With an impressive roster of high-profile clients — ranging from The Guardian newspaper and Time magazine to Peugeot and Waterstones — and artistic collaborations with bands such as Echobelly and Therapy? under his belt, 27-year-old Richard May is spearheading a new generation of British mixed media illustrators. May finds that combining Apple technology with traditional creative approaches gives him the perfect balance of techniques.
May’s work is highly distinctive, with its fluidity and exciting textures, layered with sketches and graphics. But in creative circles, May is equally well-known as one of the three founding members of Pixelsurgeon — a Web portal for the creative community providing news, reviews and interviews with designers, musicians, filmmakers and artists, as well as competitions and online exhibitions of artwork from all over the world. The site is a “labour of love” that brings in more than 8,000 unique visitors each day, and prides itself — in May’s words — in “bending over for nobody in exchange for advertising”, and that means editorial integrity, which translates into respect.
Looking at the complexity and variety of May’s creative activities, it may seem surprising that his studio consists of a relatively simple technical set up: two Power Macs, a scanner and an Epson A3 colour printer. He also has a big cutting board and pasteboard, with paints and scalpels, and photography equipment (a manual Pentax and a few Polaroid cameras), which he describes as his “production line”.
 This eclectic approach to his work is certainly influenced by the fact that May comes from a fine art, rather than a technical, background (“apart from computer games”, he chuckles). “Because of the simplicity of the Mac interface, I can work almost as if I wasn’t using a computer”, he explains. “It all boils down to the Mac being yet another tool in the designer’s arsenal”.
So what made him first realise that he could make a living from his art? “Transformers and 2000AD!”, he asserts in an instant. “I always wanted to draw comics, and the day I realised people were actually paid to do so… well, it was a big deal for a 12-year-old boy. I remember thinking “This is it, I’ll be a comics artist!” and, as a teenager, pretty much just set about laying the foundations: getting artwork out there to a very small audience with my own fanzine, The Bomb Circle — black and white, photocopied, stapled, named after a chapter from Iain Banks’ novel The Wasp Factory, and extremely embarrassing to look at now... lots of teen angst!”
Finally, May plucked up the courage to send a few sample pages off to David Bishop, then editor of Judge Dredd: The Megazine. “He liked them and mailed back a few Dredd scripts to practise with. I sent them back, he liked them again… and so on, until skipping Maths and French to skulk off home and draw Judge Death and the Angel Gang was no longer an option, and I had to either go and get a real job or do an art foundation course”.
Next page: Drawing on Apple Technology
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Richard May
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