Luke Woaller

Luke Woaller

Luke Weller is a freelance illustrator. His recent work from 2015, so far, includes being commissioned to draw his perception  of a soldier in the army. It was a fictional book. He says that there was a lot of pressure and probably a lot of comments because apparently, the book wasn't really worth reading.

He was commissioned by 'Neptune' to illustrate two guys, Neptune wanted an image to go next to an article of the interview with the two men. He used two different styles and merged them together into one image.

He showed us his illustration of Clive James. He wrote a poetry book and he was terminally ill. He mixed his styles, on his face, he used exstyle pencil and the background was colourful. He doesn't use colour in mono printing, it is all black, he'd do the colouring on Photoshop.

Luke did a illustration for British airways, it was an image of Tim Key. A unique, stand-up kind of guy. Tim likes 1950's/60's lounge music so he's holding a lounge music vinyl cd in his hand. This image was 100% monoprint. Luke finds it a lot easier and loves to do mono printing.

Weller told us, "there are many ways int illustration", you've just got to figure out what you want to go into and how to get into it.

British airways were good to him, he'd draw for them once a month, try and get to draw for the same clients, be nice to them, give them what they want and they will keep using you for your work.

His advice about agents was not to rush into things, learn about tax and prices and work on your portfolio etc.

In 2008, he worked for Lloyds and Domino's, payed off loans, etc.
He said "once you've been in the industry, they'd get a much better idea about taking you on.
Agents can help you out and hinder you when you first start out, but don't let them take advantage of you and tell you the wrong things.

Luke joined JSR in August last year, he made artwork on tablets and worked on developing an app.

There are 3 main areas;

Editorial- Magazines, newspapers. Where most people start off. They call it the bread and butter work, helps pay the bills. Deadlines are about 1-48 hours.

Publishing- book covers, illustrations.

Advertising- where most of the money is at.


You get an email ('when can you do the job?'), dimensions, when needed by.

Certain amount of time to do the job
2 hours to do a rough draw
read the description, get ideas
reference images
drawn (using Photoshop, in luke's case)
send it off
sometimes you get a quick reply from the client
worse scenario is- CHANGE IT!!!!!
Then...
work  on the proper drawing (mono printing)
Final image
Photoshop does a lot of Luke's work for him

Luke has used Photoshop since he was in A level so he is quite comfortable using it and knows what he's doing
He is also a very big fan of screen printing

He monoprints and he scans it onto the computer, he tries to get that screen-print look.

Luke says that seeing your images in print is the best thing. Not thinking so much about the money, but when you see your work in books, in the papers, in magazines, you get a really good feeling, a rewarding feeling.


He has 2 main styles

-mock edging

-portraits (spoke about later on)
done using pencil, cross hatching.

He experimented with different styles and ways of illustrating.