Jack Teagle is a freelance illustrator fresh out of Exeter College who, through a long and time-consuming path has become quite famous in a short space of time. His work is mainly painted by acrylic in complimentary flat colours that can be easily merged in Photoshop, but he can also has a skill in line art, computer based art, editorial design, as well as silk screening. Jack is influenced mainly by science fiction and fantasy within Japanese culture. He would particularly concentrate on the humour behind rip-off comics of already famous cartoon characters, and collect bizarre pop culture toys that he would manipulate their appearance. Within painting, Jack admired the unique mind of Ryan Heska.
His own style would be represented through a sarcastic sense of humour, crudeness, usually based on creating unique and bold characters that would have ordinary lives and dilemmas. After his third year in his college, Jack had now begun to define and develop his own style, adding typography and imagery.
His first placement as work was poster designs for a band named ‘Tube Lord’.
This was when Jack started his own website and to refine his portfolio. With only three paintings that really defined his style of wrestlers that had ordinary dilemmas, he had to draw narratives outside of his comfort zone, for ‘Short Fiction’, a magazine that the University of Plymouth put out for short stories.
This was one of his first mistakes as he did not get paid and the magazine was made up of students. However, his constant blogging and updating of his portfolio by painting etc helped out throughout the years that he struggled to get properly paid illustration jobs as well as exhibitions.
His first exhibition was with ‘Nobrow’, where they opened their shop and gallery for him, as well as jobs for ‘Spera’ a fantasy comic.
Overall, because he constantly updated his style, his blog and his website, whilst sending his work to the right people, and with the patience and motivation of having no money, Jack Teagle became slowly famous in the time of now and since he was still on his course.
I find his motivation and determination fascinating; he had succeeded by changing his style slightly to suit what the clients wanted, as well as finding his way by understanding his mistakes and being supported by his family.
For the start of this project, I went over to the school and we all discussed our ideas of how we were going to begin this big project. There were the teachers from the school, Richard from graphic design, me the illustrator and Ben Gavan from RIO.
We believed that it would be best to get the giant footprint template out of the way first. Richard did this.
