Heavy Pencil at Pick Me Up 2013 Ho!

Heavy Pencil is back at Somerset House for Pick Me Up 2013 and this year sees a whole bunch of great people doing lots of great stuff like live drawing, costume making workshops and musical fun times. Mr Mike Perry and Mr Josh Cochran are even flying over and parachuting in especially for the event to paint up a treat of a mural. Come on down if you can get yourselves in! It looks like it will be a busy one!

Details below courtesy of Mr A. Rae.

Heavy Pencil
Live Art-Live Music
25th April, 6pm -10pm at Pick Me Up, Somerset House, Wc2R 1LA

Live Music
The Dead Pirates
Owen and the Eyeballs

Live ArtAndrew Rae, Jim Stoten, Nick White, Owen Gildersleeve, McBess, Anna Lomax, Jess Bonham, Chrissie Macdonald, Luke Best and special guests from New YorkMike Perry and Josh Cochran.

Plus DJs Miles Donovan and Disco Bits

£8 Entry, £6 Concessions, £15 Festival Pass, available from www.somersethouse.com

NY Times - The Next Frontier Is Inside Your Brain

Illustration for the New York Times' Sunday Review. It's a fascinating piece that looks at a new research initiative into the Brain that hopes answer, among other questions ... 'how the brain generates thoughts, dreams, memories, perception and consciousness...' This was nice, quick job with the turnaround ending up being about 4 hours for roughs and final.

At first I was thinking about focusing on the neurons in the brain but replacing the 'cell' part with faces. Which, although was getting there wasn't quite working. As the art director quite rightly informed me, the neurons looked more like trees or onions.

 

 In the end we went with the classic Head option, with the final image being stretched out to fill the space and the various parts moving around a bit. Normally going from rough to final I would swap over to using gouache and painting it, which can sometimes mean I tighten up and make the image a bit too clean. This time however I was enjoying the pencil marks so stuck with it. Thanks to Alexandra Zsigmond for the commission and great art direction.

The Nightmare before Valentines

On the 13th of Feb to celebrate the day before Love day (where everyone gives strangers hand made cards with hearts on them and scrawls sweet nothings inside with their non writing hand), we aka Owen & The Eyeballs, the band I am in, have a gig at Catch. We will be playing with the marvelous Dead Pirates who contrary to their name are neither dead nor pirates. (I could be wrong).

 

Details below. Poster above by Jim 'Jimbalaya' Stoten.

 

The Nightmare before Valentines.

Live Music, Good Times, Much Fun

featuring live music costumes and visuals from: 

Owen and the Eyeballs 

http://owenandtheeyeballs.bandcamp.com 

http://vimeo.com/owenandtheeyeballs

The Dead Pirates

http://thedeadpirates.com

At Catch 22 Kingsland Road E2 8DA

February 13th at 8 till late

Free Entry

Limner Journal #2 Launch

24th January sees the launch of issue 2 of Limner Journal at Beach London, from 6-9pm. For people not in the know 'Limner is a new critical journal of illustration. It's aim is to provide a platform for the exploration, critique and contextualisation of contemporary illustration. Issue #2 takes the form of a 168 page book featuring new writing and illustration.' 

It has some great people in there including 

Jordan Chatwin, Blaise Larmee, Colin David Stewart, Peter Willis, Penny Klein, Murray O'Grady, Stine Belden Røed, Grace Helmer, Jay Cover, Holly Mills, Reena Makwana, Kai Nodland, Reuben Mwaura, Joe Kessler, Liv Taylor, Eric Timothy Carson, Charlotte Mei, Umberto Eco, Ella Mclean, Florence Shaw, Nick White, Alice Lindsay, Good Press Gallery, Joakim Ojanen, Mike Redmond, Jon Pilkington, Chie Miyazaki, Lisa Wilkens, Rose Blake, Megan Woof, Dan Shapiro and Isabella Toledo.

 

If you look closely you will see my name included in that pile of names, this is due to me writing a whole bunch of words in an order and doing a few drawings too. (Though it is mostly writing.) I wrote the words in Limner a wee while ago and was pleased with them at the time. My piece is about Procrastination and the two people who read it said "It's not the worse thing I have ever read.'' Which is pretty high praise and also odd that they both independently said those exact same words. Thankfully there are so many other clever and talented people within the Journal so I am sure it will be great!

I know Peter Willis and the Studio Operative guys have worked darned hard on the Journal so If you live London way be sure to come down and grab* a copy.

*Buy.

The Night before Halloween!

Come celebrate Halloween a day early on the 30th of October at

 

The Night Before Halloween!

 

Free Entry!

 

Fancy Dress with prizes for the best costumes.

Music from Owen and the Eyeballs, Glaciers and more

Scary Live Drawing

Wrong Pop, Eerie Tunes and Good Old Fashioned Spooooooky fun!

Bring your friends and their friends and their friends.

Catch, 22 Kingsland Road, E2

 

Poster by the master Illustrator man Jim Stoten!

 

It's going to be scarily good fun! This guy reckons so! Huh?!

Pain at the dentist.

Thursday the 19th April sees the opening of 'Pain at the Dentist' a group show at Alvarado Gallery. The exhibition explore the notion of pain and has some great exhibitors like Rob Ryan, Martin O'Neill and some guy called Nick White to name a few. If that wasn't enough the gallery is an ex dentisits and who doesn't love an old dentists?

The private view is on from 6-9 at 33 Chatsworth rd, London, E5 0LH. More information over at Alvarado Gallery.

Pick Me Up 2012 - Kibbo Kift III and Heavy Pencil

Pick Me Up is back at Somerset house and so am I playing some musical music and doing a bit of live drawing.

First up is Supermundane's Kibbo Kift featuring a whole load of illustrator people performing poems and songs! The last two Kibbo Kift's have been awesome so it will be nice to take it to a new and grander venue. Should be a great evening featuring all of the above. I am excited. It's on the 22nd March from 6:30 until 9:30pm. Tickets can be bought here LINK

The following thursday eve I will be back amongst another whole load of talented people. I will be playing songs in a band featuring the mighty Andrew Rae, the stupendous Jim Stoten and the powerhouse that is Owen Gildersleeves. More Info below.

Thursday 29th March Heavy Pencil at Pick Me Up

Pete Fowler, Jim Stoten, Nick White, Luke Best, Miles Donovan, Andrew Rae, Owen Gildersleeve, Chrissie Macdonald, Lauren Davies, Anna Lomax and Jess Bonham

6.30pm-9.30pm Entrance included in fair ticket £8 or multiple entry pass £12 or £6 concession.

As well as the Thursday events I will have my Heart Limited Edition Snake tee for sale in the Pick me Up shop. There's always some great stuff to see and do at Pick Me Up. I for one am particularly excited about seeing Peepshow's Museum of Objects & Origins.

www.somersethouse.org.uk/pickmeup

Now Or Ever

Tomorrow I head off to Belgium for the install of 'Now Or Ever' a group show at Ter Dilft in Bornem. There will be work from Ephameron (BE), Joanna Hellgren (SE), Louis Reith (NL), Nous Vous (UK), Ward Zwart (BE) and myself (UK). It looks to be an exciting show, with plenty of space to have fun with. I have been creating and collating various bits and bobs to show, including some frames with pictures in, some 3d pieces and whole lot of heads. Fingers crossed everything makes it there in one piece or just the correct amount of pieces.

The show opens this saturday 17th march with live performances from those Nous Vous guys and is on till the 5th May.

The Maestro's Loss

Normally at this time of the year (the start) I would post all the things I forgot to post during the last year but instead I thought I'd start as I mean to go on and post something published in 2012. This Illustration was for the Observer and came out on New Years day which also happens to be the first day of the year. The drawing accompanied a short story by Hari Kunzru called 'The Maestro's Loss' and was / is a great story to try and Illustrate. Go read it over here. The Cembalo Scrivano that the story has at it's centre is a fascinating contraption and you can really imagine a writer having to push down hard on those thick wooden keys.

As you can see the piece was printed up nice and big which was pretty exciting when I opened up the paper on Sunday, though perhaps others were probably cursing me for getting newspaper ink all over their fingers and elbows. 

I also got to include a few chalk drawings of the typewriter as a spot. Noice.

Supermarket Sarah Wall!

I was asked a wee while ago to curate my own wall for the website Supermarket Sarah so I said 'Yeah, sounds swell.' As mentioned before Supermarket Sarah is an online shop whereby you create a wall in real life, take a photo of it, upload this to the internet (not real life) and you can click on the items to buy them. (I really don't need to explain this stuff to you as I know you're smarter than the average bear and know how clicking with a mouse works.)


Anyhoo. It was fun to do and I managed to get a load of great work from talented buddies like Mr Ben Newman, Signore Rico, the amigos from Nous Vous, Monsieur Sam Rees, Herr Florian Kremb, Señor Paddy Molloy and Master Tom Hicks so there's plenty of stuff to take your fancy.

There's a whole lot of stuff to buy like prints, framed original art works, ceramics, fake tattoos, books zines. I also made some bits and bobs specifically for the wall like some screen printed tee shirts and bags.


As well as this hand painted plate. I think perhaps you should go there now and buy some stuff for birthday presents or something.

Recent-ish Editorial pieces!

I say recent-ish as most were done at the end of last year. The top one being for the latest issue of Eye magazine, illustrating a great piece about how graphic design students should be taught information design rather than just making things look pretty. The subject is something I often think about in regards to my work as it can often feel like i am favouring 'style over content' due to my want to put pattern everywhere. But I think what I came up with shows that it's not totally one sided. The piece has been printed up nicely as it features in the 'Uncoated' section of the magazine where surprisingly the paper is uncoated. The whole issue focuses on infographics and looks great thanks to the art direction of Simon Esterson. It's worth picking up if not for my illo but for the pieces on McSweeney's and Chris Ware.

Here it is in all it's printed glory.

This piece was the for the L.A Times review of the new Salman Rushdie book 'Luka and the fire of life' which was written for his son. It deals with among other things a magic carpet, a circus, some animals, some classic video games, somebody called 'Nobodaddy' and the quest to find the fire of life as you probably guessed.

On a quite different note here is the cover I did for a watch supplement for The Spectator. T'was nice to draw with me ol' dip pen for a change.

Bloomberg Businessweek Cover - Coke In Africa

Last week I was lucky enough to illustrate the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek over in the U.S of A. The cover is based on Duane Stanford's article about Coke in Africa (as you may well have been able to tell what with the big red and white writing.) The piece looks into the fact that Africa is the last place for Coca cola to conquer in terms of sales and the subsequent plus points and minus points of this. Obviously I had to show both these sides as well as making the cover intriguing to the viewer but without it looking too much like a Coke ad. I think I pulled it off and am real pleased with the outcome. I had some great art direction from Richard Turley the creative director at Businessweek who knew what he wanted but didn't say "now draw this in that corner and put some red here...' rather letting me come up with my own solutions that fitted the brief.

Beatrice & Virgil / Man or Monkey

A wee while ago I was commissioned by the LA Times to do an illustration for a review of the new Yann Martel book 'Beatrice & Virgil'. As the two namesakes from the title of the book are a donkey and a monkey I was asked specifically to draw the head of a donkey and the head of a monkey. Normally when an art director asks you to draw something specific it can be somewhat frustrating as it's much more preferable to come up with your own idea. But this isn't the case when asked to draw a donkey head and monkey head. In that case it's usually ''How many do you want?'' As you can see from the following roughs I got pretty carried away with drawing these heads and so numbered them up so one of each animal could be chosen.





Even then I ended up handing in 2 versions of each. In the end they went for the more 'donkey looking' Beatrice rather 'horse -looking' Beatrice and the not so sad Virgil.

A couple of months later I was approached by Anorak the foremost kids magazine to contribute a game or puzzle for their upcoming activity book. I decided to make a classic game of 'Man or Monkey' whereby I could draw some more monkeys and some men too.


Although my spread won't be in the first Anorak activity book it will be in the second one which is coming out shortly.


I then thought ''Yeah that game of Man or Monkey would make a sweet limited edition screen print, printed in various colours on A3 paper and sold at the reasonable price of £10!'' So that is what I am doing and here is what it will look like in yellow. I'll let you and everyone else know when it's up for sale. Yeah.

'People I've never met and Conversations I've never had!'

Holy Moly! 'People I've never met and Conversations I've never had' is the name of my first published book and my debut solo show.

The book is a 32 page hardback monograph featuring all new work and is published by the great people at Nobrow. The guys have done a great job putting it together and I'm real excited for people to see it. You will be able to buy it at their website very soon and at....

The Private view / launch on Thursday the 17th September at Concrete Hermit (5a Club Row, London, E1 6JX) from 6.30pm - 9pm.

To run alongside the launch of the book I will be exhibiting the original artworks from the book, a number of Limited edition screenprints / posters and several hundred heads. The show will be on from Wednesday 9th September to Saturday the 19th September.

I just finished putting up the show and am pretty darn pleased with the result. I'll post some pictures soon. I was helped out with the install by the Gent that is Sam Bevington who has been interning at Nobrow. He was indeed a great help as i'm pretty sure I would still be sticking Heads to the wall now.

As you can see the Launch / private view is quite a bit after the day the show opens, this is because the books are only being sent over from Belgium this coming weekend. Therefore the book will not be in the gallery / shop until at least Tuesday the 15th Sept. Fingers crossed sooner!

See you at the Launch I'll be the one smiling lots and posing next to the pictures and making sure no ones knocks anything over.

Below are some sneaky peeks at the inside of the book.

This is Nick White's Shop Now Open!

Yes my shop is now up on my website for all to peruse. Not quite in time for the christmas post but hey. For sale are a series of silk screen prints recently printed by myself at The Rob Clarke Print Studio. For anyone in London who would like to buy one of these prints but doesn't want to spend money on postage then i can probably arrange to meet up behind Tesco or Asda or not even a supermarket maybe just by a statue or other famous landmark.

THISISNICKWHITE'S SHOP