Pin-Up Painting Posers

With all of the recent furore over Page 3 of The Sun, I thought it would be nice to return to a simpler, less-contentious time when pin-ups were chaste and fun. I love these fascinating 'behind-the-scenes' pics of models and the paintings they eventually became.

These are all works by the celebrated pin-up artist Gil Evgren who is probably the best-known such artist after Alberto Vargas. He was active from the 1930s right through to the 1970s but his most famous work dates from the 40s and 50s. If you want to know more about him, his website is here.

It's interesting to see how the finished art differs from the original photos isn't it? Image manipulation was happening a long time before Photoshop arrived ...

Some day my prints could come ... to your house

 

I have some prints for sale. They come in two sizes, A4 and A3 and are printed on mid-weight semi gloss art paper. The price?

 

A4 = £15

A3 = £20

 

This includes postage and packing and I'll sign each one.

 

Interested?

 

Email me at: stevyncolgan@me.com

 

 

Print 1: Uranus is So Bracing

 

 

Print 2: See Uranus

Print 3: San Diego Cosplayers

Print 4: Yellow Brick Road

 

Print 5: The Not Very Hungry Human Centipede

 

 

The Delicious Children's Book Illustrations of Júlia Sardà

I love this lady's work. It makes me smiley.

Her individual take on classic stories is glorious. I am in awe of their fun and energy.

See more of her lovely week on her website here.

Beautiful, Beautiful, Beautiful

Need I add anything? A wonderful collision of art and science created by Seattle-based science artist Eleanor Lutz. Do visit her brilliant blog, Tabletop Whale, here.

The Sticky Monsters of John Kenn Mortensen

I was browsing through bookshops in London yesterday when I came across a wonderful little yellow and black book called Sticky Monsters.

It's a collection of monster doodles, all done on Post-It notes by a Danish children's TV producer called John Kenn Mortensen. I had to buy the book.

At once charming, creepy and downright weird, Mortensen's beautifully rendered pen sketches have echoes of W Heath Robinson, Munro S Orr and Arthur Rackham with maybe just a hint of Tim Burton and Edward Gorey thrown in for good measure.

If you get a chance to buy the book, do so. If not, visit Mortensen's blog here or his Tumblr here where he posts new pics regularly.

The Pen IS mightier ...

I'm really liking these detailed pen and ink pieces by French illustrator DZO Olivier. He uses no pencil and no eraser and says that 'Every mistake is an opportunity to create unexpected images'.

You can see more of his work on his Behance page.

 

 

 

Cor! Constable Colgan's Connectoscopic Cover!

Ladies and gentlemen, aliens and robots, may I present the MAGNIFICENT cover of my new book ...

 

Isn't it great? It's by the brilliant writer/illustrator of the popular books Goliath, The Gigantic Robot, Hunter and Painter and You're all just Jealous of my Jetpack, the very splendid Mr Tom Gauld.

I met up with Tom last night to thank him for doing such an amazing job. He's as nice as he is talented.

I must also mention the genius that is designer Mark Ecob who sat down with me to work out what was needed and came up with the perfect cover. Just wait until you see the full wrap-around cover - it's gorgeous! But what do you expect from the guy who was recently entrusted to redesign the covers of Iain Banks' fiction books? With Mark and Tom on board, it couldn't fail.

So, there you go! I've been very spoilt. And we have a cover. And, if you pledged on the book through Unbound, the book will be in your hands soon. It's gone off to the printers and, as they can have up to a six week turn around, it should be ready sometime around late May/early June. The e-book should be ready about the same time and I'm recording the audiobook in June. And then the trade paperback will be in the shops in the Autumn, in time for Christmas!

That said, if you didn't pledge on the book but can't wait until September, you can still pledge here and get a copy sent out to you. However, your name won't now be listed in the back as a funder as there has to be a cut-off point for the print process to start.

Exciting times!

RCA Secret (No More) Auction

Well, the bidding is over and the big reveal has happened. All of us who took part in this year's Royal College of Art Secret Auction can now tell the world which ones were ours. Some people camped out overnight in the freezing sleet to get their bids in first.

Picture credit: Daily Telegraph

'An RCA spokeswoman counted 50 tents outside the site at Battersea, south-west London, on Friday night and said there were at least 300 people queuing when the doors opened at 7am on Saturday morning', reports the Telegraph here: 'But even those at the front were taking something of a gamble on getting their hands on a famous artist's work as the designs are all anonymous, with signatures on the back only being revealed after purchase.'

This is the 20th year of the RCA sale, and organisers hope it will raise more than £120,000 for a fund to support emerging artists.

Here are my three cards (and three bad puns) - Numbers 337, 1392 and 2272. Enjoy.

Secret Art

This evening I met up with artist Angela Lamb to go to the Royal College of Art's Secret Auction exhibition at their new building in Battersea. It's the second year that I've been asked to take part (Angi's done a few of them before) and it's good fun. What happens is that lots of artists - some final year RCA students, some jobbing artists, some very famous people indeed - get sent three postcards on which to create three original artworks. However, they must not be signed or give any overt indication of who did them. Then the cards go up for auction and, if you're lucky, you could get a Nick Park or a Maggi Hambling or a David Bailey for a song ... or you could pay way over the odds for one of mine. Poor you.

The exhibition looked great ... and seemed to go from largely empty space to being packed with people in just half an hour of opening.

You can see the full range of postcards from this year's auction here. Be warned though ... there are 2700 of them ... and some are very rude (not to say disturbing - I worry for the mental health of some of the exhibitors).

Bet you can't spot mine!

New painting - Lord of the Rainbows

Here's the new picture I've been doing this past week. I like the idea of taking cosy children's book characters or beloved TV puppets and mashing them up with movies. What next I wonder ... Bagpuss as Jabba the Hutt? I was part inspired by some of my previous paintings but also by some doodles I saw a while back by the ever-excellent Warwick Johnson Cadwell, particularly his Rod, Jane and Freddy (and Freddy). I featured his Rainbow doodles on my old blog here.

This is quite a large painting for me being some 4 feet by 3 feet in size. The canvas began life as something quite different, however. It's always bugged me that I cannot get a likeness and, therefore, have never been able to do portraits. So I figured I'd have one last go at it and decided on a self-portrait. Here's how it went. In a word ... badly:

And so, last Sunday, after a last ditch failed attempt to fix it, I gave up. Out came the big brush and the dark lands of Mordor started to emerge from the canvas ...

The fun part is always imagining the shock on people's faces if, in the future, they ever X-ray the painting to reveal the crappy portrait beneath. But it won't be half the shock they'd get if they X-rayed this one I did last year ... 

Kids' stuff

Dave Devries is some kind of a genius. He takes children's illustrations, projects them onto a canvas to keep the exact outlines and dimensions, and then renders the drawings in a realistic painted style. He ends up with glorious stuff like this:

Sadly, his Monster Engine website seems to have vanished and so has his website. But there is an excellent selection of his Marvel and DC art here.