Q & A with Rohan Daniel Eason

Contacting professional illustrators has been so hard to do, as many of them dont reply and already have Q & A sections on their own websites, so I was delighted when one of my favorite artists, Rohan Eason replied to my questions. 

He is a pen and ink illustrator, who creates black and white imagery. His work has been widely used in children's and adults book illustration. I absolutely love his style and it was a pleasure talking to him. 

You can check out his work here at http://www.rohaneason.com

1) what inspired you to first start drawing ?

I drew from a very early age, I always loved too, my mums an artist, my uncle was an artist, and it felt like something I didn't have to try to do. 

2) Do you think it is important for your drawings to have a connection to the subject your working with ? 

As a professional illustrator you don't have the luxury of a connection with the subject matter or project ethos. Sometimes you win, sometimes you face tedium and banality head on, and it's your job to squeeze some life and character into it. 

3) What are the inspirations behind your work and working methods?

I was first inspired by Aubrey Beardsley, in my teens, I was struck by the stark black and white line, and the beautifully balanced compositions. I decided that I would aim to have the same quality of line that he created, and really study the craft of drawing with ink. 

4) Following on from the last question, is research an integral part of your working process?

Research is always the no1, process. Nothing really begins without reading the book, or gaining a back-story, visiting a location, or speaking to the writer. I have a huge collection of books to trawl through and then of course the Internet now offers a huge research library. I may sketch immediately ideas of composition, but it's like putting a jigsaw together, and each element must by researched and chosen. 

5) From looking through your work, you use pen and ink in quite a few pieces. What is it about that medium that you like ? 

It's immediate and allows for no mistakes. It's a skill that I can improve over my life time, it's important to me to create artworks, and not just illustrations.  I want the work to be a direct reflection of the skills of my hand, there is something human in that, a connection which you don't get with digital arts. Which is why I keep computer work to an absolute minimum, only using for scanning and simple retouch. 

6) How important do you feel composition is to your work ? 

Very important. I will try many compositions before settling down on one. Sometime I will sketch a piece and then simply turn it , and re sketch, changing the angle for the viewer and creating a more interesting perspective. Composition is paramount. 

7) How much freedom do you have when creating your work ? 

An illustrator is always restricted by the brief, and it is the skill of the illustrator to find freedoms in that. You must present everything required, plus the special parts not thought of, or represented in the brief. It's not your job to change the brief but reimagine it.

8) Throughout your career what would you say is your biggest achievement?

Every book or project I complete is my best work to date, I'm always striving to be better so self congratulation is fleeting. I always look back and see the mistakes rather than the achievements, in that it's a journey that I focus on. Rather than the goals of completion. 

Relational aesthetics

This is a valuable lesson I have learned from my context lessons. Relational aesthetics is where a piece is created with the audience or onlooker in mind. So for example creating my parkinson's images, I had to think about how people with parkinson's would think and feel about the images. It really makes you consider and think about your drawing and consider the relationship the drawings must have with the onlooker.

Children's Books Conclusion

I am very pleased with how my book and the pages I have created have turned out. I think I have kept true to a consistent style of work and kept the style of drawing the same. I have stuck to my core pricniples of line, texture and shape throughout each page. I think a good point is that I haven't just stuck to what I know, I have tried to adapt my style and try and whole range of new processes such as experimental forms of mark making.

I think a weakness of my book could be that as I haven't finished every single one of my images it becomes quite hard to understand and read the storyline, affecting what the reader will understand about the story. I think next time I create a book I will stick to my mark making style as i like the unpredictable nature of the marks and that way of working really fits in well with a children's book style.

After having many weeks or trying and many weeks of hard work, I have a new found respect for children's book illustrators. the amount of effort and time spent to make a book look professional, consistent and good is staggering. Ive learnt so many new things from this unit.

• To try and keep a consistent style 

• Keep up to date with work 

• Find the right feel and look to suit the audience 

Tales of the City

This was my image for the brief ' tales of the city' it was a very open brief basically open to your interpretation. This might seem strange but I got the idea for my image from a dream I had. I was in a park with a man feeding ducks, however the man had a ducks head instead. I just think it was quite a surreal image and I think it really suited a  scene that I could see in somewhere like Manchester.

Ive tried to use collage and be really experimental with how I have created it. Thinking about composition, mark making and use of colour. My influence for this come from things like dada who use used very abstract imagery swell as surrealism, with their dream like imagery.

I also took a lot of photo's of Manchester as this is the place that inspired me with this idea. I wanted to capture the mood of the city and try and reflect what I saw in my dreams. I tried to capture different perspectives and views. 

Multiple Images

This was my most challenging page as I and to consider not only how Sultan looked, but also his posture and trying to create a human. I had no idea what I wanted my human to look like at first. I decided to go with a simple line drawing that represented a feeling or emotion in this case being scared. I think it goes well with the animal characters. I wanted to keep the consistent white spaces throughout  my pages and had to consider composition with this piece a lot. I did this so the page didn't become to crowded.

A weakness of the page is sultans drawing. I struggled to imagine what the dog looked like side on, so had a trial and error kind of moment with him.

Raven

 For this page I wanted to create a raven. I wanted the marks to mimic the texture and feel of a birds feathers. So I used darker and lighter shades of black ink and I was quite free flowing with how I applied the marks. the image originally was just the bird on its own, but again like other images it looked to flat, so I decided to add a butterfly and make it very vibrant so it came to the forefront. I enjoyed making this page. The weakness of it is that perhaps the butterfly detracts from the main raven image.

Cats !!!!

Ive really like drawing cats in this project, I just think they are easier to draw then dogs especially as they have definite line and body structures. Whereas with a dog its fur covers most its body so its harder to define parts of it.

I think in all these images here you can see the different compositions. I have tried to experiment with it and different layouts for each image. From just sections of the animals to the way it moves. Ive tried to keep the wool line from an earlier page going throughout every page to try and keep it consistent.

I think a weakness is potentially in the last images, as I really struggled to draw shadows and which way they are meant to fall in the background. The unpredictable nature of the black marks of the cat really help to make him stand out.

 

Wolf in woods

These were two pages I worked on at the same time as I felt they were most in common with each other, with lots of overlapping features in both. I think the The bottom image works the best with the contrast between light and dark and the textures of the bushes especially working in my opinion. The only problem being the colour scheme and its not consistent, but I just felt that the black and white suited Sultans situation being in a dark a scary wood.

Both of these pages took a  lot of different scanned in images to compose and put together.

3 pieces of Great Advice !

These were just some inspirational advice that I use to help me with with work when I've been, struggling. 

Paul Wolfgang webster 

The only way to be as an artist, it is to look as professional as possible, keep work clean and neat, put work into folders, get a lot of business cards made to hand out, get a website, send out emails to companies, galleries and local shops, and start a project and finish it, if you want to do other projects write them down keep the ideas and get them done when your free to put 100%. There are 50,000,000 artists in the world, so get professional and make your work stand out. I have a gallery you could bring your work for me to look at , so there’s a start on your road to becoming a successful artist, give me a ring. - yay !!!

Leonid Afremov 

"Work hard and never give up. good things happen with patience and dedication."   

Quentin Blake 

" I think if you keep on doing a great deal of drawing – actually an enormous amount if possible – it helps you discover your own natural way of drawing, and out of that your style will emerge. It’s a mistake to assume a style but you can be heavily influenced by another artist, as long as it’s a real relationship and not just imitation for the sake of it. And it’s important not just to think in terms of other people who are doing the same job you’d like to do. "

Piece I wish I had done

This beautiful piece of ink drawing by Rohan Easton ( the artist I interviewed ) Is the piece I wish I had done or could do. I admire the imagination and creative mind to be able to come up with such an intelligent drawing that encompasses so many different aspects. For example the surreal quality of the imagination with the lion in the middle of the ocean. This is one part I found so interesting and it really captures my imagination. Another aspect of the drawing I like is the use of monochrome colors i.e. black and white, I find it hard at times to scale down my colour palette when drawing or painting and i think just using black and white brings the piece together. In addition the different tones of colour work so well with the pure black sky and  the lighter kinda black sea, they really reflect the feel and motion of the sea and sky.

The intricate line work and marks really help to create texture and make me wonder how has he achieved that and how long must that have taken him to get so good at it. I want to be able to create pieces this detailed and this organic in a way. Its a realistic sort of drawing but he's adapted it to give it a surreal kind of feel, which Im trying to do in my own work. The line quality and use of line, shape and texture help to bring the piece together and create a unique sense of perspective.

another aspect that I like is the cleverness of the image at first glance I saw a lion sitting in a field, then it became the sea, then a lion in the sea with a mountain behind him and then a woman behind him and then a boy sleeping. I could see so many different parts in the drawing that I couldn't see before. They were kind of hidden. I like the cleverness involved.

This is one piece I think is amazing and if I get any where near this quality, which I hope I do, then i will be pleased.

Wolf up a tree !!

This was the page where the wolf had just been scared up a tree by the cats shadow. I think I have really captured the colour and look of a tree. Using the a3 scanners I managed to put together the leaf marks I had made for my tree. I found it really hard to do at  first because leaves are very hard to draw and I was thinking to literally so I changed my approach to changing back to mark making and focusing on the shape of the leaves instead.

I used pastel rubbings from trees to recreate the texture of wood and I think it works here as I can see the jagged edges and rough surface of the tree. This page was a challenge.

John Wick soundtrack

Art isnt the only form of inspiration for me. I listen to music a lot when Im doing work and it more than often inspires me. Ive recently watched a film called John Wick, its a brilliant film and theres a scene where he's fighting,  this music is being played and they combine the violence so beautifully with the music.

I can't stop listening to it !!!

Poppy field

  This was one of the last pages of the  book and I really wanted to illustrate the bright mood and upturn in fortunes for Sultan and the story. So I wanted to draw a poppy field. I thought it worked well with the image I was trying to create,which was one of vibrancy and positivity. I placed the wolf in the background as I wanted him to be ever-present and alway around, but almost hidden. The obvious weakness for this page was my time keeping as I didn't have enough time to draw sultan into it. He was meant  to be running throughout the fields happy. I think a strength of this piece is sense of perspective and distance with the wolf further away.