The Wonder of Copy Art

I’ve always been something of a style whore.

Even as a kid, I used to jump around, sketching in the style of different comics and artists. I used to try desperately and hugely unsuccessfully to work out how the hell they drew that!! Sweating over Warlord comics and Commando, then Mad and Marvel and onwards. In those days it was all about comics, cartoonists and later, painters. Then once I was working as an illustrator, finding my own voice, a whole universe of digital artists exploded…suddenly I’m thinking, “How the Hell did they do that?” all over again. So i’ve always had to try other styles, I just have no choice, it’s a buzz and it often makes you realise just how good something is, or sometimes how crap it is, like dismantling an engine.

One of the upshots of all this is that I undertake a quite a number of copy art projects for my agent, the lovely Bright Group. It’s often the case that we Illustrators simply end up with more work than we can handle- it’s labour intensive stuff and short cuts are limited. A series of books can take longer than we anticipate or we simply have life stuff that comes up and having a few copy artists around ensure that we don’t leave the publisher up the creek.

Now, I don’t often publish copy art as I feel it belongs to someone else. But sometimes the work can be wonderful and be totally left field in terms of style..it can also be a bugger to do at times! Producing images against a deadline in someone else's style can be royally challenging but amazingly rewarding.

So I’ve decided to start putting some of these up once they’re published starting with this series for ABDO Publishers in Missouri, a lovely publisher I worked with a few times. This first two books are by the marvellously talented Daniella Volpari which I took over in May this year. I love her characters and the atmosphere she creates and creating two books worth in her style was a stiff old learning curve.