Nick White

Nick White studied Illustration at Kingston University, graduating in 2004. He currently lives and works in Stoke Newington, London and is signed to Heart Illustration Agency. Nick takes a huge amount of inspiration from his collection of found media. He has hundreds of books, magazines and leaflets found in charity shops, car boot sales and occasionally on ebay.

In 2009 we published Nick’s first book ‘People I’ve Never Met & Conversations I’ve Never Had‘. We asked Nick to explain where in the hell he came up with such a bizarre book idea:

“I keep a small black book where I write notes and ideas for projects. It’s more a notebook than sketchbook not sure why that’s important but it is. Anyway I remember writing the title of my book along side other ideas like: ‘A kid on the tube eats spaghetti bolognese.’ And also ‘a book about the secret nourishment of Biscuits.’ It’s hard to remember why I didn’t go for these other ideas instead as they are all gold.”

Whilst talking all this through we came to the eventual conclusion that Nick was a genius (savant was also mentioned… but we stuck with genius in the end!). His working methods range from the conventionally methodical to the sublime and then the just plain ridiculous.

“I decided that although I had never met any of these people I was about to draw they would probably need names. Trawling through my collections of old magazines & journals I cut out names and words that appealed to me. I mixed them up to form new names and set about making the portraits.

Along with the collage of found imagery, I tend to use a mix of: gouache, acrylic ink, coloured pencil, pencil, felt tips & brush pens. When you get caught up in creating, say, a picture of a giant Ham, and look up to find you’ve been working for 8 hours solid it really is the greatest feeling.”

We were delighted with the end result of Nick’s labour and it’s pleasing to see it on sale in book shops to people we’ve never met (and to some we have met too).

Nobrow 1: Gods and Monsters

People I've Never Met...

View an artist

• Bjorn Rune Lie
• Luke Pearson
• McBess
• Matthew the Horse
• Mikkel Sommer
• Jack Teagle
• Rob Hunter
• Stuart Kolakovic
• Jon Boam
• Jock Mooney & Alasdair Brotherston
• Paul Paetzel
• Micah Lidberg
• Brecht Vandenbroucke
• Tom Rowe
• Rose Blake
• Orlando Hoetzel
• Joe Crocker
• Richard Hogg
• Various
• Blexbolex
• Ben Newman
• Nick White
• Nishant Choksi

Coming Soon...

Cramond Island - February 2012 Cramond Island is the first instalment in the Jean Baptiste Baigorri narrative, created by Basque comic book virtuoso Irkus M Zeberio. At 19 x 27 cm it is also one of our largest short-run comics to date. The tale follows Jean Baptiste Baigorri an embattled poet/freedom fighter/ existential superhero as he struggles with his rapidly [...]

Leeroy and Popo - March 2012 Leeroy and Popo is the first book by up and coming talent Louis Roskosch. The full colour strip follows the misadventures of a couple of slacker extraordinaire, adolescent friends as they loaf around trying to hook up with girls and generally avoid doing anything that might be construed as work. Roskosch’s duo of protagonists are characters any [...]