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Humpty Dumpty by EB Thurstan (1930).
A preoccupation of the past couple of weeks has been Lewis Carroll’s Alice books as I’ve been working on an Alice in Wonderland project which I’ll unveil shortly. Looking around at some of the numerous visual interpretations of the stories I came across two portfolios I hadn’t seen before [...]

Mighty Baby (1969). Illustration by Martin Sharp.

Yet another album cover prompts this post, part of an occasional series. Mighty Baby were a British rock band who formed out of psychedelic group The Action in the late Sixties, and their music is fairly typical of the period, being “heavy” without any of the psych trappings which—for [...]

Time again for some work updates and other news. I mentioned in August that this Steampunk design—created to illustrate a formula definition of the genre by Jeff VanderMeer—was originally going to be a T-shirt. That idea fell by the wayside when an opportunity arose to submit it to Modofly who were asking for Steampunk-related work [...]

Manhattan Skyline: I. South Street and Jones Lane, Manhattan. March 26, 1936.
I love Berenice Abbott’s photographs of New York in the 1930s which capture the city in transition from a world of 19th century brownstones to the more familiar high-rise skyline. Dover Publications produced their own collection of her photos which I used as one [...]

Jessica Helfand at Design Observer draws attention to Mr Picassohead, a site which allows you to create your own Picasso-style portraits. The interface doesn’t have as much choice of elements as the Simpsonizer did but messing around with it this afternoon yielded a passable rendering of David Britton’s Lord Horror.
This idling reminded me that I’ve [...]

All Is Vanity by Charles Allan Gilbert (1892).
The surreptitious skull is another of those perennial motifs that recur in art from time to time and one which has become especially prevalent since the late 19th century. There seem to be a number of reasons for this, the most obvious being that if you’re going to [...]

I’m surfacing this week from a busy couple of months having finished (more or less) two substantial book designs. I mentioned the redesign of The Exploits of Engelbrecht a couple of weeks ago and it’s been a pleasure to have another bash at this. The original design wasn’t bad as such, especially compared to the [...]

Philosophy from The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929).
I’ve procrastinated for an entire year over the idea of writing something about Hugh Ferriss and now this marvellous Flickr set has forced my hand. Ferriss (1889–1962) was a highly-regarded architectural renderer in the Twenties and Thirties, chiefly employed creating large drawings to show the clients of architects [...]

Another delivery of work of mine this week with this new design for Savoy Books. Horror Panegyric is a small volume examining David Britton’s Lord Horror novels, writer Keith Seward being the founder of the web’s best William Burroughs site, RealityStudio, and also an author of avant garde erotic fictions which can be found at [...]

top left: artist unknown (1969); top right: Patrick Woodroffe (1975)
bottom left: Peter Elson (1988); bottom right: artist unknown (1995)
The Men with snakes post at the weekend finished on a note of Freudian melodrama with a picture of Doc Savage battling a giant python. Lester Dent’s brazen hero has appeared a number of times in the [...]

I posted an old James Joyce portrait sketch for Bloomsday a couple of days ago and today decided to rework it as a vector graphic. This is the result. I was producing a lot of sketches like this while working on Reverbstorm a decade ago, most of them post-Picasso/Bauhaus/De Stijl variations. Joyce is particularly easy [...]

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm #3 (1992).
Following from the post about an art forgery exhibition (and Eddie Campbell discussing his American Gothic cover for Bacchus), I thought I’d post some of my own forgeries, or pastiches as we call them when no deception is intended.
Reverbstorm was the Lord Horror comic series I was creating with David Britton [...]

Non-Brits may not be aware that The South Bank Show is a long-running arts programme (or “show”, as Americans prefer) and the last bastion of cultural broadcasting on the otherwise completely moribund ITV channel. Over the years the SBS has produced some great documentaries and this one from 1985 is particularly good, capturing artist Francis [...]

My discipline here has rather collapsed since returning from Paris. Lots of things that required sorting out and the distraction of a new computer is the excuse. Time for a new announcement, however. Now that The Haunter of the Dark is back in print, work has begun at the Savoy HQ on the eventual reprinting [...]

A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart, cataloguing interests, obsessions and passing enthusiasms.
• Archives: easy access to some recurrent { feuilleton } themes.
• Recent work: a continually updated list of what John’s been working on.
• Writings: a selection of John’s published writings here and elsewhere.
JOHN COULTHART’s first illustration work was for the Hawkwind album [...]