painting – iainjclark [art]

Hugo 2021 eligibility

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/

**Sailing Over Glasgow (2021)**
*Acrylics on stretched 220gsm paper*

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.

**Blake’s 7: Stardrive (2021)**
*Acrylics on stretched 220gsm paper*

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.

**Tim Barlow as Tyssan from Destiny of the Daleks (2021)**
*Acyrlics on stretched 220 gms paper*

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.

One year’s work

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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.

It’s all behind me

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iain-with-2016-artwork

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.

flight_recorder_ciainjclark_1000x786w — Flight Recorder

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.

Artist with a portrait

doctor who

Thanks to Justine for snapping this pic of me trying to sneak the painting onto the office scanner.

Painting Patrick

doctor who

troughton_sketch_ciainjclark_800 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.

2016-11-18-22-58-08 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).

flight_recorder_ciainjclark_1000x786w 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.

Addendum

doctor who, Uncategorized

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.)

The Twelfth Planet

doctor who

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.

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