elementary my dear…

During last years’ Sweetness & Light I had the pleasure of meeting a really nice couple, Coralie Bickford-Smith and Mike Topping. They noticed I had something to do with the Candy Collective and came up to me to say how much they were enjoying the talks. As we chatted it transpired that Mike is an illustrator and Coralie is a designer for Penguin. They were working on a series of new book covers for the Sherlock Holmes canon. This is a bit of an area of interest of mine (quite a big bit actually so I was pretty excited).

I’ve been a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes from a very early age and the Sidney Paget illustrations were a big influence on my young mind. I watched and rewatched the Basil Rathbone movies and devoured the ITV series in the 80′s with Jeremy Brett as the definitive great detective in my opinion. It’s not often I get the chance to have a drunken rant about one of my favourite subjects so I launched into a “Did you know?” trivia rant about Holmes, “Did you know that Pagent was actually commissioned by mistake as it was his brother Walter the publishers thought they were contacting?” etc, etc.

Despite this, they kept in touch and sent through these images of the covers for the series. I asked Mike a few questions and he graciously agreed to answer them…

Do you have a process you follow when you are making your pictures? Research, trawling the internet, books, sketching, materials?

The starting point for this project was “no deerstalker, no curved pipe”. There was quite a lot of research, first of all looking at how Holmes has been represented over the years, from the Strand Magazine illustrations through innumerable print editions, stage and screen adaptations. Coming up with the look for the series was very much a collaborative process between Coralie (Bickford-Smith, the designer) and myself, and we also looked at a lot of old film posters for inspiration on composition. The images themselves incorporate a range of processes including photography, pencil drawing and brush and ink work. That was all put together in the computer, along with a few elements from old etchings and the typography. There were several cycles of scan-alter-print-alter-scan for each cover.

Can you describe your workspace and how important it is to your working process? Maybe you can include a photo?

An unruly mass of books, papers, drawing materials, CDs, oddities and ephemera, with a clearing just large enough to accommodate a couple of screens and a graphics tablet.

Describe your timeline of artistic influences and has there been anyone consistently?

The earliest influences were probably Dr Seuss and Maurice Sendak, as well as the people who did the amazing illustrations for Ladybird books. Also Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, and through those Aubrey Beardsley. Then films – I watched a lot on TV growing up, especially old sci-fi like This Island Earth – and comics like 2000AD. Museums and collections have been a recurrent fascination from an early age, which has more recently drawn me to artists like Joseph Cornell and Peter Blake, as well as August Sander’s typological photography.

What would be a dream project to work on, a fantasy commission, a ‘pinch yourself’, ‘slap me in the mouth and tell me it’s Christmas’ job?

Sherlock Holmes was that kind of job – I read several of the books years ago, watched the Basil Rathbone films on TV and loved the Granada adaptations with Jeremy Brett. Now that’s done, I’d love to work on another series – Ray Bradbury or Philip K Dick would be great.

If you weren’t illustrating, what else would you be doing?

Writing.

Thanks Mike! Keep an eye out for a “Step by Step” by Mike and Coralie coming soon to Scamp!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Books, Illustration, Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.