Under the Cov­er: Tom Humberstone

The tone for the cov­er of our 103^rd issue, ded­i­cat­ed to Yor­gos Lan­thi­mos’ lat­est, was ini­tial­ly inspired by Daniel Clowes’ illus­trat­ed poster for Todd Solondz’s 1998 dark ensem­ble com­e­dy, Hap­pi­ness. We shared this ref­er­ence with Edin­burgh-based illus­tra­tor Tom Hum­ber­stone, who has pro­duced a group col­lage with all the char­ac­ters who appear across Lan­thi­mos’ trip­tych fable. We asked Hum­ber­stone to paint a por­trait of his work­ing life, and give some details on his approach for this project.

Paint us a pic­ture of your work space. Do you feel it’s per­fect, or do you have plans to enhance it?

Hum­ber­stone: I work from home from our flat in Lei­th, in a small box room. It’s the per­fect size for fit­ting in a big draw­ing board, a com­put­er with some mon­i­tors, and a chair – but not much else! We’ve had some bespoke shelv­ing built into it to store ref­er­ence books and inspi­ra­tion, along with giv­ing a home to art mate­ri­als, com­ic stock and old art­work. It’s cosy. But it could do with some nat­ur­al light. There are no win­dows! While being able to con­trol light sources can be use­ful for colour­ing work, it can feel a lit­tle dispir­it­ing not see­ing the out­side world at all. Espe­cial­ly on bright sun­ny days.

If we can afford it, one day it might be nice to have a win­dow put in. But oth­er­wise, I’m pret­ty hap­py with the set-up. It’s nice to be able to have a space at home where the work space is dis­tinct from leisure space – not every­one gets to have that.

What’s the first prac­ti­cal thing you did for this LWLies cov­er commission?

The first thing was to gath­er as much ref­er­ence mate­r­i­al as pos­si­ble. It’s a tricky thing draw­ing some­thing about a film that hasn’t come out yet. There are so few glimpses of it avail­able to draw upon for ref­er­ence. None of the images have had a chance to be absorbed into the cul­ture and become icon­ic. You have no sense of what will become the per­vad­ing images of the film that will stay with peo­ple. So it became a case of watch­ing and rewatch­ing the teas­er trail­er for as much infor­ma­tion as possible.

Then, when we’d set­tled on the idea of an image that would include the mul­ti­ple char­ac­ters of each of the cast mem­bers – an over­whelm­ing array of faces – it became key to just rough­ly sketch in a few faces and slow­ly fig­ure out a rough composition.

LWLies cov­ers always con­tain por­traits – what’s your approach for draw­ing peo­ple / likeness?

I’ve always found like­ness­es quite dif­fi­cult. Espe­cial­ly well-known celebri­ties where peo­ple already have a rela­tion­ship with those faces. We’ve all seen Emma Stone over mul­ti­ple films, we know what she should look like, and so, if your like­ness is slight­ly off, peo­ple know it at a glance. It can be a small thing as well. As sim­ple as a mis­judged shad­ow that sug­gests a con­tour of the face that throws the whole like­ness off.

I found Jesse Ple­mons an espe­cial­ly dif­fi­cult like­ness to cap­ture for this cov­er. While he has a very recog­nis­able face, he’s one of those char­ac­ter actors who some­how phys­i­cal­ly morphs with each role. I can nev­er quite get a han­dle on him or his dis­tin­guish­ing features.

One of the things I do first with like­ness­es is gath­er as many pho­tos of the per­son as I can, and try to fig­ure out the com­mon fea­tures that I want to draw focus to. It may take a cou­ple of pass­es, but the key, I find, is a light touch. You want to keep the amount of lines you use as low as possible.

For this cov­er, tell us how you worked with the chore­og­ra­phy of the mul­ti­ple fig­ures and how colour fig­ured into the final piece?

I think the thing that we were try­ing to bal­ance was fit­ting around 20 char­ac­ters on the cov­er, while also mak­ing it look like every­one was in the same ​“pho­to”. It was impor­tant it didn’t look like a col­lage – that all of these char­ac­ters were actu­al­ly in the same place, just stand­ing on a sloped platform.

To help with this, I drew every­one fac­ing for­ward and pen­cilled hero ver­sions of each actor that I could then ​“dress” with dif­fer­ent cos­tumes, make­up and hair. I was lucky enough to get to see an ear­ly screen­ing of the film before I did this stage, so I took detailed notes about each char­ac­ter which I could then use later.

One of the delights of work­ing with Lit­tle White Lies is you’re giv­en a colour palette to work with. I love work­ing with lim­it­ed palettes and find­ing ways to push their lim­its. And this set of colours was a par­tic­u­lar favourite to work with. I think we knew ear­ly on we want­ed the yel­low as the main back­ground colour so it was main­ly a case of mak­ing every­thing else pop off that in inter­est­ing ways.

Is there some­one you’ll show your ear­ly drafts to for instant, hon­est feedback?

When it comes to my comics work, I like to show let­tered pen­cil roughs to as many friends and peers as pos­si­ble – to try and work out ear­ly on where things don’t make sense, what could be clear­er, and gen­er­al­ly try to fig­ure out if any­thing isn’t work­ing. When you’re deal­ing with sto­ry­telling across 200 pages or so, it’s impor­tant to catch struc­tur­al issues ear­ly on before you get too far deep into the drawing.

With illus­tra­tion, it’s a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. Turn­arounds are a lit­tle tighter and there’s less oppor­tu­ni­ty to get quick feed­back on things. I usu­al­ly share what I’m work­ing on with my part­ner who is very hon­est about when things are work­ing and when they’re not. I always need that hon­esty. But I also tend to trust the opin­ions and feed­back of the edi­tors and art direc­tors I work with.

How do you know when one of your art­works is finished?

I sup­pose I agree with the ​“art is nev­er fin­ished, only aban­doned” tru­ism. In that, I could prob­a­bly con­tin­ue to tweak and improve any­thing I’m doing for­ev­er. But at a cer­tain point, you start real­is­ing you’re not improv­ing it any­more. Not real­ly. Some­times you even start mak­ing it worse. I try to avoid this by hav­ing a fair­ly rou­tine work­flow in place. Each stage is iter­a­tive and allows me to recon­sid­er the whole piece holis­ti­cal­ly. But I have a gen­er­al sense of how long each stage should take and I try to move from one to the oth­er fair­ly swiftly.

Dead­lines help too.

How can our read­ers sup­port you and fol­low your work? 

If you like my work for Lit­tle White Lies, you can find more of my work at tomhum​ber​stone​.com and find me on most social media plat­forms with the user­name @tomhumberstone. I also have a semi-reg­u­lar illus­trat­ed newslet­ter where I tend to write about films. That can be found at tomhum​ber​stone​.com/​n​e​w​s​l​etter.

My graph­ic nov­el – Suzanne: The Jazz Age God­dess of Ten­nis – is about Suzanne Lenglen, a French ten­nis play­er from the 1920s who rein­vent­ed the sport and rev­o­lu­tionised the way women dressed in the 20^th Cen­tu­ry. She drank cognac dur­ing match­es, got into fights with line judges, and was so pop­u­lar that Wim­ble­don had to change venues to accom­mo­date the crowds who came to see her. And yet very few peo­ple know her name now. It might be of inter­est to any­one who enjoyed Challengers!

LWLies 103: The Kinds of Kind­ness issue is avail­able now