Artist Graham Humphreys has done posters for some of your favorite movies, home video sleeves, and album covers. His instantly-recognisable, incredibly lifelike, watercolor illustrations are gorgeous and fascinating collages which capture the heart and soul of the medium within. His art pops up in books of horror movie art, with his poster for The Evil Dead being a touchstone for horror fans of a certain age. While Proud Gallery published Graham Humphreys – Drawing Blood: 30 Years Of Horror Art in 2015, that book was extraordinarily limited and very hard to come by, so it was particularly exciting when Korero Press released Hung, Drawn and Executed: The Horror Art of Graham Humphreys late last year, making much of that work available to the general public. We were lucky enough to speak with the artist to discuss the book, art, music, and more.
STARBURST: Do you find having like a place that is away from your home helps you work?
Graham Humphreys: Oh, I think so, yes. It’s very much about discipline. I mean, I have worked from home before, and you kind of tend to look for distraction sometimes. I have to take breaks, obviously, because you lose sort of sight of what you’re doing – you can get kind of bogged down and stuff – but I find it’s really good just to get away from my home and go into an office and actually sit there and do stuff.
It’s kind of convenient for other reasons, as well. There are technical people there, should I have any issues with my computer, for instance and, also, it’s just convenient for other facilities around. There’s a swimming pool nearby. I like to take an afternoon swim just to clear my head.
We imagine, as busy as your career is, and as many things as I see come through my in-box that have your art – be that be it Blu-ray releases or album covers – you seem to be working as much as you ever have been, probably.
Most likely. It’s a good thing.
We’ve noticed that the clients you work with quite a bit are companies that we are quite fond of, like Arrow Video and Mondo/Death Waltz. Does having a client base that comes back to you again and again like help you in creating, because you get a better idea of what they want?
Definitely. I mean, you learn well. I have to say – with Arrow, for instance, most projects come through project managers, so with I work with the same people for a period of time. Inevitably, you find stuff working. There’s a sort of healthy turnover of people that I work with there, but there is very much an understanding which is all based on color. We understand what the budgets are, and what could be achieved within those and, I guess, they also pick projects which they probably think are better-suited to me.
Sometimes, it’s about how you approach the lack of material, for instance. On a job, sometimes you’re working with a very old film, and everything’s kind of quite blurry. You’re looking at the unrestored version of what will become a remastered Blu-ray and it’s just how you approach those difficult circumstances.
Reading through your book, you mentioned a couple times that you’ve had to go and watch certain films three or four times to get an idea because you’re not familiar with them. How often does that happen?
Probably most times, and the reason is that it’s first my duty to try and find images that aren’t the familiar publicity images or the stills everybody else has seen over and over again, and to do that means going to the film. If it’s a film for the first time, obviously, you want to know what the film’s about, and who does what, and how it ends, and everything else, but even if it’s a familiar film, I have to go through it really looking for those little moments where you get a great expression. Also, of course, it’s got to be about the quality the image is, because you’re making screen grabs, generally. Even if in a scene, you think everything looks in focus, you’re trying to get a single frame and the images can be too soft to use.
Seeing your style change – like, some of those covers were like much more cartoony than the work you’re known for now – what’s it like when you get to return to something like Return of the Living Dead several times? Is it nice to be able to sort of correct past sins?
Absolutely – and in fact, I’ve just been given that job once again for somebody else. That job has returned many times. Incredible, really, but I think in the ’80s, what I was doing was addressing things in a different kind of way that I understood the requirement for me at that point was different to what it would be now, and that’s partly because I think that my style was more cartoony at the time, simply because I was doing a lot of cartoon work and concentrating on the more humorous side of things and partly I think because the skill set I had at the time wasn’t as polished as it is now.
I want to say polish – that don’t mean trying to be as slick as possible. It’s all a question of the technical ability. I just didn’t have that at the time to render great portraits, and perhaps the techniques I was using to render those portraits were different at that time, as well, so I think that’s calmed down, really. When I first returned to Return of the Living Dead, I tried to match the original in its content and the way it come across or was stylised. When I did the Scream Factory version, for instance, I was probably doing something more akin to what I would like to have done at the time had I had the skill set.
In the book, you have a very detailed walkthrough of how you go about creating your art, and it’s fascinating. We’ve often looked at your work and wondered how you get to where you do. We love the starting point and, most of all, the wash you put on the page. How long did it take you to come to this sort of process, in order to get a very distinctive style?
Over the years, as budgets have got lower, I guess, and workers need it faster, you have to learn to come up with a technique that allows you to work very fast and deliver something which looks like a complete accomplished piece of work, but in a minimal amount of time. It’s not like I rush things: I try not to do that ever, but you know how much time you have, and because of the budget, it’s just unrealistic to spend you know something five days on something where, realistically, you know you’re being paid for about a day and a half’s work. Inevitably, I always ends up working longer on some things than the budget allows, because I want to do something that’s good for the client.
But, also I do remember many, many years ago – my technique was different at the beginning – and I’d start from a white page and just build up layers of dark, and then work to light. I find that, occasionally there’d be little specks of white still showing through. For me, that’s the nature of the paint work, but I had a couple of clients saying, “Well, we can still see some like this,” and you know, they’re tiny, tiny little specks, but I had to go back and just fill in those tiny little specks for them, and it just seemed like, “Well, why should I ever have to do this again?”
So I kind of got this technique, where I put down a wash of colour that there would never, ever be white specks, and that’s really how that developed, but also, it does allow me to have a background and a sort of texture to the overall thing, which doesn’t need further work in some parts. By creating a textured background, you’ve already filled in substantial parts of the painting, allowing you to just concentrate on the bits where the focus will be for the viewer.
Given that you’ve done so many music-related projects, especially in recent times, how much is music an important part of your creative process?
I like to work with as few distractions as possible, because I used to work with music on all the time, and especially when I was working from home. Occasionally, I’ll put on earphones when I’m working. To be quite honest, all I’ve been playing what I’ve been working it from home over the last sort of three months is – I’ve got one sort of a compilation of Hammer things. It’s on a loop, virtually, and I never tire of it, and it just it just seems to fit all the work on technique. There’s bits of music I know so well that I’ll go for the afternoon swim, and that’s all I can hear in my head is all these Hammer things.
Certainly, in the early days it was a big inspiration when I was looking for ideas – you know, the lyrics and the music I was listening to was such an important part of what I did, and actually helped shape the way I worked, as well. A lot of the music was quite raw and aggressive, and and I think the technique kind of reflected that and, to an extent, still does now. Really I’ve never been somebody who’s been attracted to the slick and the highly finished look, because to me, I don’t think life is like that. I don’t think anything should be slick and finished, really, but the music really did play an important part of the way the work was shaped.
In fact, we mentioned Return of the Living Dead earlier on: that came to me, purely because of the music connection. The person who had commissioned me was actually a friend of mine I knew from a different job. She had as a publicity agent she knew professionally, in video, and the film came up. We’d been to see The Cramps many times together, and she knew I liked the Damned, as well. Of course, those were the two featured artists they wanted to sell and that’s why I ended up with that job, probably with the Cramps in mind.
You know, they always had a slightly cartoony come up look to them, and I think that’s probably what shaped that particular job. So, yeah: music did have a big influence on everything I was doing. I mean, the original Evil Dead poster I did for the UK? That was purely fueled by the Cramps and the Gun Club.
While there is some older material, the new book is very much focused on a lot of the things since the 30-year compendium from a couple of years back. In terms of putting it together, because it’s such a shorter time-frame did you notice any themes that surprised you?
I wouldn’t say necessarily that, but what I did find was that, with that first book and the 30-year work, I struggled, to be quite honest, because over that period of time, I was doing a lot of other work – design and work and illustration which was not horror-themed at all. A lot of educational projects and sort of very sort of standard design kind of stuff, which was not involving illustration, so a large bulk of my work over that period wasn’t illustration. So, there was a struggle to try and find enough to fill Drawing Blood, whereas in the period since that, it’s all the illustration work – and a lot of it, as well – so, I did feel that I had enough to fill a new book. The previous book was rather expensive, and I wanted people to access the work without having to pay large amounts of money, so I thought certain key pieces should be in the new book, as well.
HUNG, DRAWN AND EXECUTED – THE HORROR ART OF GRAHAM HUMPHREYS is on sale now and reviewed here.
