Influences

I wanted to make a post about some of my primary influences as an illustrator. I find inspiration from many sources, I use photographs and movies for reference, I look at illustration and fine art, but there are a few key artists whose work strongly influences mine.

Mort Drucker

Legendary MAD Magazine illustrator Mort Drucker is among my absolute favorite artists, and maybe my biggest influence both consciously and subconsciously. When I was a kid I used to eagerly look through every issue of MAD I could get my hands on to find the strips that he drew - I love the scribbly looseness of his line work, his absolute mastery of caricature and likeness, the playful cartooning in his proportions and compositions. It doesn’t hurt that he mostly drew comics about movies - I learned about many classics by reading his parodies first, long before I saw the actual films. His work is probably one of the reasons why movies are so important to me today and why I love to recreate them in drawings.

Sergio Toppi

Famed Italian comics maestro Sergio Toppi blows me away with his astonishing graphic compositions and fascinating textures - I absolutely adore the strange curved patchwork hatching that he would use to fill in areas of shadow, or to describe hair. I have tried to assimilate some of that approach into my own work and it’s from him that I started to add rectangles and other geometric areas of black behind figures to create more interesting compositions. He also clearly uses a lot of photo reference but his highly idiosyncratic rendering elevates them above mere copies.

One thing that both Drucker and Toppi do that I as yet haven’t fully embraced is their ability to distort their figures, exaggerating the proportions. I think this probably is due to my third major influence:

Frank Quitely

I feel very fortunate that I am able to call Quitely a friend - after admiring his work since I was a teenager I was given the opportunity to share studio space with him in Glasgow for a couple of years, where I got to witness his meticulous drawing first-hand. Interestingly although the majority of his work is in the action/superhero genre, Quitely is also strongly influenced by a humour cartoonist (in this case Dudley D Watkins). I love Quitely’s naturalism, his “realistic” proportions for his characters - although stylized they are never drawn with exaggerated bulging muscles, they always feel like authentic people wearing actual fabric costumes, and he always includes the smallest of details like seams, laces, eyelets, zippers. I also love that through the superb use of shadows his drawings always feel like they have solidity and depth. The way he includes details on the edges of the panels, figures or background objects that are partially (or sometimes nearly entirely) cut off by the border, always gives the sense that the scenes extend beyond the frame - like we are looking through a window and seeing only a section of a complete world.

These are only three of my influences but they are the ones that I think I am most consciously trying to emulate when I make my own work. If you weren’t already familiar with them, I hope that I’ve given you some new stuff to explore!