Contents 
Illustration Issue 61

News and reviews

A brief round-up of current news stories, exhibitions and competitions – plus new books, reader offers, catalogues and websites, auction highlights  and dates you need to remember.

Notebook

Darrell Warner has spent the past 36 years building and developing a career creating mood and story boards for the biggest blockbuster films of the era. He looks back through his sketchbooks and explains how he has used them to record ideas and inspiration and what they mean to him now.

Sir John Tenniel’s animals

Although today he is best known for his illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books, in his own lifetime Sir John Tenniel was more famous for his work for Punch. Throughout his career he showed a particular affinity for depicting animals and it was his illustrations for Aesop’s Fables that helped win him both the commissions that made his name.

Illustrating Frankenstein

Everyone is familiar with the “look” of Gothic fiction. However, the images that spring to mind are largely those from the cinema and television. In the first of a new series focusing on Gothic classics, we look at some of the best and most thought-provoking illustrations for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and consider how they reflect and add to the details and the atmosphere of the text.

Georgina  Bowers 

At a time when relatively few women worked as, let alone made their names as, cartoonists, Georgina Bowers stands out. Encouraged by John Leech, she succeeded him at Punchand became the foremost illustrator of horsemen and horsewomen and of hunting scenes of her period, producing illustrated albums and pictures for novels, as well as cartoons. 

Interview: Ron Tiner

Despite little encouragement from his parents, who wanted him to get a “proper” job, Ron Tiner has managed to forge three successful illustration careers – as a comic strip artist, a children’s book illustrator and as a teacher and author of books on illustration techniques. He discusses his work and the qualities that make a good illustration.

Exhibition: Melvyn Evans

Man-made marks that demonstrate the ways in which people mould the landscape have fascinated illustrator and printmaker Melvyn Evans for many years. Now, an exhibition of prints at Yorkshire Sculpture Park has given him a reason to bring the varied strands together into a single coherent collection.

Exhibition: Israeli political cartoons

Israeli cartoonist Avi Katz was on holiday in the US when one of his cartoons was published in Israel depicting the country’s leaders as pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The image caused a storm of protest and resulted in his being sacked from the paper. Fellow cartoonists – from both sides of the political spectrum – rallied in support of free speech and the importance of political satire in a free country. The results of their work are now the subject of an exhibition.

Graduate  round-up

Two young artists fresh from their degree courses at The Northern School of Art and Plymouth College of Art discuss their current work, their inspirations and their ambitions for their future artistic careers.

Resources

The Barnett Freedman Archive

Barnett Freedman is having a “bit of a moment” with an exhibition and a new book about his work in the pipeline. Fortunately, his archive, which is held at Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections Museum, offers a unique insight for researchers into Freedman’s illustrations, relationships with other important artists of the time, dealings with printers and publishers and family life.

Look and learn

What are the key events, shows and exhibitions coming up in the next few months? Find out what you can’t afford to miss.