pen and then applying outlines with a fairly fine (O or OO) Rapidograph
technical pen.
Colour was a problem
as I could no longer obtain a Kohinoor fountain pen which worked with
waterproof ink. Should have stockpiled a few in the 1970s before they stopped
manufacturing them. Finally in desperation I started using a straight pen with
India ink for the base drawing so I could add colour without black bleeding
into the colours. This after some experimenting with doing the colouring first
and then adding the ink which I felt took away some of my control.
During this slow
period I joined Japan’s Sloth Club (via Kyoto
Journal magazine) plus got a subscription to Plain. I had set a Luddite course that would last until the waning
months of 1999.
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