heyitsrosie's blog

Rosie Hawtin. 22. Illustrator, artist, maker, and weirdo in Edinburgh.

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Looking for a great romantic gift this not-Valentines day?

Check out these awesome prints by @heyitsrosie, now available to order via the Red Door Gallery in Edinburgh.

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Gem & Aster - Chapter 1

Gem & Aster is a new queer witch webcomic by @heyitsrosie // Rosie Hawtin

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I've just started a new webcomic called Gem & Aster - I'm super excited to share this project!

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this was our first project from this year, surreal summer!

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sometimes you just need to turn a project into ghosts

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brush pen reportage at Lauriston Castle

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a dental model in surgeon’s hall museum

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sketches from around dalry

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a gravestone in Dalry cemetary

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character dev from a project last semester

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the view from my studio this year is pretty sweet

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guess whos back

back again

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Reflective Blog: Kerascoët

It’s no secret that I love a whole bunch of contemporary illustrators, I’ve written about several on this blog, and it was pretty difficult to pick one to comment on for my Reflecting On Practise blogs. Except then I remembered that Kerascoët exists.

Kerascoët is the joint name of two French illustrators, Marie Pommepuy and Sébastien Cosset, who have been making comics together since 2000. Some of their notable works include Beautiful Darkness and Beauty, both of which are in my opinion, insanely gorgeous.

The Kerascoët style is consistently recognisable and has a feeling of vibrancy and freshness. The texture and movement in their watercolour work is often brought into the more traditional comics style with flowing lines and intense, dynamic pattern. Without question, the most engaging part of their work for me is their use of colour. I love a good limited colour palette and Kerascoët is just at the peak of that game, especially in Beauty.

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Reflective Blog: Social Media

I’ll be honest here: I’m a sucker for social media. I’m a sucker for #branding. The only thing is, I’m really just not a sucker for combining these with my illustration work.

Maybe it’s just some kind of millennial apathy, but I find I struggle near-constantly with maintaining a consistent online image. I am happy to limit my involvement and curate myself (and my selfies) on a personal level online, but the more I try to construct a persona around my art, the less engagement I feel with uploading it.

There’s no question that social media is massively important for artists in this day and age. I know it’s both a networking opportunity and potential source of income that is hugely important to my future, and that there are so many ways of handling it. Some illustrators take an extremely personal route, others are distant and professional. Some take an intellectual and serious route, others are humorous and, well, pretty meme-y. Some are all of these in the same places, which has the double edged sword of wide appeal overall but the possibility of some work putting off some of your audience.

I’m not sure how I’m going to solve this in the long run, but there’s essentially no question: I’ve got to throw myself in! So I’ll be figuring this out as I go, but in the meantime, what do you folks think?

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Reflective Blog: Kazuo Oga

Thinking about historical illustrators is, honestly, not something I do hugely often. I struggle with finding historical inspiration outside of what’s very distinctly Fine Art (TM), and especially in terms of this blog, I’ve already spoken about my go-to historical illustration hero in-depth. It took me a hot second (translation note: an actual age) of looking at my inspiration tags over on my personal to realise someone was obviously staring me in the face directly through my childhood, and that’s art director and background artist Kazuo Oga, who worked extensively on films with Studio Ghibli from the 80s to mid 00s.

Working not only on overall art direction but on physically painting some of the backgrounds for these films, you can really see Oga’s interest in the light and textures in the natural world. There’s a gorgeous sense of detail and glow within his work as well as a sensitivity to colour that, to me, are central to the look of Ghibli films.

I really enjoyed looking into Oga and discovering an illustrator who had such a huge influence on films I love, but is still relatively below the radar. Who are some favourite artists from your childhood?

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Reflective Blog: Speculative Landscape 2: This Time its Fictional

Moving forward from my research element of the Speculative Landscape project was initially, to be honest, pretty hard! I knew I wanted to place a focus on the dead and their presence, but really struggled to find a story and characters to place it with.

After what was basically a miracle creative writing workshop, I managed to find a key character though, who is a holographic projection of a scanned consciousness, embedded in her own grave to comfort mourners. The narrative as a whole is a descriptive story about the way the scans of the dead are left behind as their mourners move on in this future.

Above are some photos I took which helped to solidify a mood and aesthetic for my story, as well as some previews of the work I did, which I’ll be posting over the next few weeks.

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Reflective Blog: Drawing Attention

I recently visited the National Gallery of Scotland with my mum and went to a gorgeous exhibition of drawings on there titled Drawing Attention. It featured some of the rarer drawing works on paper in the gallery’s collections, many of which were originally preparatory works for paintings.

Above are some of my favourite works and their information, found through the Galleries’ excellent online archive. I love seeing pre-modern sketchy work displayed with pride like that, even though the standards of what was ‘good art’ were so much cleaner historically. A nice rough mark and a bit of texture has always been a huge part of my drawing personality and there’s something so comforting about feeling a little closer to classical artists.

Bonus: me enjoying a rosemary and orange iced tea after - top notch gallery with a top notch restaurant!

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Reflective Blog: Damon Herd

http://www.damonherd.com/

Recently, comics artist Damon Herd came to the ECA Illustration department to give a Friday talk on his practice, his organisation DeeCAP and his current PhD in autobiographical comics.

Damon Herd’s own comic work primarily revolves around autobiography - notably The Adventures of Ticking Boy, which focuses on his experiences of living with a mechanical heart valve. Unsurprisingly, his current PhD does too, but it’s more close focus is on the role of truth and authorship in these comics. This really interests me - here’s an autobiographical comics artist specifically researching how autobiographical comics do not necessarily reflect a neutral reality. Whether that’s through dramatisation of reality, ‘editing’ of it, or just plain old making things up - I was really interested in the way that the relationship between creativity and reality can be manipulated when writing stories that happened to you.

I’ve got a particular interest in autobiographical comics, whether that’s more long form graphic novel fare like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home or short form online comics about everyday life experience, like the excellent rubyetc’s (Ruby Elliot) work. I’m sure many of the autobiographical creators I admire bend the truth to make their work as enjoyable as it is, and I’m okay with that - but I’m not sure how I’d feel authoring something like that that bends the truth. What responsibility do you think creators have to tell the truth in autobiography?