Editorial Illustration 2

As I wanted to concentrate on developing ways of using portraiture I decided to go for the ' Interview with Melvin Bragg' Editorial Illustration as a brief. 

I found an interview in the Telegraph with him in which he talked about his book marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. It is a fascinating interview in which he talked about past tragedies and the enormous influence of this version of the bible on the fabric of our society as well as English language and imagery. He is so keen to show the positive nature of its impact that the interviewer describes him as flitting between 'absent minded professor to fired up evangelist'. This gave me an idea of how I wanted to represent Bragg. I also noted down some of the other images that stood out throughout the interview... 'Rise and Shine' "let there be light' (phrases that come from the King James Bible) and Bragg's own description of his work using the words of Sir Isaac Newton...

"...my work is that of a boy collecting pebbles on a shore, "whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me""

In my sketcbook, I did some quick portraits of Bragg based on some photographs found on the internet.

From there, I decided to work in ink on a slightly larger scale. I experimented with controlled line and a more 'scruffy' mad professor/evangelist line....

reduced line

I reduced the lines right down to the bare minimum and am quite pleased with the clarity of the result. But it doesn't really sum up the Bragg's Character (Mad Professor/Evangelist)

Scruffy pen and ink seemed to add a little more of this characterisation to the image.

Scruffy pen and wash with splatter had a similar result - but the splatter seemed a bit 'token'. I like his expression in this one though.

This was a drypoint etching - bit faint though

I touched it up in the computer but I think that the jumper now drowns ot his face... I should have made his eyes darker... - I think that the scruffy pen and ink drawings were perhaps the best. 

I decided to try to introduce an element of the dramatic by creating a scene from the imagery which I had picked out of the article. So I went back to the sketchbook.

I went for the more direct face option and used quink to get a stormy washy effect...

I used passages from the King James Bible written in scratchy pen for the waves on the sea and then washed them out... I then had a play in the computer to see what the effect would be inverted.

I thought that the sea and sky looked great, but the rest didn't work... so I did a bit of cutting and pasting.... 

But then I wasn't sure that the 'book should be white.. it seemed better black, which really meant that the sky should be whiter

this version seems to work best for me... Bragg's face is lit by the light from the bible. The white reflection gives an 'other wordly' quality to the light, the words appear to be floating out of the bible... or leaking out.. The pebble seems to have been plucked from the sea. When I was directing one of the Time Team episodes in Looe, Cornwall, I did some research into quartz pebbles brought by pilgrims as offerings to remote shrines, so I felt that the white pebble had a resonance.