6.8 x 9 inches, Promarkers, 2011.
The latest illustration for the NoHo Noir series written by Katherine Tomlinson, illustrated by me, and featured on the Patch.com North Hollywood and Toluca Lake site.
Ash has a stalker. She's a bit scary.
You can read this very funny episode
here. An element of this week's story actually happened to me - can you guess which bit?
I thought this week i'd talk a bit about the process behind these illustrations. Katherine (the writer) e-mailed me with a basic idea of what she is going to write. All the information she gave me was that the story involves a Goth-style girl who is stalking one of the characters.
It instantly reminded me of a Jerry Springer episode where a girl's boyfriend had left her for a midget. She was a big girl, dressed in the goth style and she just kept menacingly repeating that he was hers and he wasn't going to leave her. So I had her in mind as the stalker.
I then thought how about seeing her through a window under a streetlight. Things like this are tricky - I can't go to an apartment in North
Hollywood and take a photo out of the window, so I have to look out my window and try and look at
Hollywood on Google maps and try and marry the two.
So the cactus and the cube and the stone are actual objects from my workroom windowsill (the dead fly isn't!
LOL).
Once I've worked
out the composition and drawn it out in
pencil I then draw over it again in fine liner pens (I have 4 sizes to get a variety of line). Then I start to fill in with the markers. On this one working out the shadows and lighting was all guesswork as I had no reference photos that fitted . I think it just about works.
