Peckham Print Studio Field Trip

Climbing Trees at the Horniman Museum

Continuing my intermittent flirtation with screen printing, I joined Peckham Print Studio's Field Trip to the Horniman Museum & Gardens towards the end of last year. My resulting two colour screen print is above.

The Horniman is a fantastic local museum that was opened in 1901 by a Victorian collector and, in the spirit of the age, it's crammed full of fascinating and exotic stuff; including natural history, African and musical instrument collections.

The Horniman Museum

The trip was led by Tom Murphy, an artist and fastidious screen printer, and consisted of one day of drawing at the museum and another day of printing at the studio. On day one we started out in the Natural History gallery, moved on to the African gallery, then the Music gallery and ended with a bit of sketching outside. Below are some of my sketches. They are all done with india ink in a Pentel Aquash brush pen on tracing paper.

Baboon and skeleton

Spectacled Caiman

Tree climbing mammals

Two tree shrews

Gold figure of an African hunting dog

Various figures and skulls

A case of horn instruments

  

Tom having a sketch in the gardens

On day two the group worked on producing a 2 colour A4 print each, back at the print studio. We were very thoroughly guided through the whole process by Tom, and as I only vaguely remembered what to do it was very helpful. We chose a composition from what was produced the day before and then exposed the tracing paper drawings directly onto a screen.

Exposing my drawings onto a screen

My exposed screen

A fellow field tripper preparing her print

Just the black layer

I chose the case of tree climbers and the horn assemblage to overlay in black and gold. It looks like an almost claustrophobic layering of slightly random stuff that - I think - represents the museum quite well. I'd highly recommend a visit and, if you're interested in joining a Field Trip, keep an eye on Peckham Print Studio's Twitter account.

My final print with black and gold layers

The view from the Horniman Gardens

Rhinoceros and Calf

This is a drawing I did recently of a rhino with a young calf. 

It's an appropriately large one at A0, or 1189 x 841 mm. These photos don't really show the scale. I took loads of process pictures, but I think I have misplaced them!

I used india ink on Saunders Waterford watercolour paper. 

It was commissioned as a gift.

UPDATE

I found a couple of shots of the work in progress, so I thought I would add them in here...

Ride or Die

Here's a piece that I did recently. It was commissioned as a birthday gift for one of a trio of friends. The brief was that it had to include a tricycle (as a symbol of their three-way friendship) and the words "Ride or die".

I thoroughly enjoyed aggressively inking out the letters but decided that a Lisa Frank rainbow gradient would be perfect to lighten the tone. It looks like Summer holiday mischief to me.

Fresh ink

The trike

Printout

Rainbow typography

Sketching at the British Museum

Sketch in progress

I recently had a lovely afternoon sketching at the British Museum. Working from home as I do, I thought it would be good to get out of the house and just draw stuff. After eating my packed lunch in the Great Court I went down to the Africa gallery. I've never actually been in there before and I thought it would be a fitting warm-up for my upcoming trip to Cape Town. I'm travelling there soon for a 2 month working holiday/sabbatical, and I wonder how much of this stuff I will find in the museums there...

Various African masks

I made the decision to sketch with pen only - I used my Preppy 0.3 fountain pen loaded with brown Rotring ink - and just went for it. Admittedly me 'going for it' is everybody else's 'super slow-mo' and I spent my entire time in just one room.

This guy (above) is kind of in the corner of the room i was in, and even though it's massive (you could probably fit 3 people inside it in a very cosy manner) it's very plain and initially looks just like a giant basket. He is in fact an Eland, which is a hefty kind of South African antelope, and as soon as I identified his little head and tail I knew I had to draw him.

I took a few photo pictures while I was there too...

Bronze panel from Benin #junglelife

House pole from British Columbia in the Great Court

Chuck every pattern at a ceiling = British Museum entrance hall

Night night British Museum!

Nicki Minaj in colour

This is just an experiment for my sketchbook portrait, using Dr Martens liquid watercolours (because they're hyper bright) and oil based pitt pencil (because it's proper black). I think it worked.

I drew Nicki Minaj from a picture in an old issue of Wonderland. Once I start drawing, it often amazes me how crazy celebrities faces are and Nicki's is just about as nuts as she is. 

I often instagram things-in-progress, so follow if you're interested in seeing that kind of stuff I'm @abihey - FOLLOW!

Lost in London

Lost in London is a beautiful quarterly magazine about living simply in the city.  It initially caught my eye because of its natural bent and local attitude.  They also happen to make fantastic use of illustration between the covers.

For this latest issue, number 8, I was asked to illustrate the Starling murmuration (yep, I had to look it up too!) that happens over Rainham Marshes.

THE SPREADS

THE COVER

There are lots of gorgeous spreads in this issue and it would make a great present for any lost Londoners you might happen to know!  For £10 you can order a copy online or catch it in these stockists.

DETAILS

If You Love Me by BenZel & Jessie Ware

I'm so pleased to have been involved in the making of this awesome video for "If You Love Me".  The track is a 90s gem by Brownstone, reworked by producers BenZel and featuring the beautiful vocal talents of Ms Jessie Ware.




The video was produced by Studio Moross, where I helped out creating and filming some of the visual effects used.  We turned the studio into a Laboratory and made a mess with all sorts of miscible and immiscible liquids.  Yeah, I still remember a few things from my school Science lessons.

Credits

Director - Kate Moross
DoP - Laurence Stephens
Assisted by Abi Heyneke & Guy Field 
Edit & Grade & Post Production - Kate Moross
Playback Op - Oliver Chapman
With thanks to James Moriarty & Will Samuel

Fitzpleasure

I love alt-J.  I'm not alone in this, because their album 'An Awesome Wave' is amazing.  I wanted to create an illustration in response to their music.

One song that stood out to me from the beginning was 'Fitzpleasure'.  It has this amazing off beat choral intro and then a super dirty bass drop.  I read the lyrics and while very poetic, they are also dirty.  And then I found out about the short story that inspired the track - Tralala from Last Exit To Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr - which is just beyond dirty into abject and brutal.  Still, if you have the stomach for it it's a thought provoking read.  This image is influenced by the track, rather than the story.  

I'm at a little bit of a loss when it comes to explaining my choices (I created the image quite quickly) but I'll try...  

The main part of the picture is a yonic hand gesture, representing the obvious and a more spiritual and serene attitude.  There are several references to hands in the lyrics.  

"Steepled fingers, ring la-la-la-la-leaders, queue jumpers, rock fist paper scissors..."

The triangle in the background is delta, ∆ (the shortcut is alt+j on a mac), in clear and direct reference to the band.

The patterning around the wrists is in inspired by pylons.  They are strong but usually situated in a bleak landscape.

"Tall woman, pull the pylons down, and wrap them around the necks of all the feckless men who queue to be the next."

The cables also continue on from that sentiment.  They represent the visceral without being too graphic, and also show connection, turmoil, confusion and restriction.

The stain shape in the background is more directly from the ending of the Selby Jr story, but in general it's representative of the wake of destruction and dissipation and entropy: the dissolution of all things.

Sorry if this doesn't make a whole lot of sense and it sounds like I'm pussy-footing around the issue (it's because I am).  It should make more sense if you have dug into the 'Fitzpleasure' lyrics or have read the story.  I've done remarkably well to get to the end of this post without mentioning gang rape once.

Grab yourself a high quality limited edition print of this image.

Summer Crush

It's a sunny afternoon in London and you should probably be outside enjoying it, rather than inside reading blog posts.  If you want something to look at while you're out bathing in the sunshine then why not pick up a copy of CRUSHfanzine?  You can enjoy my portrait of Novak Djokovic and loads of other stunning work on paper.  You don't need to hack an unsecured WiFi network or even have any battery left to enjoy it.