Meeting with Gillian Blease

Whilst in London I met up with Gillian Blease with Louise and Safina at the British Library. She was lovely and gave us some great advice. We spent a lot of time talking about portfolios, starting with Gillian showing us her work. She had an A3 portfolio which looked very professional with her name embossed into the leather. The A3 format worked very well for her designs as she had included pages from newspapers showing her work, it was good to see her illustrations in their intended format. She also talked about the impact of an A3 portfolio, although it may be easier for the art director to be given an A4 portfolio, A3 is still a manageable size and it’s better for showing the impact of designs and still have nice white space surrounding. Throughout Gillian’s portfolio the images on opposing pages compliment each other nicely. She takes into account the colours and shapes used when placing images. Gillian’s distinct style is evident throughout her portfolio. There was nothing which looked out of place.
When looking through our portfolios Gillian said that it’s always best to start and finish on our strongest images. This is what I had tried to do in my portfolio but the two images which I felt were strongest were for the Russian fairytales project. Although the images at the front were for a different fairytale than the images at the back she said it would be best to have them together as they still appear as a set. So I am going to decide upon a different image to finish my portfolio. I had wrote small explanations under my images but they weren’t very structured so Gillian suggested that I make them look more professional by having perhaps two headings, Brief and Concept, then putting a small description next to each. Also she said I should add some information about myself and my contact details on the first page. After looking at Gillian’s portfolio it was clear to see her distinct style, this is very important as the art director needs to know what they will be getting. She gave us advice on what illustrations might confuse this and said that if we do have a couple of distinctly different styles it might me best to create different portfolios for them, and perhaps even different names to ensure no confusion in what is being commissioned. I had added a few photos of models I had made for the KPMG brief, although they had a fairly similar style to my other work she said it will be best to take them out as I don’t want to be commissioned for this type of work. I asked about marketing surface pattern, as this is another area of design I am interested I saw meeting with Gillian as a good opportunity to find out about this as she has created a large range of surface patterns. She tries to keep the two areas separate so she doesn’t include any surface patterns in her illustration portfolio. She also has a separate section on her website.
Illustration: http://gillianblease.co.uk/illustrations.php
Pattern: http://gillianblease.co.uk/patterns.php
She doesn’t want people to confuse the two areas. In the past art directors have wanted her to create surface patterns out of her illustrations. But her patterns have their own distinct look which is still along similar lines to her illustration style but they are clearly intended as patterns.
Gillian also gave us some good advice on who to approach with our work. She said I should carry on as I have started in contacting children’s book publishers. Random House have recently published one of her friend’s books so it might be worth giving them a shot. She said it’s always useful to have contacts, so having meetings with art directors will be very beneficial in terms of them being more inclined to remember our work. Even if they don’t initially commission work they keep it on file for the future.
Gillian also gave us some tips on self promotion. It was great to get her advice on this as coming from a fine art background she went through the struggle of breaking into illustration on her own, so learnt from books how to promote herself and shown a lot of determination. She started out by teaching herself how to use computer programs like Adobe Illustrator and putting designs onto postcard, this led to her first commission. She said we will probably have to send out a lot of postcards to get any response, so maybe if 200 are sent out we could receive one commission. I asked her if she thought it would be worth while getting my accordion book printed professionally to send to book publishers, she said that it’s not necessary to spend a lot of money on self promotion if I can do it cheaper. This was also emphasized in Otto Dettmer’s lecture as he printed his own self promotional work and made his own limited edition books.
After getting to grips with the way in which we work and listening to the direction we want to go in Gillian gave us tips on whose work to look at for inspiration. She advised me to look at Present and Correct http://www.presentandcorrect.com/index.php who are graphic designers who sell lots of nostalgic merchandise. I particularly like these animal drawing cards; they remind me a lot of Charley Harpers work.



When I talked about wanting to explore pop-up and novelty books Gillian pointed me in the direction of David A Carter and David Pelham. They both do really nice pop-up work.

David A. Carter

David Pelham

I have been looking at one of David A Carter’s books called Elements of Pop-Up. It has lots of Pop-Up designs which can be copied and incorporated into books, so this will be very useful for my major project.
I have wanted to create more hand made textures for a while now and Gillian said that my work will benefit from doing this rather than using photographic textures. She gave me some advice on how to do this by taking selections of textures in Photoshop and turning them into vectors in Illustrator. I have been experimenting with mark marking to do this so hopefully will see some results soon. It was really good talking to Gillian Blease, I think it’s great that she took the time to meet with us and give advice on life as an illustrator.