A full page illo for the "Menu" cookery section in UK's House and Garden Magazine. I had to illustrate all the ingredients of one of the featured recipes.
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A whopping big 50cm by 70cm two colour screenprint that will was printed by the folks at earlygriffin.com up in Edinburgh, Scotland. The inspiration for the print came from an old etching I found of a Frenchdude, called Margat, in 1798, who rode his white stag, Coco, around in a hot air balloon! Bizarrio. You can buy a copy (on the hush-hush cheap) from my Etsy Store for $55.
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Album cover for the crustiest dub punk band based in Manchester, Autonomads.
The Comic book I'm (slowly) working on for Blankslate Books, finally has a name.
A collection of five postcards printed on 350gsm glossy card stock are available from my Etsy Shop for only $5. Bargain.
Don't fear the Sabbath...
Have a good 'un!
An image for a short folksy xmas story that appeared in today's Seven Magazine, a supplement with The Sunday Telegraph.
The second set in an ongoing series of 25mm badges is now available from my Etsy Shop. The four badges come packaged in a lavish full colour double sided printed blister pack and runs as a limited edition of 100. Only $6.00. whatwhat.
T-shirt graphic for "The Fray" on their latest North American tour.
Ok- I've been out the invisibleman loop for a wee bit too long, so I'm gonna post a bunch of recent stuff that I've been up to. First up, Get a hold of one of these limited edition (only 19 printed), hand shaped, five colour Old school Slalom skateboards! Each one is printed on top quality 11 Ply Canadian Birchwood, and the top graphic is surrounded by a handcut vintage style grip job. They're available to buy without tucks or wheels from my etsy shop for only $75.
Let her rip. Hang ten.
I was given practically free reign to design a whole wrap around book jacket for a novel that documents the author's travels around Romania and the gypsies that he meets. If you dream of never seeing cars and wish you could live without this thar internet thing, this book is for you!
So I finally just met The Jon Keegan via this modern whizzy-do technology, which reminded me I've been neglecting said Invisible Man blog of late... So here's an image for Tiny Showcase which was just released last night as a twee high quality 5" x 5.45" print on their website for only $20.00. It's a limited edition of 100, and they've already sold 60 of them, so if you want one, better head over there quick-like. For those unfamiliar with Tiny Showcase, they're super, and $250 from the sale of this artwork will be donated to the UK National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society. See? Super.
An image for the next issue of the Color Ink Book. And when I finished it, I just had to colour it in! That's what it's for... (to U.S. readers, "color" is spelt differently in the U.K.)
An image for "Número A", a 'zine printed in Argentina by "Dos Fuerzas".
The screen prints, especially made for the Joyful Bewilderment Show down at Rough Trade, London, are now for sale at my etsy shop. I'm so stoked how they came out; they look almost exactly as the original artwork (one of the few times in my life where I'm happy with the quality of the print!)- so big ups to Lovenskate Stu at Error Solutions for the amazing print job!
30cm x 40cm, high quality four colour, hand pulled screenprint on 300gsm Canford paper. A limited edition of 40 prints, signed and numbered.
Re: Joyful Bewilderment- It's going to be the most rippingest exhibition, with some of the best illustrators and artists (a total of 120!) from around the world getting involved. Can't wait to see it!!!
I've been pretty busy on Illustration side the past few days, but I made time last night to make this thar rug. I've been wanting to do this for ages, so I forced myself to put my pencil down and tried it out. It's available to buy from my etsy shop, but I plan to make a few more in the near future for an exhibition near the end of the year.
(A Rug?! What am I doing with my life...)
If I was cool I'd wear pair of these hoot cufflinks available from my etsy shop for only $30. There's seven different designs available and they're dapper as 'owt.
An image to accompany an article on Psych-Folk for Plan B music magzine.
Week of the zines:
An image for the folks at crayonlegs.com who are doing a 'zine about "Facial Hair".
An image for a zine put together by some Kingston students called "This is it". This is for the "Fun" themed issue. I can't think of anything more fun than flying a kite whilst wearing a bear skin.
I'm also featured in issue five of Document's +1 magazine. You can pick it up for free at hip and with it boutiques or download it as a PDF zine from plus1mag.com .
I'm extremely happy to announce that I will be working on a new separate comic book that will (eventually) be published by Blankslate Books. Blankslate is a new independent publisher set up by Kenny Penman and James Hamilton, founders of Forbidden Planet international. At the moment I'm still bouncing around some ideas and have just started to sketch to get a feel for how I want to tell the story. I plan to start working on finished artwork by the beginning of September. In the meantime, go check out the Blankslate blog for it's imminent publishing schedule- they've got some rad stuff planned...
A quick full pager to accompany an interview with Carl Shipman, one of the first British skaters to ever make it big in America. If I got to draw "RAD" stickers for every illo job, I'd be much happier. This one was a bit of a challenge to draw; the editor wanted a straight up portrait of Shipman, but didn't have any sample shots for me to draw from. We both spent far too long trawling the internet searching for any photo portraits of him, but to no avail. In the end I had to resort to climbing up into my Dad's attic to rummage through my extensive childhood sk8rat mags until I found a few snaps of him. Elusive.
And if you really want to know more about what it's like to be a pencil pusher, go to the July issue of Australian based readersvoice.com for an interview with me.
Some photos of a mural I painted on the walls of Projekts MCR last week.
The first set in an ongoing series of 25mm badges is now available from my Etsy Shop. The four badges come packaged in a lavish full colour double sided printed blister pack and runs as a limited edition of 100. Pin a little Slavic folksiness to anything and everything for only $6.00! Go cats go!
An ode to The Legendary Stardust Cowboy.
This was originally an illustration about the band Silver Jews which ran in Plan B music magazine. I'm now offering Etsy buyers the chance to buy their very own personalised print version. Buyers can request up to four letters of their own choice which will replace the text "SJ" as seen above. This could be a date, name initials or anything else you can think of. This of course will make each print a unique piece of art!
9.25"x9.25" high quality laser print on 200gsm card presented in a white wooden frame (11.5"x11.5"x0.5") for only $22.00.Go here to have a look...
A full page advert for Document Skateboard magazine's "Big Push" competition, this year in association with Sony Cybershot. I love it when I get the chance to do my own typography- there's nothing worse than spending ages on an image only to see it destroyed by some clueless graphic designer a week later in print.
...and so here it finally is! The whole of Never Been, all nine and a bit meters worth, online, for the whole world to see! So if you couldn't make it to my solo show at Projekts MCR earlier this year, GO HERE NOW!!! I want to say a massive huge thank you to my genius graphic designer brother, Adam Kolakovic, for figuring out a way to get this all online for me! He's the most rippingest designer in town!
This is an image I made for a small edition art book that collects together a bunch of cool artists from all over the world that are influenced by eastern european aesthetics/folk lore. The image itself is based on an idea I've got floating around my head about a florist and his wife. More soon when the book is available...
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Here's one of the final images that was used by Barclay's Bank on a huge billboard outside a new branch in Manchester that celebrates the city's achievements.
Here's another preview page from the book proposal I'm working on at the moment... Since last week's post, I have been asked to contribute to uber cool comics site Partyka and have been featured in another Serbian magazine article, this time in
Slovo Magazine- which again I can't read because it's in Serbian.
Here's a page from a comic I'm working on at the moment about two brothers growing up in Serbia during WWII. Don't hold your breath though- it might be a wee while before it finds way out into the paper world. A serbian newspaper called "Vesti" found out about the way my Serbian heritage has shaped my work and featured an article about me last week. The only problem is, I cant read it because I can't read or write Serbian- doh.
More new framed work for sale at my online shop. This here print illustrates a slavic female weather demon "Ala"- bad tempered monsters whose main purpose is to destroy crops. They are rumoured to eat children which they would gobble up with huge wooden spoons! A given ala may look like a black wind, a gigantic creature of indistinct form, an old lady or a bird like a raven or a crow. Eagles, however, are regarded as defenders against Ale, chasing them away from fields and thus preventing them from bringing hail clouds overhead. A 9.25"x9.25"" high quality laser print on 200gsm card presented in a white wooden frame (11.5"x11.5"x0.5"), signed and numbered on back of print, a limited edition of Ten prints... only $15.00. C'mon over and see if there's any other prints that tickle your fancy...
I have a fresh new website- go check it owt!www.stuartkolakovic.co.uk There's still a few little extras that need adding- including a microsite containing the whole nine meter plus of "Never Been" that's in the pipeline...
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An image for an article about The National Survey of Health and Development that appeared in The Guardian here in the U.K. last week.
...for an album column about alternative country/americana music, featuring the likes of Radar Brothers, Puerto Muerto, Murder By Death, Mark Pickerel And His Praying Hands. You can tell by the amount of "panels" I've been drawing recently that I'm pretty keen to start on my comic...
A double page spread for El Bosque magazine. Some of you might notice I've drawn this instrument being played before, a "Gusle". Except this time I've tried to show what the musician is actually singing about. This image is for a themed "Forests, plants and flowers" issue.
The past couple of weeks have been a drag, doing real bland corporate illustration work. To keep myself from going insane I've tried to find enough time to sketch some of the other ideas that have been bouncing round my head for my new graphic novel, which I should hopefully be starting in the next fortnight. Hopefully.
You can learn more about my comic plans at an online interview with comics Brainiac, Matt Badham here.
Illustrating an All Girls Skateboard Competition at a skatepark in Manchester presented itself as welcoming break from the other heavily art directed illustration I've been doing, and was fun to do. It finally gave me the chance to play around with some hand rendered type and to indulge in some 50's/60's surf style graphics. The hardest part was trying to come up something that wasn't sexist, or even just plain girly. I dared myself to use pink, is that p.c. these days?
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This is an image for Hong Kong's "The 1&Only Magazine"- the Love Addicts Issue.
The image is available as a handsome wee baby framed 4"x7" print, a limited edition of ten, from my online shop for only $9. The mini comics I have featured on Invisibleman are also available-
"A Gosling" -16 page A6 size full colour comic,laser printed onto Heritage White 200 gsm paper, machine stitched with a 260 gsm dust jacket. $4
"Ja Ljubav Te"- 42 page full colour wee tiny mini micro comic, machine stitched and laser printed onto Five Seasons (100% recycled) paper. $2
Cheap as chips.
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More snippets from my solo exhibition "Never Been"; a Summer scene with a Pig farmer crossing a river (I don't know why, but pigs are my favorite thing to draw at the moment, I think it's because they're so fat and stodgy with no real structure that you can draw them however you like. As long as it has a snout, it will look like a pig.) and a Summer night's party scene.
The show got some excellent press in this week's MEN's City Life Magazine Supplement, which you can read here.
So the show, "Never Been" at Projekts MCR, is finally up, and the opening night was last Friday.
Less than four days before the opening of my show in Manchester and I'm still doing artwork- surely not a good sign. Luckily I've saved the fun stuff 'till last- another wee baby A6 full colour mini comic. This page here might look a bit different to the other work I've posted here on Invisibleman, but there's a good reason for it; because the book is going to be printed so small, I have to make sure the images inside will be as clear and legible as possible. The story (again set somewhere in pre-WWII Yugoslavia) is about a little boy trying to convince his Dad to let him keep a Gosling he found in the wheat fields. The mini-comic is going to be dispensed from a home-made vending machine for £2, which providing I'm still alive, I'll post some pics of next week.
Here's some sample crops taken from the giant image that's going to form the main part of my show here in sunny Manchester.
I'm really hoping people are going to look at it and make up their own little stories about what the hell these characters are up to and how they relate to each other. Also, a lovely chap from the BBC interviewed me about the upcoming show last week, you can read it here..
Hi, my name is Stuart Kolakovic and I'm a fledgling illustrator from the Midlands (home to Black Sabbath and industrial pollution) in the U.K. I've kindly been invited as a guest artist here on invisibleman for the next month, so I'm pretty stoked. This here is a flyer for my first solo show here in Manchester (home to The Smiths and industrial pollution) that opens this December. It's getting pretty hectic so close to the opening, and I'm still doing work for it! The main "piece" for the exhibition is going to be one long drawing that wraps around the back wall of the gallery space- not a comic strip as such, more of a panoramic illustration of a year in the life of a fictional eastern european village set somewhere in the early 20th century. This is basically me being really self indulgent after doing one too many bland illustration jobs.
| Stuart Kolakovic |
| Website: www.stuartkolakovic.co.uk |
| Email: stu -at- stuartkolakovic.co.uk |
| Location: Manchester, U.K. |
Hi, my name is Stuart Kolakovic and I just about manage to draw pictures for a living here in the U.K. I graduated from Kingston University with a First Class honors in Illustration (2007), where I won a D&AD New Blood award for "Milorad", an 80 page comic book about my Serbian Grandad, and recently came runner up in The Observer Graphic short Story competition. So far my clients have included Reaktion publishing, KU Press, The Natural History Museum, Caughtinthecrossfire, NYU Physician Magazine and Plan B magazine. I'm currently working towards my first solo show in Manchester, entitled "Never Been", and a new book and look forward to sleeping sometime in the future. |
