I attended a very interesting talk by the illustrator Bevery Philp. Illustrators create images for a wide variety of industries including computer games, advertising, packaging, textile design, books, graphic design, web design, the list goes on and on.
Beverly Philp started out doing a graphics degree, her tutor at the time was Rayman Briggs who is the illustrator for The Snowman books. Drawing was a huge part of the course along with printmaking, bookbinding and photography which are fundamental skills she continues to build upon.
Her success started when she finished uni and visited lots of companies to show them her work. It was her doll photography that caught their eye. She would make clothes, accessories and sets for dolls, making them up to look like celebrities. After some time she found that this was not very cost effective due to the huge amount of hours that needed to go into each doll so she decided to go back to uni to do her MA at the Royal College of Art.
During her MA she focused more on drawing and photography, producing two documentary books, Alfie and haircut. These again were a success when she finished her MA and can be seen on her website below.
She is constantly drawing, sketchbooks are a vital part of her work and she finds that she learns a lot about herself from looking at these. Her sketchbook is full of drawings of people and all using quick lines in black pen. Sometimes she will talk to the people she draws to enable her to understand them better and incorporate their personality in to her sketches.
As well as the black line drawing she experiments in her studio with different ways of drawing such as drawing something upside down or using lemon juice and baking it. This allows her to broaden the types of illustrations she produces.
Her final illustrations are very loose and and use a lot of texture. The textures she uses are all ones she collects, makes or prints herself. The illustrations start out with the hand drawn images and the textures separate, she uses a computer to put them together and play with the imagery.
Beverly does a lot of work for magazines and newspapers where she has to work to very tight timescales. For these she has to get rough sketches for her initial thoughts done within days to send through for approval. She then works on the ones they like. Working with publishers gives her projects with longer timescales.
From listening to the talk it was clear she is a lovely down to earth person who has to work hard to continue the work she loves.
Her illustrations really are beautiful and worth a look: