1. NBHQ: Tell us a bit about yourself: B: I’m a Norwegian artist/illustrator who’s somehow ended up living in Bristol, England. It’s been so long I almost can’t remember why. I work to much, eat too much bread and not enough fruit. I can’t afford a car so I cycle everywhere on my hopelessly untrendy bike, transporting all sorts of things on the pannier rack such as floor boards or bags of firewood. I really like Duke Ellington and that kinda stuff. I really don’t like chart music and consumer culture etc, but I’m not bitter and cynical although the world is obviously going to the dogs. I’m pretty hopeless on Twitter.

2. NBHQ: What inspires and informs your work? B:  I always try to seek inspiration from as many sources as possible..It’s hard to nail down exactly what inspires me, but I seem drawn towards wonkyness and imperfection; Folk art, printed matter from before the digital age, old photographs of strange plants and weird contraptions. At the moment I’m really inspired by Victorian greenhouses, power stations, botanical illustrations, photos from the Russian revolution, eccentric explorers and adventurers..It all comes together somehow. And things from my childhood seem to reappear quite a lot. Having amazing people around like Ben Newman and Jon McNaught is really inspiring too.

3. NBHQ: Tell us a bit about your process…  B: Man, I’m still trying to work out what the hell I’m doing. I’m always experimenting with new ways of doing things, which leads to a lot of hair pulling. I don’t like repeating myself too much. There always has to be an element of surprise. I’m slowly developing a technique at the moment which really suits me though. It involves, scalpels, sponge rollers and ground up oil pastels. It looks razor sharp, has a degree of wonkyness, is hard to overwork, but has the element of surprise. Best of all it’s just a really enjoyable process. Good for the soul, but not for the respiratory system, so I sometimes wear a dust mask.

Tell us a bit about yourself?

I’m an illustrator and comics artist. Sometimes I say I’m a cartoonist as it sounds more fun and less like someone who just draws the pictures. I graduated in 2010 with an illustration degree and in the year since I finished I’ve spent nearly every day hunched slavishly over my desk, doing as much work as physically possible. I’ve somehow managed to make drawing my job, but I’m still waiting to start properly. I have the kind of face that makes people ask if I’m alright.

What inspires and informs your work?

Visually I take inspiration from classic animation art, old book covers, alt comics and the massive amount of great illustrators and cartoonists I’ve discovered over the last few years. I look at a broad range of stuff that I strive to learn from or capture the essence of, but generally everything comes back to a desire for appealing cartooniness, clean lines, strong shapes and distinctive colour schemes. My ideas sometimes come from an urge to capture a warmness or a pleasant feeling, while some of my more downbeat or miserable ideas come from intensely scrutinising my own navel and trying to expand on the observations.

Tell us a bit about your process…

For line-based stuff my process is banally straight forward. I draw with pencil on whatever paper. I’ll frequently draw something, rub it out, try again and rub it out again so many times I wear a hole in the paper and have to start over. I ink over it with a brush pen, then scan it and digitally neaten up all the areas I messed up because the brush pen is clumsy and unreliable and I need to switch to a nib or a real brush like a true pro. I colour everything digitally. For some of my simpler, shape-based illustration stuff I work completely digitally, but always in Photoshop, never ever in Illustrator as some people seem so eager to believe. I keep sketchbooks but they tend to be full of small compositional sketches, illegible scrawls and wispy, barely visible, rough-as-hell practice sketches.

Recently we caught up with him between a show at Rotofugi in Chicago and a huge retrospective at the Dudes Factory in Berlin, this is what he said!

Tell us a bit about yourself…

My name is McBess , it means giant steaming balls in Greek , in a way it’s the answer to the famous series of metaphysical poems about the balls . I’m 13 years old plus 13 years old and I run faster than a shark , I read faster than a tiger , and unlike the eagle I can cook with an oven . I’m cheese where the good French come from , and  I live in Nodnol  wich is London backwards .

What inspires and informs your work?

My work is an art inspired by an abstraction of salami and sex, it gets its power from the galaxy and the inner you, its addiction is making you horny and unconfortable about it. Its references are very intricate and form a vortex of information designed by one self, one all mighty mind .

Tell us a bit about your process…

I lay naked on a beach for 2 or 3 days until it rains , I look at the stars at night and stare at the sun during the day , when my eyes start bleeding with awesomeness , I then go to the drawing board and let my soul and photoshop do the work . There’s also a lot of ritual dances while the file saves in photoshop that I can’t explain with words or letters .

Tell us a bit about yourself…

I am a big man who likes silly jokes and the outdoors. I grew up in the beautiful hills of the north, amongst wind and livestock. I studied at Bath Spa and now live in Leeds, where I teach at the art school. I don’t know anything about poetry but like to write poems. I try not to be cynical, I think that if we met we would get on.

What inspires and informs your work?

Energy, silliness, the human condition, horses, trying things out. I like rap music, hot meat, bicycle rides, thinking in the dark, heroes, trying to tell good stories, bashing the internet, drawing as a language, knobbing about.

What is your process…

I draw with a range of calligraphic pens and brushes, these brushes dont allow for much detail so it encourages me to think about line and pattern. I’m interested in the relationship between shapes, functional visual devices and wobbly hand drawn lines. I never sketch out my line work, instead I draw the same pieces repeatedly until I’m happy with them. I do this in an attempt to recreate the magic of those purely uninhibited drawings that only happen in a note book. I draw in my note book as much as possible, these drawings are usually bad but occasionally something happens that I can own.

NB: Tell us a bit about yourself:

MS: I’m a large domain of single-celled, prokaryote microorganisms, who was born in 1987 in Copenhagen. Typically a few micrometres in length, I have a wide range of shapes, ranging from spheres to rods and spirals, but mostly quite oblong. I’m ubiquitous in every habitat on Earth, growing in soil, acidic hot springs, radioactive waste, water, and deep in the Earth’s crust, but at the moment I reside in Berlin with my girlfriend. I also draw comics.

NB: What inspires and informs your work

MS: Hard to say really. Films, books and art for the most part. I also tend to get feverishly productive after doing the dishes, which is both counterproductively constuctive and buckets of fun. As in the two words from the question, I often find that seemingly pointless information can lead to great inspiration.

NB: Tell us a bit about your process…

MS: I normally spend aeons on overthinking every step of a project. It honestly doesn’t really bring me anything solid, but is the pattern I see myself following over and over again for some reason. Never really been a big sketcher, so I usually go straight to business. This approach gives me a lot of freedom, as well as an otherwise almost unattainable intuitive energy. I’ve tried to force this expression many a time, but often failing.

I divide my time between painting, comics and zines, and commercial design and illustration work. I work from an old shipping container that I have converted into a studio on my parent’s farm in Cornwall. I collect action figures and old comics. I have to pile everything into boxes that are stacked everywhere.
I’ve shown my paintings worldwide including San Francisco, Portland, Aberdeen, London, Porto, and Bristol.

I’ve been reading comics since I could read. I started out on the Beano and Dandy, and then got given loads of annuals, 2000ads and deadline magazines from my comic loving family as I got older. I gradually started to get into alternative comics, I really got into Charles Burns, Dan Clowes and Robert Crumb.

I’m really inspired by pulp science fiction and horror, I  can’t get enough of the posters, the films and the costumes. I love Kaiju, 8bit computer games, silver age comics, British and Luchadore wrestling too, and I try to mix this into my work when possible. My favourite films are David Cronenberg’s the Fly, The Thing, Blue Velvet, Delicatessen, Alien, and these have had a huge effect on me. 
Gary Baseman, Gary Panter and Ryan Heshka are really inspiring. I love how their work can span across so many different formats, they paint and put on shows, they create editorial work, they release comics, they don’t limit themselves. They have a great sense of colour and playfulness and they all have a totally unique style.
Medieval art and woodblock prints have had a real influence on my work. They have great narratives within them, and I love how both cultures don’t concern themselves with perspective, it makes for some really interesting pictures. Aside from that hieronymus bosch absolutely kicks ass, I love his creatures and the sheer detail in his works.

I have several processes and they have all been informed by my time at University. I really wanted to make the most of my time at uni and spent a lot of time in the print room. I was obsessed with silkscreen, and this really started to influence my work. I treat photoshop in a similar way to print with layering and limiting colours. I draw up a final image and then break it down into different colours and shapes, which I scan, colour and place in photoshop, much like a collage or cut paper picture.
I paint in a similar way. I paint backgrounds first and then work onto the foreground and characters, after this I add in the details.

Since then we have worked with him for exhibitions, prints, Nobrow magazine and very soon, his very own comic book. Rob shares a studio with fellow Nobrow artist Jon McNaught.

The pending release of that book ‘The New Ghost’ prompted us to catch up on our Artist’s Profiles, so we got in touch to ask him a bit about his work process, motivations and future plans. Here’s what he had to say:

NB: Tell us a bit about yourself:

I graduated in Bristol in 2007 and have been working as a freelance illustrator since. I currently work in a studio with a group of friends creating books, films and animations.

I spent two years of my childhood living in the New Jersey suburbs and draw a lot of my inspiration from photographs of that period. I am Lucky to have had very interesting grandparents whose stories continue to motivate my work.

NB: What inspires and informs your work, tell us a bit about your process…

RH: I create my work through traditional drawing, collage and printmaking techniques using the computer to edit. Accustomed to making images for printmaking a lot of my work will be drawn in black and white, with additional layers for colours.

The ever busy, dumbfoundingly talented illuskater (yup, that’s the right spelling, he’s an avid skater and illustrator) was of course responsible for the first issue’s cover and has since been involved with many subsequent issues and let’s not forget the groundbreaking Graphic Cosmogony. We recently peeled back the cobweb ridden curtains of his dimly lit 15th century Serbian Orthodox monastic cell to ask him what keeps him going and this was his sermon.

I’m 25 and live in the Midlands; home to Black Sabbath and Industrial pollution. I find Illustration can be quite confining; having to adhere to quick turnarounds or very specific briefs. So I try to indulge myself as much as possible with other, more personal projects in my spare time.

A lot of my work is inspired by my interest in Eastern European folk art, which is something I discovered whilst researching a project about my family history. When I’m not drawing, I enjoy making music, reading, skating, complaining, feeling guilty for not working and pissing my friends off.

My working process is pretty stressful. I get very uncomfortable when I hear other artists talk about how much fun they have drawing. I feel the idea, narrative or message I’m trying to communicate through the commissioned drawing is the most important part of image making. So I spend a lot of time trying to hone down exactly what I’m trying to say using pages of thumbnail sketches until a solid image starts to form. This is fleshed out on nasty cheap A4 copy paper, inked up with a brush, scanned in and then coloured in on Potatoshop.

I am a 33 year old man, I live in Derbyshire with my wife and daughter, I have lived in a bunch of different places, done lots of different jobs and travelled far – always drawing in my spare time. I think I have always been interested in drawing, I enjoy comics, cartoons, science fiction, fantasy, imagining things and all the usual stuff.  Over the past 3 years I have been focusing more of my energy on creating artwork, I have had various illustration commissions and been involved in some interesting group projects & collaborations. I love drawing characters and strange magical/technological objects – these are some of the themes I’m fond of – super powers, madness, time travel, mutants, monsters, aliens, space technology from the future, magic, secret caves,enchanted forests, robots, ghosts, interdimensional worm holes, insects, dinosaurs, animals, space ships, villains, idiots etc… I tend to draw most things out in pencil first on Bristol board before inking up with fine tip pens, I scan in and add colour on the computer. In the future I hope to focus more on comics and children’s books and look forward to more new & exciting collaborations.

‘Leggy Stunnerz’ editioned and commissioned by Nobrow marks their first foray into printmaking. We asked them to explain their thinking behind the bizarre and colourful limited edition: ‘We wanted to produce a garish, irrational yet rational book. Quite simply it features a cavalcade of humans in costume and carnival floats which on closer inspection have numerous pairs of legs. Starting off with a wasp, then slowly building into a crescendo – BAM – the book ends, and we are left to ponder about where this strange troupe is heading and what the hell will happen when they get there. For the back of the book we wanted to have a bold stylish pattern that would act as some kind of subverted ‘TV static’ – acting like a withdrawn, dazed counterpart to the heady activities on the other side.’

As the guys usually work with visual narratives in animation, we thought it would be interesting to get them involved in a Nobrow Small Press project and in particular a concertina book. Their process, even though the end result would be presented in a different format, was still based on creating lists (of potential ridiculous costumes for the cavalcade) and then making hundreds of drawings from which they could create the ultimate composition. Drawings were scanned into the computer and edited down until Jock & Ali were happy with the army-like mass they had conjured up: ‘That editing process is really vital to the kind of work we do – being ruthless and always ready to throw things on the scrap heap until only the creme de la creme is left. We both really value distilling an idea’s visual information until all the vital components are left. Final layouts and colour are then argued about until both parties end up in a sobbing, drunken heap.’

Stylistic and conceptual influences include Japanese culture – be it 18th Century prints or classic Studio Ghibli – combined with a love for Alfred Hitchcock, 1960s design, horror films, vaudeville, 1980s soft rock and Vienetta. They also like to carry small elements of previous projects through their current work so, for example, in Leggy Stunnerz you will be able to spot several motifs from their video work, while the cat-in-a-dress character for their video Bubblegum was derived from one of the final drawings produced for Leggy Stunnerz.

Leggy Stunnerz from Alasdair & Jock on Vimeo.