Jack Teagle Lecture!

Jack Teagle is an illustrator from Newquay, he graduated from university back in 2009 and since then he has made quite a name for himself in the art world. Teagle has worked in a bunch of different ways but his refined style always shows through in every piece he produces. Jack studied fine art at university and it wasn't until his second year that he really found his style. In the third year they were given the task to illustrate different book covers, instead of a load of half finished books Jack decided to make his own comic which would then make up a full book. His loose style allowed him to illustrate an entire comic within the allocated time they had for the project. Jack struggled finding work when he graduated, he would get the occasional job but not enough to support him, he then had to resort to 'going on the dole'. Jack did not give up drawing and decided to keep making little comics, Jack worked with paint as well as fine liner both of which to great effect.

Jack mentioned that he had a lot of influences which help him to make his images, here are a few:

• Howard Finster  ( Click this one!)      (Or this one! )
• Ryan Heshka
• Craig Atkinson
• Gary Baseman
• Gary Panter
• Henry Darger

Jack is also influenced by a lot paraphernalia from his childhood, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Godzilla and Batman were among his favorites. Wrestling figures were his favorite and a lot of his characters mimic the limited action poses that you see on wrestling figures today. Muscles were also highly exaggerated on those figurines and Jack adds those tiny details to his own characters which has helped to build up his style. 

Jack experimented a lot with screen printing at university and that process has also had it's influence on his style, his use of block colours and heavy lines give the screen printed effect, this made his work very appealing to publishers such as Nobrow and Anorak. Jack made the habit of keeping an updated blog, he would post nearly everything he drew in attempt to get a job which evidently paid off. Whilst Jack was on the dole he made an image and posted it online, to him it was just another one of his drawings, someone soon contacted him to ask if they could use his image on some coffee packaging. Jack would work fast with his images to get it all out there for the world to see, the more little jobs he got the better, it all adds up. 

Soon after this, Jack got noticed by Nobrow and got asked to feature in one of their annuals, this is where Jack's career started to snowball. Soon Nobrow asked Jack to illustrate a full comic which thy would then publish, the comic was called Jeff Job Hunter and it was a story Jack wrote when he was trying to find work after university. Since then Jack has produced more work for Nobrow, here are some of the books Jack has illustrated: 

Jeff Job Hunter

Egyptian comics

FIGHT #1

FIGHT2!

What next? 

Jack started to work digitally to both save time and make his images neater seeing as they were now normally being used in publications and posters. The FIGHT comics really got his work rolling and opened up more opportunities for Jack, it wasn't long before people started recognizing the characters from his comics and began to ask for pieces in the same style for various products. Jack soon nailed a job illustrating an entire taco truck. He covered it with his wrestling characters, it looked like this:

No Guts No Glory 

No Guts No Glory are an association who help aspiring artists get their work noticed. Jack got the chance to work with these guys and make some low budget zines which they could sell at conventions for a small profit. Jack also got to screen print some of his designs onto shirts and jumpers, Jack also worked on a 24 hour comic called Dick Williams. (Click here to see the comic )



Anorak
Jack got noticed by publishers Anorak, this combined with his time with Nobrow gave him the experience he needed to successfully make it as an illustrator with sustainable income. Jack told us that working with Anorak made him further refine his style, he would paint a lot of characters for Anorak, it was then that Jack started to experiment more with his digital skills. After working with Anorak for a while Jack soon got employed by them, this job was the first time Jack ever got to focus on editorial illustration.


                                     

Jack didn't give up when there was little work, if anything that inspired him to make more work, he took the skills he learnt from uni and adapted them to refine his own style, he got jobs by posting his work online and hoping for the best, all it took was one job to get him noticed. Jack came out of university knowing that he liked to tell stories and he knew how to tell them, he used his childish influences to easily annotate his stories, he applies his knowledge of screen printing and painting to his image making to great effect.

We finally had a questions and answer session with Jack.
I asked him if he liked having a lot of little jobs going on or just one big one, i also asked if he limits himself to a certain number of jobs at once.

He said that he preferred the smaller jobs and he had a bad habit of accepting a load of jobs at once, he went on to say that three is about his limit. He also said that he would normally have one or two jobs that have a small short deadline and one job that has a longer deadline, this is a good way to keep money coming in throughout the month and therefore a good way to support himself.

Someone else also asked him how he got an agent.
He said that he got an agent mainly through his work with Nobrow and the fact that he won the student award help by the D&AD.