joel priddy

joel priddy is an illustrator and comic artist who is a great influence to me. his first comic 'pulpatoon pilgrimage' shows his crisp graphical style and surreal storytelling and use of type. the story is about a group of three very different creatures and friends who are journeying to some unknown place, it shows their backgrounds and their reasons for partaking in the journey, all in joels wonderful style. i find his rendering of trees in pulpatoon pilgrimage to be one of the most interesting qualities as they are given great textures and forms making them seem very organic. my girlfriend has a tatoo of his character 'ironhide tom' who is a very tough pirate described as a 'sea-ape' who is pretty much drawn as a hunched peg-legged stick man.

the influence of animals on my work

When I was 4 years old I was asked what I would like to be when I grow up, my reply was ‘a Tiger’ followed by a mess of orange and black berol drawings. Since I have wanted to be an archaeologist, super-hero, barbarian, painter and finally an illustrator.
I still find the indigenous beings of this planet to be a fascinating and wonderful source of inspiration to my work as a designer, when I recently visited the capital on a ‘cultural’ trip, with intentions to wonder around a lifeless art gallery for a few hours. I instead headed to London zoo, to see the monkeys. The result was 200 or so photos of the zoos inhabitants and an enthusiastic inspired mind. I did the same thing on the college trip to Berlin last year spending one day wandering and the other two in the zoo and aquarium drawing hippos and scary fish.
Most recently I visited Chester zoo with a small group of fellow students and I have come to the conclusion that I can stare at as many books, galleries and websites of design but the thing that motivates and inspires me the most is animals of all shapes sizes and species from pigs to piranhas, but mostly monkeys obviously.

hippo

My hippo character derived from the hour or two that I spent watching the group at Berlin zoo, although I only started drawing it during my first year. one of these hippos spent most of its time swimming laps in the pool emerging only briefly to spray an immense shit over one of the younger hippos who was attempting to follow it, another hippo seemed to spend the majority of its time staring around in a daze and occasionally opened its mouth and made a noise. These two creatures as well as my own inner dim-witted persona formed the foundation on which the ‘hippo’ was formed. The hippo walks on two legs to represent its humanisation, if it had a job it would work in a call centre. It is also drawn without pupils in its eyes to represent its blankness and prevent the audience from empathizing with him. its nature is as a pariah of sorts surviving with very little in the way of wit or instincts among society.

marcel dzarma

its not like me to like one of these gallery type fine-artists, but dzarma is an exception his work is very character driven and although he goes out of his way to make his work mean nothing it is still quite good. marcel dzarma creates lots of costumes of his characters as well as short films such as 'the lotus eaters'. i like to see characters as costumes because it makes them 'real' to an extent, i admire his ability to take his creations off of paper in this way.