Month: June 2021

The Queen’s Head

This is one of my Magnum Opus pieces to date, a drawing of the Queen’s head. The source image is taken from her 88th birthday portrait by the photographer David Bailey. I am not a follower of the Queen or her life and am normally indifferent to the Royal Family but I thought a Queens Portrait could be an iconic addition to my work. My maps are quite obvious they are maps when you are looking at them even from close up however I feel like my portraits give more of an interesting far away view. From close up they are sections through imaginary buildings but from further away they become portraits. The first portrait I completed was Hotel Perpetua way back in 2015.

Consequently, this new portrait idea shoehorned itself right in the middle of my Drawn Out Journey maps project which has delayed it because I really enjoy drawing portraits. This portrait is A3 size so I took a bit of a risk because I did not know how it was going to appear from a distance. Pixellating the portrait in Affinity Photo is fair enough however the shading offered by drawing lots of tiny images is VERY different to block shading when you pixellate a photo. It is far more subtle.

Challenges happen when you reach a point in the maze which happens to be a dark spot you need to think about how you can represent an event from that year as a dark spot. So, for example when I got to the right corner of the mouth, I had reached the 1980s. The discovery of the Titanic Wreck by officer Robert Ballard in 1985 would be a perfect thing to represent in that section of the portrait because it is a dark image of the wreck underwater.

See if you can spot the Titanic image to the top left of the left hand image – this is the dark corner of the Queen’s mouth. In the image to the right, we see the upper levels of the Queen’s head. Here are galleries which contain images of Margaret Thatcher, the Gherkin building in London as well as an image of the iconic High Speed Train and random rooms which have Ikea furniture, Brompton bikes and other little things that are quintessentially British.

It has been a while!

Since my last blog post in 2017, I have done a lot for my illustration career but have not given the same time to the support structure such as my blogs. The simple, quick process of posting on Instagram has been the bridge between my drawing desk and the real world recently.

I have completed 3 pieces since the World Map project in 2018. These are a) an updated map of Great Britain showcasing British history (A3 size), b) the Queen which contains a maze showcasing the History of Britain within the lifetimes of Queen Elizabeth II (A3 size) and a new portrait of London’s major landmarks (A2 size). The portrait of London shows Big Ben, a red Routemaster bus and the London Eye with a maze that contains a history of London from 1984 (the year I was born) until the present. I am particularly proud of the Queen’s portrait and the London pieces. But for now, I will showcase images of each of my major completed works on this blog which will be updated more often and I have to catch up because there is a lot to include!

These are images of the first map of Great Britain called ‘Kingdom’ that I created and the latest version. These drawings are both A3 in size.

The first map of Ireland (to the left) that I produced for Kingdom in 2015 was a lot more whimsical and had more random connections to Ireland that I personally found interesting, eg Dingle with an observatory for Fungi the Dolphin and a cross section through the Trinity Library for Dublin. The new map to the right is bursting with Irish history in comparison and the maze makes more sense in relation to the rest of the drawing. I also added brick sections to round off some of Ireland’s more distinctive geographic features in the second drawing.
And here is the final piece, Kingdom II. This is a far more refined map than my first one, with elements that are more relevant to a general UK history instead of elements that are a lot more obscure. Please not the William Shakespeare image, the Big Ben spiral staircase, the image of Queen Victoria and the Titanic in the close up to the right.