The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Today we present the second of thee articles (part one is here) celebrating the launch of Oli East‘s Proper Go Well High, with Oli sharing a page from the book and his thoughts on the work as we get The Fear:

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

While I’ve got people’s ears, can I just clear up the watercolours thing?  I don’t use them, never have; they’re very diluted acrylic inks.  Watercolours just have a kind of hobbyist image attached to them which I want no part of.  Glad I got that off my chest.  Sorry, rant over.

There’s a few of these pages with kind of titles at the top of the page, including ‘My First Tramp’ and ‘Twat On A Phone’, and the design is just a ham fisted nod to the Beano and Dandy classic layout, with The Fear meant to resemble some cheap 50s film poster type thing.  I don’t know, I just make it up as I go along.  I could have spent longer on it and made it look a bit better but I try and get a page a day done, so it’s all done quite fast.  I keep trying to slow down but I get panicky if I’ve not done at least a page a day.  Probably to the detriment to the books but there you go.

On these walks there’s often very long lanes or country roads where not a lot happens and your mind kind of wonders.  The previous page to this has me wondering why I’m holding my stomach in when there’s no one around, but the lane was really long, so when it came to actually drawing this stretch, back home some weeks later I added another page with a more recent concern; that of my drinking and making a tit of myself at an Elbow gig.  Elbow had played an outdoor gig in Delamere forest on a Saturday and someone had organised a massive coach load of us to go down.  I’d been out the previous night, woke up stinking and decided just to drink through it all and carry on.  I had shades on; it was all right, for a while.  Come to after the gig and everyone’s backstage and I’m just all over the place.  For some reason there’s some tiny fence about a foot high, which keeps sending me flying, and my wife says to me “you’d think tonight was about you” to which I reply “it kind of is” (I’d done the sleeve to their current album and they’d been playing in front of a backdrop with my design on it).  Anyway, people try to introduce me to others while I’m barging past them to find any free drinks and, in my mind; I’m the life and soul on the bus back.  So I was drawing this page a few days after that and ‘The Fear’ had set in, wondering if I’d offended or made a pass, or both, at anyone I shouldn’t.

My visual notes for this page are:

“Long lane-static caravan park-blue tit flying in hedgerow – field, bridge in distance train white building next to arch”

So why the blue tits are in the first panel I don’t know.   I think maybe the caravan park was in two parts and I saw the birds in between.   When learning how to draw things I found it easier to stylise the things I thought I had trouble drawing.  So I was like ‘how the hell do you draw a decent hedgerow?” and a couple of pages before this I’d settled on three layers; hedge then flowers then grass.  Looks all right as far as hedgerows go and they carry on like that for the rest of the book.  It also comes from feeling comfortable with recurring patterns, lines and shapes which has more than a little to do with my dyslexia.  I find drawing trees quite comforting.  Once I figure out a simpler way of drawing something often I’ll stick with it.  Like my trees, they act as a kind of fence or wrap that curls round and hugs other things in the panels.

This page is also very typical of the colour range I choose.  The weather on the day of the walk, plus my mental state months later sat at the drawing board, both dictate the page’s palate, but I always add a little black to each colour because, my thinking is, the world’s not that bright.  Things you see every day just aren’t that bright, so I add some black to tone the inks down and make things look a little overcast.  Particularly in Proper, I wasn’t the happiest bunny for the last few months of making the book for various reasons, and you’ll see the pages get greyer and greyer in hue as they go on.  I’m just a moody bastard really and wanted to bring everyone else down with me.

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.