Jason Brown

Contact

I've worked in the games industry for Bullfrog/EA, illustrated books, magazines and newspapers (EMAP, Future Publishing, IDG Media, Daily Telegraph, Oxford University Press).

Lifedrawing

Dark Art

First, my favourites:

1: Not the sanest thought, agreed, but the combination of bodies, toothy protrusions and some creature in the murky depths really appealed. I like to just start sketching on a page, unawares of what is going to develop. As soon as I start to think, "This is good", "This is for a commission", or try to take it somewhere in particular, the whole thing falls apart and becomes stiff and amateur looking. It's like I can't draw. A lot of my drawings involve trying to work out what it is I do when I feel it's working. I know the theory, but it's difficult to be consistent as it is a time not to think, when a thought itself gets in the way. I can compare it to lucid dreaming. When you try to direct the action the dream falls apart and you wake up. With practice you stay in the dream longer, even direct what you do, but you're not thinking in the ordinary sense. Like with my drawings, a thought itself is enough to disturb whatever it is you have entered into.

2: I liked the sketchiness of this style. Not one ink line, but many, used like a pencil.

3: I liked most of the shapes. Also the pencil technique, where there is some outlining with other details filled in or suggested with midtones (especially the lower right hand "thing").

4: This is probably my favourite right now. Mouths with arms and legs and other distorted body parts, veins and things sticking out. Moving up, the cheery, Halloween type figures with holes for eyes. I like the curved body at the top, with the multiple teets and concentric rings of mouths.

5: Something about strappy lengths of flesh, with little creatures or people peeping out.

6: The arms and legs theme again. I love the gaping maw and rolled eyes.

Rest of the dark art:

Sketches

Some of my favourite artists are H R Giger, Simon Bisley and Bob Harvey. Harvey is an artist I've not been able to find on the web, but he illustrated a series of books called Way of the Tiger, that I read as a kid.

I 2003 I travelled the US and among other things, nearly got married and ended up painting in a gallery on 42nd street in NY. Artists would rotate each week, painting so passersby could watch, some 40,000 people a day, a stones throw away from Times Square. Weblog.

Later I painted this mural in Toronto, where I stayed for a few months. After that I did a smaller mural in San Francisco.

Editorial illustration - mostly for Future Publishing in Bath, England.

Book illustration - commissioned by Oxford University Press.

Portraits - sepia watercolour portraits, mostly commissioned from America.

Memory Lane - some very early work on the Amiga.

Archives - instead of deleting it, I've put it here.