Wednesday 2 October 2013

Billie Jean, Sara Fanelli, Gerald Scarfe




Billie-Jean

Billie Jean is a man that lives and works in Leytonstone in east London. He enjoys climbing trees, visiting second hand bookshops, drinking Slush Puppies, making chocolate rice crispy cup cakes, knitting tea cosies and drawing.
He's very hard to find information about, with this being all his reveals. 
His style is very reminiscent of secondary school doodles, being done primarily on desks, lined paper and graph paper.



This is his work for Nike, which is very playful and messy - considering a great portion of Nike's sales are from school children, appealing to them with this kind of illustration makes a great deal of sense.

This is a book cover he did. It's considerably more feminine than most f his work, very colourful and very clean. It is considerably more interesting than most gardening books though.

This piece brings back memories of trying to decode the graffiti on my old school desks; that's what makes this piece so good. It's very well done and very nostalgic! 


Sara Fanelli:

An artist and illustrator born in 1969 in Florence. She came to London to study art and graduated in 1995. She works on a lot of childrens books, and has won several awards, including the V&A museum's Illustration Award and the D&AD Silver Awards.
She was commissioned by Tate Modern.


This is presumably a childrens book cover, as it is very colourful and friendly. 
This has been done by painting and then sticking images on top. This creates a niave, child-like appearance that tends to appeal to young children. 


This also looks like a childrens book cover, although I'm not so fond of this one. I find her flat face very creepy, as well as her strange, patch work body.
It is a very good example of her style, however.

Gerald Scarfe:

Gerald Scarfe was born 1st June, 1936 and is an English cartoonist and illustrator. He has worked for the Sunday Times and The New Yorker, as well as for Pink Floyd and Hercules. 
He spent his early years suffering from severe asthma and spent it bed-ridden. This is said to have influenced his dark, diseased looking drawings. He has said that his work can be traced back to the dodgy treatments he received. He moved to Hampstead at age 14.

This is his take on a dalek from the Doctor Who franchise. Done presumably in marker and ink, it is very expressive and messy yet remaining cleaner than his messier ink pen works. The lack of colour works as the daleks are well known enough for us to decode the colour scheme ourselves. 


Slightly more political, this is a better example of the majority of his work. Using an ink pen and watercolour, his work is messy, 'diseased' and dirty - and something about that is charming. I can't say I'm overly fond of the style myself, but I adore how well emotion and such can be portrayed with a simple dip pen!

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