I’m proud to have created the painted cover for Journey Planet Issue 65, a celebration of all things Rogue One. I also wrote an article for the issue about my inspirations for the piece as well as the process of creating it. And I did a little portrait of Felicity Jones as Jyn Erso for the interior.
The issue is free to read and you can download it at the link below
http://journeyplanet.weebly.com/journey-planet—2021-hugo-nominee/issue-65-rogue-one
I’m in issue 62 of Journey Planet (“Crafting during COVID”) talking at length about creating art for Glasgow in 2024 during lockdown, with pics. I cover Shipbuilding Over the Clyde, Glasgow Green Lady and Sailing Over Glasgow in a bit more detail than my recent Hugo 2021 eligibility blog post, including some work-in-progress and preparatory pictures. If you’re interested in that kind of thing! There’s even a bit of my fan art.
(Don’t worry, there are many more interesting contributors too!)
It’s a free pdf download! Gift horse. Mouth.
http://journeyplanet.weebly.com/journey-planet—2021-hugo-nominee/issue-62-craft-during-covid
I’ve never done this as a blog post before, but as I’ve been nominated a couple of times and have been specifically asked what artwork is eligible for this year’s Fan Art Hugo award, I’m feeling brave. So, should you be one of those fabulous people who inexplicably cares, my works that first appeared in 2021 and are definitely eligible (because they were published or exhibited somewhere other than my Twitter feed and this website!) include:
Glasgow Green Woman
Aka ‘Glasgow Green Lady’, this one is a sequel of sorts to the Green Woman piece I did for Dublin 2019. It’s my attempt to create a nature spirit, surrounded by plants native to Scotland including, of course, the Thistle.
This was used on postcards to promote the Glasgow bid in April 2021. I’m delighted to say it’s been longlisted for the BSFA 2021 Best Artwork award.
The framing and layout is a development of the classic railway poster idea that I used on Shipbuilding Over the Clyde, but allowing the artwork to expand to the full frame beneath the text. I didn’t design the logo; that was the tirelessly creative, Hugo Award-winning Sara Felix.
You can find a video of me talking about the Glasgow Green Woman and the Spring into Summer campaign painting on the Glasgow 2024 YouTube channel.
You can support the bid here: https://glasgow2024.org/
I had an almost fairy tale image in my mind of a sailing ship suspended in the air. I combined that with a view of the Tollbooth Steeple in Glasgow, the sunset lending both a vivid sky and a crepuscular shadow to the buildings.
This was used on postcards to promote the Glasgow bid in December 2021. As with the Glasgow Green Lady the layout is a development of the classic railway poster idea.
You can find a video of me talking about the Sailing Over Glasgow painting on the Glasgow 2024 YouTube channel.
This painting appeared in the Blake’s 7 Annual 1982 from Cult Edge published in 2021. It’s a fan-created hardcover book to fill the gap left by there being no actual Blake’s 7 annual celebrating the final series of the show in 1982. It’s chock-full of astounding stories, articles and illustrations of which mine is but one minor part! It’s also in aid of charity, with money going to Save The Children UK and Axminster and Lyme Cancer Support. The book has been longlisted for the BSFA 2021 Best Non-Fiction award., making it the second project I’m involved with that’s on the BSFA longlist (although I don’t pretend this one is because of me!)
I chose the episode Stardrive not because it’s a particular favourite of mine (although it has an iconic ending) but because the characters were so much fun to paint and the chase scene with the Scorpio, three Federation Pursuit Ships and an asteroid seemed like an opportunity for an interesting composition. The actors are Hammer icon Barbara Shelley as Dr Plaxton and Damien Thomas as Atlan.
The piece is fully painted except for the green HUD behind the Scorpio spaceship which was, as they say, added in post-production.
I was approached to provide a painting for a charity anthology called Tales of Time:Tales of Time: Stories From the Cast of Doctor Who: that appeared in November 2021 in aid of cancer research. The brief was to paint one of the contributors and I chose Tim Barlow, who played Tyssan in Destiny of the Daleks. He has a very distinctive look, and of course who can resist painting a Dalek… (Believe it or not I’d never painted one before.) This kind of thing is a great opportunity to do something in a good cause while indulging my love of fan art.
William Hartnell and Jodie Whittaker from Doctor Who
Calligraphy marker on 250gsm paper
I had a lockdown flurry of fan art in 2021. Many of the pieces were full paintings or very detailed ink drawings, but I also did a strand of sketches done with Calligraphy marker pen straight onto paper with no planning or under-drawing. They don’t always work, but I’ve been quite pleased with the results and they’re great practice at focusing on what really matters in a likeness.
These two appeared on Doctor Who: The Community Show in August 2021 which was extremely flattering and also makes them eligible for the Hugo category!
Other art from 2021
These aren’t my only work from 2021 — not by a long margin! — but they are the ones that are definitely eligible. I produced many more paintings for Glasgow in 2024 than the ones above during 2021, many of which have started to appear as postcards. I also produced a huge amount of fan art in 2021, much of which is on my website — mostly Doctor Who related plus a bit of Cadfael and Sherlock Holmes.
I was honoured to be asked to contribute the wraparound cover of the Souvenir Book. I’d been heavily involved in the con but doing the cover was by no means a given and was a huge vote of trust from the convention.
This was destined to be a prominent bit of artwork so I did an unusual number (for me!) of preparatory sketches to get approval for the concept. Since these sketches were aimed at other people for approval, not just for my internal creative process, I did them in colour with annotations. I don’t normally feel the need to do this (since I am lazy and avoid additional effort wherever possible.) We settled on a combination of two of the ideas with concentric circles, moving out from the CCD to Dublin, Ireland, the Earth and the Universe.
I then worked up a larger pencil prep sketch. This is fairly close to the final version but there are a lot of different sections to the image so I’m still trying out ideas. In hindsight I overstuffed it with detail, partly out of a fear that it would be too simple for the cover. Ultimately I decided to trust the concept and simplified it back down for the final painting.
The sketch version includes additional elements such as phases of the moon, connecting lines between the concentric circles, and additional animals of Ireland – a salmon, a bat, a hare (the crow survived intact to the final image). The woman’s face became a dragon in space in the final version, for no particular reason except that I was struggling to find something suitably iconic for the back cover, and who doesn’t love a dragon in space? It put me in mind of the Space Bat Angel Dragon from Ted Hughes’s The Iron Man.
The astounding library at Trinity College Dublin is a major part of the cover, along with the 5000 year old spiral carvings at Newgrange Passage Tomb in the Boyne Valley. Selkies have been a repeated motifs in some of my Dublin art and I really wanted to include one here as well, diving into the ocean of the planet and making for a transition between front and back covers.
For the actual painting I started from the centre and worked outwards, because that’s how my brain works. And besides, isn’t that how you’d want someone to paint this picture?
Here’s an animation of the rest of the process:
In the final stages I did a lot of what is technically known as “faffing” to darken and tidy up parts of the image. I added some red tones to parts of the image, including the CCD building, to harmonise the colour scheme across the cover.
A framed print of the finished artwork was presented to the Lord Mayor of Dublin by the Chair of Dublin 2019 James Bacon. Sadly I couldn’t be there for the event but I was hugely honoured.
The final Souvenir Book is below. I was delighted by the sympathetic design and placement of the text by Diana Thayer. I had been worried that the standard Dublin 2019 logo would clash with the artwork (bad planning on my part) but Diane’s curving design fits the artwork very harmoniously.
You can read about my experience of attending the Dublin Worldcon here.
See my Etsy shop for prints and original artwork. You can find updates and Work in Progress pictures on my Facebook Artist page here.
All artwork © Iain Clark 2019.
“Worldcon”, “Hugo Award”, and the Hugo Award Logo are registered service marks of Worldcon Intellectual Property, a California non-profit public benefit corporation. “World Science Fiction Society”, “WSFS”, “World Science Fiction Convention”, “NASFiC”, “Lodestar Award”, and the distinctive design of the Hugo Award Trophy Rocket are service marks of the World Science Fiction Society, an unincorporated literary society.
I was fired up by Dublin and the experience of exhibiting and selling my art. So much so that I’ve opened an Etsy shop to sell original artwork and giclée prints. You can find that under the “Shop” menu on this site, or just click here: www.etsy.com/shop/iainjclarkart. Pricing is a tricky thing, but I’m aiming to keep the prints at affordable prices. Originals are a bit more precious to me and I keep being told not to undersell my art, so those have a bit more of a price tag attached.
In another experiment (i.e. new for me, old hat for the rest of the internet) I’ve started a Facebook “Artist” page to share works in progress and prep pieces that never seem to make it as far as this blog. I’ve already added some WIP for a new painting of Drummer from The Expanse, and some background on how I created the cover to the Dublin 2019 Souvenir Book. You can find that Facebook page here: www.facebook.com/iainjclarkart, and if you “Like” the page (it’s what all the kids are doing) then you’ll see any updates as and when I post them.
So this is what one year’s creative output looks like (for me). It was a lot tougher to squeeze this year’s art into the photo than it was last year, and I was pleasantly surprised when I got it all together in one place. (It’s also what one year’s beard looks like. I was all stubbly this time last year.)
Putting your art out into the world is a strange thing. I vacillate between bullish self-confidence and agonising self-doubt, often over the same picture, within the same hour. I can cheerfully post fan art on twitter, on my website, on tumblr, even copying in other accounts, and then immediately cringe and want to take it back and/or issue formal written apologies and point out all the crap bits.
I know I’m far from the best artist out there. I also flatter myself I’m not the worst, and when there’s a particular image I’m proud of, I want it to do well. It’s like entering your pet dragon into the Best Small Dragon category at the village fair (it really isn’t, but bear wth me). I give it a benevolent little push onto the stage, a bit of encouragement, I’m pleased if it gets a good reception, maybe a ripple of applause, disappointed if the audience runs screaming from the blazing tent.
But I’m also realistic about these things. If after a couple of tries and encouraging nods the whole thing isn’t catching fire then I take my dragon home and we have a nice cup of cocoa and we move onto the next thing.
Okay, now I want a pet dragon.
In a similar vein, I nearly exhibited a few pieces at the FantasyCon gallery in Peterborough. After some exploratory conversations I realised I didn’t have time to get everything framed, packed and sent by the deadline. I also bottled it. But it started me pondering about such things so I’m slowly starting to have a few bits of art framed in case I decide to exhibit them at future cons. I’m quite pleased with how these two turned out.
My fan art pieces from this year have already found their way onto the internet, here and elsewhere. I’ve done a lot more fan art this year and slightly fewer for Dublin. (I’ve also done a few pieces just for myself, some of which may show up in public in future, some of which were just test pieces.) I’m still trying to find a good balance, but I have the luxury of coming up with my own ideas and mostly it’s about where inspiration takes me. This year, inspiration has mostly taken me to Peter Capaldi who has one of those faces that was born to be painted. I’ve also done old and new school Doctor Who, Blake’s 7, Deep Space Nine, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes, Babylon 5, and Twin Peaks. All favourites of mine, all done out of sheer affection for the source material.
Moving into acrylics last year (instead of scanning and colouring my line art) has been good for my productivity, and increasingly I’m painting without a preparatory pencil sketch which speeds things further. My portraits of Tom Baker, Roger Delgado and Jeremy Brett were one-evening paints (2-3 hours), Mira Furlan as Delenn took two nights. If I painted like that every evening I’d be a lot more prolific, but sadly I don’t…
The Tom one even found its way (at postage stamp size) into the letters page of Doctor Who Magazine, which would have delighted the 10 year old me who read it from Issue 1.
Some of my more complex art has taken much, much longer. I spent a month working most nights back in January for my detailed painting of spacecraft arriving in Dublin. A more recent one took me 3 months (on and off, working and reworking). I abandoned it once and overpainted large sections before I finally completed it to my satisfaction. I’m glad I did – I’m quite pleased with it now. If I’ve learned anything over the last couple of years it’s to trust the process rather than throwing in the towel when a picture looks bad. But it’s hard, sometimes.
I also tried some larger full face images like the framed Capaldi one above, and the Sandman image, which took about a week each. I might try a few more along those lines.
I was also quite pleased with the raw emotion I got into this Peter Capaldi image, even though it’s not quite as achitecturally solid as some of my portraits. I don’t want to just mindlessly regurgitate promo images in acrylic, and I go back and forth over whether this looks good or not, but I wanted that sadness in his eyes.
My Dublin artwork generally hasn’t found its way here, and won’t until it’s been used officially by the convention so it’s hard to talk about it much (although if you squint behind me in the photo at the top you can get a preview.) It’s been a huge year for Dublin, which won the 2019 WorldCon site selection unopposed, and things are accelerating. There’s already a t-shirt based on slices of my artwork available, which is a lovely feeling…
I also took some postcards of my Dublin art along to this year’s FantasyCon…
I still feel like I’m finding my way with paint – a medium that, until last year, I’d seldom touched since A Level art – but just doing art is a great way of levelling-up. As for next year, my wife just got me some water-soluble oils and some liquid acrylic colour, neither of which I have any idea how to use, so that should shake things up for 2018. I’m also keen to paint more women and more people of colour — something that could probably be achieved by not painting Peter Capaldi all the time, now I come to think of it.
Another bit of juvenalia for you. This is an A3 pencil drawing I did back in my youth (1988 to be precise).
It’s the companion piece to the Star Trek movie piece here. In accordance with the source material that one was 16:9 format, while this one was 4:3! I think pretty much all the photo reference was taken from my well-thumbed copy of the Star Trek Compendium, and I’ve reproduced the lack of resolution perfectly!
To round off the year here’s a picture of me with the finished artwork I’ve produced in 2016. Most of it was produced with the Dublin bid in mind, the rest is fan art (which can be found in my portfolio).
Looking at it all in one place it suddenly doesn’t seem like a lot (at least to me). Roughly one a month. I’m reminding myself that it was all produced in little windows of opportunity, in evenings, fitting around work and the kids. Also I’m really lazy, and the entire internet needed proof-reading. So given that, it’s not too bad a haul. More importantly, it’s the most productive I’ve been in years. I’m aware that I owe this surge to the opportunity I’ve been given to provide art for Dublin, and I’m really grateful to Emma, Esther and the rest for kicking me out of a moribund decade or more prior to this. I’m making up for lost time. If my art can keep pace with my exponentially multiplying gray hairs I might just come out ahead.
My earliest images this year (as last) were inked, scanned and then coloured digitally. When I first started colouring my inks the most I might do on paper would be to paint an abstract watercolour texture to be scanned and overlaid in photoshop. Increasingly this year the colours have become fully painted elements in their own right, making the final image a Frankensteinian assemblage of mixed media.
This was working well enough, in the sense that it could produce an acceptable result, but was amazingly time-consuming: each part of the image had to be created and composited separately, and I was effectively doing each picture several times: in pencil; in ink; in paint; in photoshop. One particular [beep] of an image took so long, and progressed so haltingly, that it began to feel like a creative process was turning into a frustratingly mechanical one. I was stifling whatever artistic mojo I actually possess through… well, sheer caution as much as anything. Fear of making a mistake. The final straw was when I accidentally saved over my master file with a much smaller version of the image. Never to be recovered.
There are plenty of wonderful artists who work only in Photoshop and produce phenomenal results, but I’m nowhere near that level. And so in August I decided to try a complete painting. You can see my very first attempt here, using acrylic on un-stretched paper. It’s a raw bit of art in some ways, but it (and in particular the crater at the bottom) convinced me I might be able to do better. I haven’t actually tried to paint since ‘A’ Level art, back when digital watches were a pretty neat idea and Doctor Who was still Sylvester McCoy. I was never very good at it back then, but I’ve sometimes found that art, oddly, is something you can get better at even while not doing it. Like being born with outsized paws and growing into them later.
Since August I’ve produced six fully-painted images (including the two Doctor Who ones), initially at A3 size but rapidly moving up to A2 when I realised that I needed more space to create detail with a paintbrush. I’ve also started using heavier paper, and stretching it on a board (okay, MDF coated with floor varnish, but you know, whatever works) which has really helped. I’m still using acrylics, which dry quickly and can take a lot of overpainting so are quite forgiving of trial and error. I’m learning as I go, but one advantage of working
straight from sketch to paints is that I’m only doing the picture once. When it’s done, it’s done, and it only needs a bit of a clean and polish in photoshop. That means I can be more productive and get more more practice, and it feels creative again. Not every picture suits being painted of course, but so far this is working out very nicely. And if not doing art makes you a little bit better, maybe actually trying could pay off. Sounds crazy I know.
The Doctor Who images were well enough received on Twitter that I even made them available to buy. I’m not expecting to make money, but compared to where I was with my art a year or two ago this is a big step.
It’s been a tough year in many ways (and tougher for others than for me). It’s nice to have something that’s gone well over the last twelve months.
Thanks to Justine for snapping this pic of me trying to sneak the painting onto the office scanner.
The thing about Doctor Who art is that there’s a hell of a lot of it. Traditional, digital, photoshop. Every DVD. Every book. The comics get about three covers each on a monthly basis. And that’s even leaving out the vast body of fan art, the dark matter that holds the internet together. And of course it’s all (mostly) amazing. This makes it bloody hard to come up with an idea for an image that doesn’t feel like it’s been done to death.
I knew I wanted to do another bit of Doctor Who fan art, and I chose Troughton because the 50th anniversary of his first appearance gave me the perfect excuse. I’ve always loved his ‘Harpo Marx’ air of shambolic eccentricity. (And the hat. That ridiculous hat.) The strange thing is that despite being a lifelong Doctor Who fan I mainly know the black and white stories through the Target novelisations and old issues of Doctor Who Monthly. It’s only more recently I’ve started to properly catch up with Hartnell and Troughton on DVD, and of the two it’s Troughton whose performance truly transcends the character on the printed page. Mercurial, always adding some little bit of ‘business’ to his scenes, but clever and sombre when he needs to be.
The problem was what do do with him. For the Peter Capaldi one I’d at least had the fresh angle of juxtaposing him with the earliest Cybermen. The idea of Mondas being Earth’s upside-down mirror lent itself to the angular yin-yang design of the image, which felt a little bit out of the ordinary. It crystallised in my head. I knew it could work. Now every other idea I could think of was either standard portraiture (like my preparatory pencil sketch) or a floating-head movie poster.
My eventual inspiration was the recorder. Lack of on-screen appearances notwithstanding, it’s attained an iconic association with the Second Doctor, and I suddenly hit upon the idea of making that the ‘hook’, with the tune emerging from it… and the tune containing images… and the images being a rough sort of record of his journeys. It’s pretty eccentric (in keeping with the character) and had the virtue of being something I hadn’t seen before, which always makes me much happier.
I’d originally envisaged more of a twinkly!Troughton, but it turns out that playing the recorder and smiling at the same time is quite tricky, so we ended up with frowny!Troughton instead. (More attack eyebrows). He has a really distinctive face which you’d think would be a doddle to draw. I even sketched him first, and it went fine. But I had huge trouble with the likeness for the painting. I mean, epic trouble. I’d show you, but I didn’t take any photos at that stage to spare me THE SHAME. It was only with quite a bit of over-painting that I found something I was happy with, and… the process went really smoothly after that. (Turns out it was just the usual “I can’t draw, I’m useless” stage I often go through).
I picked a blue colour for the ‘tune’, which does make it look a little bit like he’s blowing water out of his recorder (Daughter: “Daddy, I told you you should have used purple!”), but I think it complements the earth-tones of the face, and picks up on his blue eyes. I deliberately used a looser style for these phantom images as it’s not something I’d tried before and it suits the more ethereal quality of the visions. I kept fiddling with the pencils to find more dramatic angles, less standard reference photos, that better suited the flow. I decided not to distract from the main image with companions or human foes (and let’s be honest avoid any more likenesses), so stuck to the more alien foes. Those are the ones that appeal to the 12 year old boy in me anyway.
I’m quite happy with it overall. In hindsight and with a bit more confidence I’d have used an even lighter touch and left even more white space in the ‘tune’, maybe tailed it off a bit earlier at the top. Because of the looser style in that section my very light pencils still show slightly a bit in places, so that’s something to avoid. Live and learn.
The final image is here.
Some of my Dublin artwork (my very first piece) in use in the Balticon brochure earlier this year. Which is a lovely thing.
I mentioned this piece a while ago, and I might do a proper ‘making of’ blog when I get the chance, as it was the first bit of my inked artwork I coloured digitally and I learned a huge amount in so doing.
One little addendum to my Twelfth Planet piece: here’s an animated gif of the painting in progress. (I hadn’t planned this in advance so despite much geometry correction it’s slightly wonky.)
As
far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be Chris Achilleos. Or maybe Andrew Skilleter. I was hazy on the details. But one thing I did know was that instead of growing up and doing a boring job I could maybe, just possibly, grow up and draw Doctor Who for the rest of my life.
Somehow that didn’t happen, but it’s hard to deny that I’ve never felt more like a proper artist than when doing my own little bit of Doctor Who illustration. I even left some room at the top for a logo.
This piece was inspired partly by the 50th anniversary of the Cybermen, and partly by an answer Peter Capaldi has given when asked what classic monster he’d like to face in his tenure as the Twelfth Doctor: the origin of the Mondasian Cybermen first seen in William Hartnell’s regeneration story. I like the juxtaposition of the latest incarnation of the Doctor and the earliest years of the show, and of Capaldi’s craggy, characterful face with the bland mask of the Cyberman.
Conscious that I’m approximately the millionth person to paint this particular image of a Cyberman (The Tenth Planet being quite short on good quality close-up telesnaps) I’ve tried to incorporate them into an unusual design that picks up on imagery from the Tenth Planet: the upside-down mirror Earth that is (nonsensically) Mondas, and a version of the computer lettering that opened each episode.
And just as a follow-on to my appreciation of the movie USS Enterprise, here’s an old bit of fan art of Star Trek Movies II to IV that I did way back in 1989 at the tender age of 19. How time flies. Not that my viewing habits have significantly changed…
It’s a weird shape because it follows a roughly cinematic film ratio across the middle, then blossoms out at the sides. I think it still looks okay, but I’d hope to do a much better job of it these days. The eagle-eyed reader may notice that Lt. Saavik is drawn in a very different style from everyone else, which is because I did the bulk of the drawing many months earlier, and even by the time I went back to it I was in a different mood artistically.
It’s all Emma’s fault. She was the one who asked me last year if I’d like to contribute some artwork to help promote Dublin’s bid to host WorldCon in 2019. So I did.
I’ve continued to produce more promotional artwork for them , which they’ve been very kind about. I’m really enjoying making some art where there’s a defined audience beyond just entertaining myself and my family. God knows how they’ll end up using it!
I’d put myself firmly in the ‘amateur’ camp when it comes to producing pieces like these but I feel like I’m learning and developing just through the process of trying to make them varied and more… professional in style. In particular, colouring my own pen-and-ink drawings is not something I’ve done before, but I’ve been experimenting with photoshop and figuring out how to apply digital colours and layer my own painted textures.
The Dublin bid team have just done a lovely feature about me on their website, which features an interview and lots of my artwork to boot:
http://dublin2019.com/an-comhra-the-chat-with-iain-clarke/
Thanks Emma!
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