Just a quick update to let you all know that series 2 for Skull & Heart is coming along beautifully! We have two more amazing artists involvded this time and we can not wait to announce who they are and show you what they have been creating for us. We should be able to announce something shortly with a few teaser shots, so keep checking back and make sure to like us on facebook and follow us on twitter for the latest news and updates! 

Once again as well, thankyou to everyone so far for their support and orders from the online store, Dan Mumford’s Noir is running low now, so if you want to get in there and order it, make sure to do so quickly as it won’t be reprinted!

Following up from last weeks spotlight on William Exley’s print for Skull & Heart ‘Escapees’. We now have a rundown on what went into Dan Mumford’s piece for us ‘Noir’. We caught up with Dan last week and asked him to give us a little rundown about the process he went through in creating his piece!…

‘Well right from the start i knew i wanted to do something that was a little out of my comfort zone, something that wasn’t quite as typical as i might produce. Skull & Hearts print series seemed like the perfect place for me to try something that wasn’t necessarily quite as horror/monster themed as 80% of my work ends up being! With a little bit of direction from S&H i went away and decided i wanted to try and come up with a burlesque type image that also drew on one of my main influences, Alfons Mucha.’

‘Im generally quite quick when it comes to the sketching process, i come up with an idea and normally i know wether its going to work before ive even put pen to (digital) paper. So its normally more a case of just working out the best composition and layout as opposed to the content itself. Over the course of a day i spent my time constructing a loose sketch based around the general idea i had and started to build up the frame around that original image. With this piece i worked all digital as i knew that the merging of frame and figure would be quite a tough job to bring together, and this way i could work on the two on separate layers and just move them around till i had a great composition.’

‘I wanted the frame to be just as important to the image as the central focus as well, and also have a nice element of symmetry. It calls back to some of my earlier pieces where i created an image for Jules Verne in this art deco style frame, and also like i mentioned earlier, Alfons Mucha’s work. He did amazing circular frames that to this day still blow my mind in their simplicity and how they became so integral to his beautiful pieces. The more i worked on it though, the more i added circles and pattern to the outside, the central image became smaller and smaller…but i liked how it was looking so kept the size ratio.’

‘The next step once i chatted about the image with S&H and got the final colour pallette to work with was to get moving on the image. I worked at a very high DPI canvas in photoshop with a tablet and quite a small pen stroke, i wanted to make this super detailed, it made it more time consuming with all the tiny point shading and the hair being quite fine, but it was worth it. Again, i wanted to push this piece more than i might usually, and just be a little more considered with my line-work.’

‘Getting the symettry with the frame to work was harder than anticipated at first as well, you would think it would be case of creating one half that youre happy with and then mirroring it, but the central woman was not symettrical, nor was the giant eagle on her head, so theres a slight false symettry to some of the image to make it work to the human eye and not look wonky or off balance. The rectangular lines around the edge though were a late addition to bring it all back in to line as well, i thought it just made it a bit straighter and pulled all the shapes into place nicely.’

‘With the colour it was quite simple to work in, i knew i didnt want it to overpower the image, and i also knew i wanted it be secondary to the black linework, so i made sure there was overall more black than pink and also that the pink was light enough so that it sat comfortably under the black without being distracting. If it were too dark the white would just burn through.’

‘And thats pretty much it! It was a real fun piece to work on, and i hope everyone likes how it came out! Whiteduck did an amazing job printing it and definitely made the piece come alive!’

Thankyou so much everyone for all your orders from Skull & Heart, we shipped out all orders up to date yesterday and they should be with you very soon! We hope you all love your prints as much as we do, and look out for information on series.2 coming very soon and next week a spotlight on Dan Mumfords piece ‘Noir’!

So as you should know, William Exley recently created the beautiful print ‘Escapees’ for our launch at Skull & Heart, we caught up with Will last week and asked him to give us a little rundown about the process he went through in creating his piece!…

‘The very earliest thought for this one came when watching the 1955 Hammer film ‘The Quatermass Xperiment’. The film opens with scenes of the army setting up search equipment around a crashed space ship, and I was immediately struck by the imagery of industrial machinery (search lights, radar equipment, fire engines) set up in the English countryside.’

‘Around the same time I was reading a lot about sightings of mythical animals such as Big Foot and the Beast of Bodmin and the links they had with genuine stories of animal escapes from zoo’s and enclosures. Cue a lot of research and Google image searching of search lights, animals, countryside and anything else that might lend to the tone of the print and the idea came together for what this could be.’

‘When I feel comfortable enough with the idea, for the actual drawing I spend a lot of time thumb nailing different compositions, trying to balance enough information to make an interesting image with enough clarity to get across the idea.’

‘I tend to work almost exclusively on the computer for drawing the actual line work. Switching back and forth between Photoshop and Manga Studio to create the initial inks. Because of the scale of this one, I drew it out at actual size on some taped together pieces of A4 paper so I could work out the specific size and how the composition would ultimately look. With the number of animals I was going to draw this also helped to act as a rough road map for what I was doing and made the actual digital drawing a lot easier (and less stressful!).

The drawing was done in 2 parts, top and bottom of what would be the eventual piece. I’m currently without a scanner, so I’d sketch out each small grouping of animals, photograph that drawing and then import it into Photoshop to arrange into the composition before finally ‘inking’ over this rough in Manga Studio. 

When the line work is done, I go back in to spot blacks, add more detail and eventually separate out into the two colours. My fall back colour way is a cyan blue and black, but after an e-mail discussion with Dan we though it would be fun to have some cohesion in the colouring of our prints and decided together on a pink and black. Comparing the two, I think the warmth of the pink suits the tone of the design a lot better.’

Once again, huge thanks to Will for creating such a beautiful piece for Skull & Heart, look out for a spotlight on Dan Mumfords piece ‘Noir’ very soon!

Welcome to the very first post on Skull & Heart! We are very excited to finally launching the website with two absolutely stunning prints from Dan Mumford and William Exley. 

Skull & Heart was born from an idea of bringing art to the public in an affordable and friendly way to everyone. Its taken almost a year of hard work to get everything up and running, but we look forward to showcasing lots of new talent from the illustration, Art & Design world over the next year and bringing many exclusive pieces of work to the store.

Thank you for visiting and please check back frequently for updates on new works and prints as well as spotlights on emerging talent that are getting us excited!

Below you can check out some photos from our recent signing sessions with Dan Mumford and William Exley. Make sure to check out their respective artists pages on the site for interviews as well as links to their portfolios and other work!

Make sure to add us on twitter and facebook as well for updates!