Myfanwy Tristram, comic artist
Still can’t crack the Observer/Cape/Comica contest! Oh well, here’s my entry from this year. Click the pages and then click again to see them at full size.
I’ll probably do my usual round-up of other entries in a blog post, so let me know if you’ve put yours online and I’ll link to it.
Best wishes of the season to you all, from me and my family (including the furry components thereof).
The image at the top of this post is a happy accident which happened on Photoshop, as I was trying to clean up the picture of the bookshop that appears in the third page below. I like it better than the actual painting, so here it is as a header.
Part 1 is here, part 2 is here and part 3 is here. If you’d like to see the pages at a larger scale, click on the image and then click again.
Sorry – you’re not actually invited, which is why I’ve deleted the time, date and venue details from this image (you’ll have to imagine how they are in the same lettering, to her right).
I just wanted to show you the most recent results of my favourite annual job: designing invitations for my daughter’s birthday party.
You can see some previous invitations here (the year she had a party at Lush) and here (ice skating).
Tabs did have the nice idea that we could display them all framed up on a wall at home, so that’s something I might try and get organised over the holidays. She also said that she’d definitely wear a t-shirt like the one I invented for this illustration. :)
[I don’t usually Photoshop my sketch diaries, but I deliberately drew these figures in closed lines, knowing that I’d be able to drop in a background. The floor where we had lunch was this kind of crazy paving – much easier to do like this than to draw laboriously].
In the last few days, I’ve put the finishing touches to a complex collage of paddy fields. It’s made of tickets and postage stamps (many contributed by kind friends) and maps (including one I used to navigate around Japan, before the advent of smartphones in my life). These elements symbolise travelling over great distances.
I also used Green Shield stamps, which don’t symbolise anything, but which seemed so right for the landscape. Then there’s a bit of ink.
You might remember my first drawing of these steppes, which was a simple version in painted inks, from this post.
Then came this valley, also populated with random stamps.
Now the two ideas come together in a new landscape. I’m really pleased with it: from a distance, I think the details of the stamps and maps make it look like an aerial photograph.
I’ve been fiddling around with placing birds over the top of it*, and then I went away for a while and had the idea of just showing their shadows.
This is all still work in progress, and I am going to have to get the original collage scanned professionally. As you’ll see if you click and view it larger, this is a composite of several scans. Why don’t they ever match up?!
* These are drop shadows, created from the airmail label bird I showed earlier. That took a bit of thinking through: once I decided I wanted the shadows, but not the birds themselves (because the background is so fussy, it’s really hard to make out any detailed birds, no matter what colour they are), I had to figure out how to do that. Make the bird layer invisible, and the shadow becomes invisible too.
In the end, I expanded the canvas, put the birds outside the main frame, pulled the drop shadows way out from their ‘parent’ shapes, then flattened all the layers and chopped off the margin with the actual birds in it.
I bet there’s a more conventional way to do this. As a self-taught Photoshop user, I am aware I often go all around the houses to do something that a pro would be able to do without thinking.
I’m very excited to say that my work will shortly be available at the Art Market in Spitalfields market.
You’ll be able to find prints of the following (and just in time for Christmas!):
“If you have to wash up the same things every day, make sure they are beautiful things” by Myfanwy Tristram
Animal Tea by Myfanwy Tristram
Tins by Myfanwy Tristram
Skittle Cat by Myfanwy Tristram
Iggy by Myfanwy Tristram
I haven’t seen these in the flesh yet, but they should be available on Thursday until Sunday (I’ll be going up on Thursday to take a look). If they go down well, I will be looking at selling prints online, too.
I’m hoping people agree that the tins, the tea design and the washing up print would all look excellent in the kitchen. The cat pictures? Well, if you’re a cat-lover, you’ll appreciate them anywhere in the house.
Every year around this time, I get a very important commission. The art director’s kind of picky; the subject matter is often a little surreal – but I wouldn’t miss this job for the world.
Yep, I’ve been designing my daughter’s birthday party invitations. This year, she’s taking a few pals to the skating rink.
This is my go at a teatowel design. How do you like your tea – two lumps like the camel? Extra milk, like the cat? Or are you sweet enough already, like the baby deer?
In November 2012, I decided to draw the clothes I wore, every day, for a month.
And as if that wasn’t enough of a challenge, I also drew my daughter’s clothes. At the end of the month, a good friend commented that the illustrations would make a great comic.
She said one thing that really struck me: that these clothes may seem pretty ordinary now, but in a few years’ time, the picutres could stand as a historic document.
So I cleaned all the sketches up and started putting them into a printable format. What you see here is me playing about with ideas for the cover.
In my day job, my boss has a penchant for extarordinarily long blog titles – I think that’s influenced my choice of title here.
My summing-up post at the end of the whole project – complete with pie charts! – can be seen here, and clicking here will take you to all the pictures on Flickr.
