A few weeks back I had the pleasure of producing some beautiful promotional photography for a Bath-based Swedish artist, Jennie Gyllblad who is forging a growing reputation as a comic book artist and freelance illustrator.
Jennie, who has a degree in Illustration, loves creating stories and characters using traditional media such as watercolour, gouache, ink and pencil. She works on graphic novels and series like Clockwork Watch, Skal, Elysia and Bayou Arcana and can often be seen at major UK comic conventions. She is also in demand as a portrait artist costume designers and is regularly commissioned by corporate clients. Jennie’s also a keen blogger and user of social media and her online comic strip Jenspiration! has many fans.
Although I’ve never seen an image of her wearing anything other than immaculate tribal belly-dance influenced attire she assures me than sometimes she just wears jeans.
It was Jennie’s first ever promotional photo shoot and the brief was to create some great informal portraits as well as some environmental shots of her at in her home-based studio and work on some of her pieces. With clients that are new to all this I try to go through many different options and shoot variety so there’s plenty for them to choose from.
In terms of the weather day we’d set for our shoot, which in part part was to take place outside, could not have been worse, coinciding with extremely wet weather that saw many parts of the West Country flooded. Nevertheless, making use of an old open air theatre gave us a little shelter.
I shot both soft, organic natural light images and also some more dramatic work, making using of a Bowens Gemini 500 studio flash and TravelPak and my used-on-every-other-shoot Bowens Softlite beauty dish. Again, this was so Jennie could seerange of different styles and choose the images she liked the best.
It was a very enjoyable shoot, despite the British weather, and Jennie will be incorporating some of the images in a new-look website that will be launching soon.
You can learn more about Jennie and her artwork at http://www.jenniegyllblad.com