Created by Make Design, The Illustrator is a desk for people who draw. Beautifully and ergonomically designed, it has an adjustable desk angle and comes supplied with a pencil dock, a set of coloured pencils and a heavy duty brass sharpener. With pencils neatly forming part of its structure, this flat-packed, easy-to-assemble desk is both sleek and smartly designed – the perfect tool for makers and creators.
One Year Wiser: The Colouring Book collects 52 beautiful hand-drawn illustrations by Mike Medaglia, creator of The Huffington Post’s Meditation Comic and oneyearwiser.com. Medaglia illustrates the words of thinkers from Gandhi to Virginia Woolf with expressive black-and-white drawings, leaving you to colour them in. It’s a book to fire your imagination, improve your focus and help you stay creative, positive and relaxed.
On Wednesday 29 July, ILYA will visit San Francisco’s finest comic store, Comix Experience, to discuss Room For Love. Open to all, the event takes place at their Divisadero St. store from 6-8pm.
Room For Love is the first book to be selected for Comix Experience’s Graphic Novel of the Month Club. An honour indeed – and the first chance for US-based readers to hear from ILYA in person. (Learn more about the Graphic Novel of the Month programme and the reason it was set up here – it’s fascinating.)
Room For Love follows the story of Pamela Green, a middle-aged, middle-class romance novelist who, under extraordinary circumstances, invites a ragged young homeless man to live with her. Two lives collide, and an intense hothouse drama ensues.
“With ILYA’s clever color scheme and quietly poignant artwork driving the tale, Room For Love is a markedly original work, with questions of identity and intimacy woven into the penumbra of a raw and authentic relationship.” The Boston Globe
“A story that subverts our expectations of what a romance should look like.” The Huffington Post
For a while now, Mike Medaglia has been bringing tales of Zen and modern life to readers of The Huffington Post. Spanning topics from presentness to self-doubt, his brilliant monthly meditation comic is essential reading for anyone interested in the art of mindfulness.
In January, he began posting weekly illustrated meditations at oneyearwiser.com. The idea was simple: to bring wise and inspiring words to life through his distinctive Japanese- and Chinese-inspired artwork. Like this:
Now, SelfMadeHero has collected 52 of Medaglia’s beautiful hand-drawn illustrations into one elegantly produced black-and-white paperback. Black and white? That’s correct – we’ve left it to you to colour them in! One Year Wiser: The Colouring Book will leave you inspired by the words of thinkers from Gandhi to Virginia Woolf and soothed by the meditative act of colouring.
So, if you’re looking for a slice of calm and creativity, grab yourself a copy. It’s available from Amazon, Foyles and Waterstones. Even better, order it from Hive and pick it up at your local independent book shop. It looks like this:
This weekend, 20th & 21st June, we’re heading to Hackney for the East London Comics and Arts Festival. This year’s event takes place across two venues: SPACE on Mare Street (for the talks and workshops) and The Laundry on Warburton Rd (for the expo).
We’ll be bringing our wares to the Laundry (table 31) on Saturday and Sunday, 10am-7pm. There’ll be exclusive discounts on all titles, signed book plates, fine company and much, much more. We’ll also be debuting something special: End of a Century by Run Wrake, edited by Andrew Collins.
This beautifully produced rocket trip through the nineties collects the visually incendiary, satirically acute album review illustrations of the late Run Wrake, who was a mainstay of the NME between 1988 and 2000.
We’ll also have copies of I. N. J. Culbard’s bestselling adaptation of Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, Andrzej Klimowski and Danusia Schejbal’s Behind the Curtain, and Julie Birmant and Clément Oubrerie’s acclaimed graphic novel biography of Picasso, Pablo. Plus, every copy of Seconds by Bryan Lee O’Malley, The Motherless Oven by Rob Davis and The Sculptor by Scott McCloud will come with a free signed, limited edition book plate.
So, jump on the 55, get off at Mare St, browse, buy and chat. A full programme of events is available here.
Later this month, we launch End of a Century: Nineties Album Reviews in Pictures by Run Wrake. Edited by Andrew Collins, End of a Century is a rocket trip through the last decade of the Millennium via the NME album review illustrations of the late John Matthew Charrosin Wrake, who traded as Run.
The book launches on Friday 26th June at The Crate, 3 Dunworth Mews, London, W11 1LE, starting at 6.30pm. Want to come? Just RSVP to [email protected].
End of a Century collects the visually incendiary, socially charged, satirically acute artwork of Run Wrake. Specifically, his illustrations for the album review pages of weekly music bible the NME. These regular commissions collectively describe the shifting musical, cultural, political and artistic trends of the 1990s. Together, they form an exhilarating visual guide to a musical decade remembered for its heady mix of guitar-driven grunge and Britpop acts, gangster rappers and manufactured popstars.
From U2, Blur and the Wu-Tang Clan to Nirvana, Kylie Minogue and PJ Harvey, these striking images mutate from monochrome, fanzine-style cut-out Xerox collages to more sophisticated, full-colour computer-generated fantasias. What unites them is Run’s unique wit and invention, borne out of a deep love of music and the multimedia world around him. From the perspective of the next century, they seem brighter still.
Run Wrake studied graphics at the Chelsea School of Art and animation at the Royal College of Art. His graduation film, Anyway, won the BP Expo prize, the first of many international awards over a varied animation career, including a BAFTA nomination for Rabbit. (You can watch the latter below.) An avid music fan, he provided distinctive illustrations for the reviews and features pages of the NME between 1988 and 2000. As a filmmaker working across music, video, advertising and TV, he created visuals for tours such as PopMart by U2 and the Rolling Stones’ 50 & Counting… He died in 2012.
