I’d like to introduce you to an incredible artist – Melbourne-based illustrator and graphic designer Simon Sherry.
Simon is an incredibly prolific artist. His work ranges in style from his very controlled and structured Killbot series through to him much more random and dynamic Full Deck series, with space for some more child friendly work in between.
Within RedBubble he cohosts a group with me, the International Superheroes of Drawing, Illustration and World Domination which is the biggest illustration group on the site. He also hosts Ultimate Resources which, in their own words, gives you free things.
I think the largest project he’s been involved in though would be the Game of Kings – a massive collaboration between ten artists covering illustration and writing (with a few videos thrown in for good measure). A whole world was created based on chess, and some rather impressive pieces resulted.
I had a conversation with Simon about his work, his style, and what drives him.
Tell me about your artistic influences.
You know, I actually tend to find this one to be a pretty hard question, and one that gets harder every time I stop to think about it 
) I guess that the biggest stylistic influence on my art would be Bill Sienkiewicz, who’s body of work is pretty distinctive and staggering. I remember when I first encountered his artwork on Marvel comic’s New Mutants title I was blown away by the sheer amount of energy on display. He has a way of rendering a scene where even figures at rest seem to have a sense of life to them – nothing’s static, and that’s probably the one thing I try to evoke in my own work. Other artists that really make me excited include Mike Mignola, Simon Bisley, Sam Keith and Ted McKeever – there’s always something that they bring to the party that makes me sit up and notice. Old masters of the medium like Alex Toth, Bernie Wrightson and Frank Frazetta always inspire too, in particular the sheer amount of atmosphere they can evoke in their work – something that’s lost in a lot of modern work.
Outside of comics, Klimt and Dore are probably the two artists that get me inspired – I can spend a stupid amount of time looking at Klimt’s work and just let myself get lost in the textures on display. The way he can draw your focus to a face, or figure, through the contrast between the delicate rendering of flesh and the insanely intricate surroundings is something I’d love to explore in my own work.
Other influences come from my childhood, most notably the artwork from Masters of the Universe – there’s something so awesome about the ‘kitchen sink’ approach they took – loin-clothed barbarians and giant tigers side-by-side with cyborgs, space craft and gargoyle-like machinery just grabbed me as a child and didn’t let go. It didn’t hurt that the artwork on the toy packaging was beautifully painted in a faux-pulp style that just opened your imagination up to so many possibilities. Doctor Who, Dungeons & Dragons, Blake Seven and god knows how many other Saturday Morning cartoons also have a lot to answer for ;o)
I guess the biggest thematic influence though, would have to be my own life experience. Like most people out there, I’ve had my fair share of doubt, depression, joy and hope, and there’s something of that in pretty much everything I create – it’s just filtered through a mix of science-fantasy-pop-punk reference ;o)
I can certainly see the influence of the likes of Sienkiewicz and Bisley on your work. Looking through those artists, the impact of their work is generally a combination of pose and media – that is to say the rough linework, or almost slapdash method of throwing down paint or ink help maintain the dynamism of what they do. Your work, on the other hand, is digital. Even in the discrete world of zeros and ones you still manage to make vector feel like paint – could you talk about your process and how you maintain the energy of your work?
I guess the key, for me anyway, is to keep the vector work as loose as possible, starting by blocking in the blacks and pulling out the details from there. I tend to work a lot with the pencil tool set to fill without a stroke, and the results are usually a little more unpredictable than straight drawing – something that I think helps add to the energy people see in my work.
This may give you a bit of an idea of what my vector work looks ‘under the hood’:
(I don’t tend to keep things very tidy ;o))
Hey that’s great. Do you do any pencil sketching or anything like that before you start, or does the image grow directly on the screen? How much do you begin with an image in mind, and how much does it just evolve as you work?
To be honest, it depends on the individual image. In the case of my Game of Kings designs, they developed completely on-screen, with me building them up from a base silhouette and adding or hacking away at it where necessary. My cowboy tee, Howdy evolved from a ballpoint pen sketch that I scanned, re-drew in Illustrator and then coloured.
Other pieces have been digitally painted (usually in Photoshop, sometimes in Painter), while others are livetraced Photoshop drawings coloured in Illustrator. A big factor is usually where I am at the time and the tools I’ve got at my disposal when an idea comes to the surface. I’m probably a bit of a pain in the arse in that respect – people have asked me to explain my process in the past, and I never have a definitive answer. Usually, I don’t have a clue until I start working on a piece.
That’s actually a really handy segue to my next question. Personally, I find I can’t force ideas.. If I sit down with some paper and a pencil then nothing comes. On the other hand I might be walking down the street or see something online and a new tee or illustration will just hit me. Then it’s a matter of holding onto the idea and maybe developing it a little until I’ve got some time and a pencil. Could you have a bit of a chat about where your ideas come from?
I’m a little like that myself – I’ll see or hear something or start running a ballpoint around a piece of scrap paper, and my subconscious does the thinking for a while. Sometimes the character, creature or otherwise percolates for a while (sometimes a couple of years in the case of this guy) and I’ve usually got a backstory in my head as I work on it. That’s where most of my series of works come from – behind the designs there’s a story or two connecting each of the characters, and I tend to work little details into each of them as a consequence. I’m actually starting to get the itch to write some of them down again (most of my formal education is in literature studies/writing as opposed to illustration) and hopefully you’ll see some of that writing in the next stage of Game of Kings.
Funnily enough, most of my commercial work is a lot more structured and stylistically resembles Howdy more than my more personal projects. Luckily I’ve managed to develop enough versatility to feel fairly comfortable in both styles… until I decide I want to try something different ;o)
You have a huge body of work, ranging from what I like to think of as True Simon Sherry Style through to the much more controlled stuff and even kids art. Clearly this is a handy skill when you’re doing commercial art, but I wonder what’s driving you? What motivates you to create, and to continue to push yourself in new areas and styles?
I think that the biggest motivators I have are the creative communities I take part in (particularly Redbubble) pushing me to keep upping the ante, and my own constant dissatisfaction with the last piece I’ve worked on. I also love to experiment with new techniques and tools, so when something crosses my path that interests me technically, I usually have to have a crack at it.
I’m also a big believer that each individual subject deserves a specific treatment. Depending on the mood I’m shooting for, the message I’m trying to put forward, or the audience I’m trying to angle it at – my approach will usually be directed by these things. That isn’t to say that I won’t find it hard to fight certain stylistic urges from time to time (I’ve been told that my crayon box usually seems to only have black, grey and red in it ;o))
That’s interesting.. I think I’m in the same boat, a combination of personal dissatisfaction and a vibrant artistic community really pushes me to improve. That being said, have you got one piece you’re particularly proud of?
I’ve got a few personal favourites – you know the ones, where you think you’ve just managed to hit the right notes, but I think the piece I’m proudest of would be Icarus Reborn.
It’s a piece that evolved quite a bit over the course of its creation, and it’s probably one of the most personal works I’ve put on display. There’s a lot of interesting things you can read into the myth of Icarus, particularly in relation to the paternal/child relationship (and it’s links to the Minotaur myth make it even more interesting imho) and it’s something I’d like to revisit and expand upon.
If I was to round it out to a top three – my Ace of Spades and Dawn of the Dumpty designs would be included. I had an absolute blast coming up with both of those characters and every time I look back at them, I just want to draw them both again!
So you would say that it’s the message and back story of the illustrations which make them your favourites, rather than the particular technique or final visuals? Is that your writing background coming through?
I think I would. A big part of the satisfaction I get out of my artwork is the character and world-building that’s going on in my head as I do it. It’s probably more a case of my internal frustrated writer coming through, as I’ve barely written anything worthwhile in years ;o)
It’s funny though – a common debate in comics is the workload of the writer versus that of the artist, with a lot of people usually siding with the person handling the art chores. To be honest, of the two disciplines, I’ve always found drawing to be far easier than writing. Sure, it’s usually a more time consuming task drawing something as opposed to writing about it, but there’s an immediacy in the visual arts that allows you more leeway than the written word.
Have to say though, this discussion we’re having has helped loosen my typing fingers, at the very least!
We’ve touched on the Game of Kings collaboration a few times, could you talk about that project – what it was, what was involved, that kind of thing?
Well, the whole project started when I decided it’d be fun to create another series of characters, but this time open it up to a group of people whose work I admire and thought would make for an eclectic mix. Crazily enough, everyone I asked to get involved hopped on board, and the result was a series of 32 character pieces making up two sides of a celestial chess board.
Why chess? A couple of reasons – primarily because I’m a fan of the game (not a great player by any stretch, but I enjoy playing it), and because the mix of pieces and what they represent just seemed like a great foundation for some dynamic work.
Getting the team together, I then assigned each of them two pieces – a ‘royal’ piece, and it’s corresponding pawn. The idea here was to not only get them to create two characters that share a relationship, but to then see how the various pairs of characters would play off of each other. The end result, thanks to a combination of great concepts, designs and some storytelling magic from one Danny Nolan, was an army of characters held together by a loose web of allegiance and mutual disrespect – the perfect recipe for disaster ;o)
While the guys were working on one side of the board, I set to work on creating the other. One thing I wanted to play off of with this project was the idea of one versus many, and how better to do that than have one artist handle one end of the board while a group worked together on the other. I think that we really ended up with an interesting contrast between the uniform menace of the black army, and the unpredictable chaos of the white. Ironically, we also ended up with a bit of an inversion of some common tropes – the ‘demonic’, black army is a well-disciplined force each complimenting the others perfectly and designed to perform their specific functions, and a white arm, led by an angelic figure, and barely able to sustain itself without imploding due to it’s chaotic makeup.
Being a collaboration, there was a LOT of discussion between everyone, and it’s safe to say that everyone had a hand in the evolution of every piece of art and aspect of the story. I think that it’s safe to say that so far, GoK has been one of the proudest creative moments of my career, and what’s even better is knowing that we’ve now got an even bigger group involved on taking the project further.
To finish off, can you talk about any projects or cool secret stuff you have planned for the future?
Let’s see…
I’ve got the second stage collaboration of Game of Kings coming up, as mentioned previously, and I think that people are going to really dig where that’s heading.
I’ve also got another collaboration going with Danny Nolan based around my Dawn of the Dumpty concept – we’re building a story around the character with an accompanying series of illustrations, the first of which you can read right here. It’s a darkly comic take on fairy tales in general, and I’m really looking forward to seeing where D and I can take it. I’ve got some other plans for the Undead Egg, but it’s all academic at this stage (watch this space!)
The other project that I’ve had on the backburner for a while is my Full Deck series, and I’m slowly pulling myself back into the saddle in order to roll out the whole 54 character designs, starting with 2-10 of the spades suite, and capping things off eventually with the two jokers of the pack. There’s a large story boiling away in the background with this series too, and at some stage I’m keen to expand on that as well.
There’s other bits and pieces percolating away in the brainbank, including the story behind this fellow so expect to see all sorts of nonsense spilling out of my folio pages in the coming months.
Thanks Si for taking the time, rest assured I’ll be watching your portfolio closely to see what disturbing monstrosity appears next