The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Today we present the third of thee articles (part one is here and part two is here) celebrating the launch of Oli East’s Proper Go Well High, with Oli sharing another page from the book and his thoughts on the work, what he saw on his walks and how he translated that into the page we see below:

(panels from Proper Go Well High by and (c) Oli East, published Blank Slate; click the pic for the larger image)

I was wondering whether to share this page or not as it’s one of my favourites and I thought it should be saved for when you buy the book, but you get the best bits in movie trailers don’t you?  Often with the movie not living up to the trailer, so the rest of Proper might not live up to this page but this and the first one I showed are amongst my favourites.  But this page is, I think, an example of the gulf in quality between Trains and Proper.  This is just a sexier page than anything in Trains in every way.  Actually it’s similar in content and style to the bit in Trains where I’m looking out from under a yellow hood for a while.  There’s 25 panels in rows of 5 because the road I was walking down was bloody long and the panels are all small because the weather at that time was preventing me from seeing much, so the panels are all snatched details from the farm houses, fences, paths and such.

I thought maybe I should say something about why I don’t draw boxes around my panels, but I don’t really know.  I guess it’d just look crap with my kind of brush strokes and that.   When the weather’s bad or overcast it’s cool because the panels form themselves, because I’ll draw whatever I’m drawing then, to give it that drabness, I’ll give the panel a healthy wash of grey which then forms the panel which separates it from the next.  There are stretches of the walk where it’s as bright as you like and the panels are much more vague, as I’ve drawn Lancashire without a wash over it so you have to do some of the work yourself.

The day I settled on how I would draw wind, rain and hail was a good day, and meant I could relax and move on.  It’s stylised for sure but it means I don’t have to fill the panels with brush strokes for weather while still getting my point across.  Elsewhere in the book my ‘sun breaking through clouds’ looks a bit like corn on the cobs but I’m sticking with it for now.

I’d hesitate before referring to myself as an illustrator, but third panel in, no illustrator can resist the chance to draw a telegraph pole.  I had to make a conscious effort to draw a barn made of corrugated iron (14th panel in), as I’m always too tempted to draw those old school American wooden barns you see.  There are a lot of nods to Americana in the book, from water towers on top of buildings that you just don’t get in England to barn architecture.  I’ve tried to keep them to a minimum but your mind wonders on these walks and I regularly fantasise about doing a Trains Are…Mint Stateside.

I thought about taking out the ‘fas..ur..na..ting’ bit as I thought it might suggest I’m bored at that point, and if I’m bored then you’ll be too, but it’s more me pretending to be cool about a bridge being on a three point boundary when really I love that kind of shit.

As well as these three pages I would have also like to show you how I got round the problem of drawing me being harassed by a puppy, the many instances and different takes on me urinating and some corn on the cob sky, but you’ll just have to buy the book I guess; unless you’re getting a freebie (hi Jim and Steve).  It’s not perfect (Berlin And That will be better) but it pisses on Trains from a great height.  Please buy it so I can make another one.

You can get Proper Go Well High from the FPI webstore, our branches and other outlets; you can keep up with Oli’s world (including the intriguing-looking Berlin multi-artist project) via his blog. Thanks to Oli for taking the time to share his art and thoughts on it with us.