Si Clark is a contemporary illustrator/animator using a variety of different mediums. His work focuses on print based media and 2D animation, developing narratives within each of them. Within his print based work he is interested in exploring narrative structures, trying to tell stories in different and unique ways. The main themes present in his work are areas of psychology (trying to visualise such topics as memory structure or schizophrenia), city life and personal views on modern society.

Si recently graduated from his BA Illustration at Bournemouth Arts Institute with first class honours. Over the three years he was able to experiment with many different techniques and has managed to create his own individual style.

Your style has a very crisp, hand-made look to it. What stages do you go through to achieve a final piece, from the initial idea to the finished work?

I do thumbnails of every piece first, mainly to get the composition right and it’s just the quickest way to get an idea out of my head and onto paper. If I’m happy with it straight away then I’ll figure out the size of the drawing and draw it all out in pencil. Then I go over that in a softer pencil to get more of an outline, then draw over that with a fine liner. Once all of the line work is done I erase all the pencil work, scan it into Photoshop. Then I select and delete all the white on the image so I have the outline on a separate layer and then proceed to colour underneath it. That’s the process for my images done in Photoshop, but with anything I do it always starts with thumbnails.

The use of colour in your illustrations is something I admire…how do you go about choosing and matching colours in an illustration?

I don’t know if my perception of colour is different to some people’s, but I really hate using very saturated colours in my own work. With my personal work it’s fine, but when I’ve had to do stuff for clients, I’ve had work that keeps getting sent back because the colours aren’t bright enough. For some pieces I will have a definite colour scheme in mind, but for others I’ll just choose one colour in Photoshop and then go through all the different hues until I find one that works.

Many of our readers are aspiring illustrators and/or illustration students. Since you recently graduated with a BA in Illustration what advice would you give to someone trying to make a start in the industry?

My first piece of advice is this: be prepared in your first year after graduating that it will be extremely hard to get any work. All of my friends, myself included, have found this. Illustration agencies won’t even touch you if you haven’t had at least a years experience, so all I can advise is search the internet for job sites and free online galleries and just get your work out there in using whatever means possible. I have spent so many months doing just that, and finally it is paying off.

Basically if you believe in your work and you are passionate about it, keep working your ass off doing free jobs and eventually something will happen.

What were the 3 most useful things you learnt during your degree course?

Learning various programs (Photoshop, Flash and After Effects) were vital and have helped no end. Also experimenting with every possible type of medium has been very beneficial. In my first year I didn’t have an individual style so I just tried out everything I could think of, and now that I have my own style of doing things I’m a lot more experimental in my ideas, especially when I’m doing my own animations. I guess the other most important thing I gained from my course was confidence in my own work, which was mainly down to having extremely talented and passionate tutors, that has probably been the best thing to leave college with. It is extremely soul destroying not getting any work and not hearing back from agencies, so having confidence in your own work is vital.

How important has setting up your own website been to getting yourself more work and more exposure?

I can’t stress enough how important it is to have your own site. Thankfully my brother is a web designer so I gave him all the pieces for my site and he put it all together, but if you don’t know how to make websites and don’t have friends who can help, there are many sites that allow you to upload your work for free, www.deviantart.com and www.warmtoastcafe.com are pretty good sites for this. You basically need something online where you can direct potential clients to your work. It makes life easier for everyone if a client can quickly see examples of your work wherever they are, instead of having to arrange a meeting. It also means that you can quite easily work with a client who is miles away from you.

Where are you going next from here? What should we expect to see from you in the coming months?

I am extremely busy at the moment. Having had no work for many months, I am now snowed under with projects. I have recently completed a load of children’s books which aim to get kids into sports. They are very basic and very cute and not really what I want to be doing but they help pay the bills. I have also just finished an animation job for MTV called ‘Blaze and Lionel’ which should be on TV pretty soon. The project I’m doing at the moment is a music video for a music producer friend of mine for one of his tracks. It’s extremely dark which is exactly what I want to be doing, when it’s finished I should be able to upload it on my website. After that, I’m not quite sure what’s going to happen. The people I worked with on ‘Blaze and Lionel’ are starting up a creative team in Soho, where I’m working, so I should be a part of that when it’s off the ground. I think that will be mainly be animation stuff, if that is the case then I will continue to do illustration in whatever free time I have. My future is uncertain but I kind of like it that way, because I never know what might be around the corner.

You can check out more of Si’s work by going to his website: http://www.si-clark.co.uk/