Mika - The Pub Experience

Just before the physical release of Mika's first single "We Are Golden" from his sophomore album "The Boy Who Knew Too Much", Mika went a tad crazy on Twitter and was telling his fans that he was going to throw a special event to celebrate the new song. I was very excited, but felt that I wouldn't be able to go on this particular day, so was praying that the day would get changed.

I have been a fan of Mika since late January/early February 2007, so basically right from the very beginning. He has helped improve my character and has made me a more confident person and it's also because of him that my art has improved. It is also because of him that I have become more independent. It took me two and a half years to meet him (Sadler's Wells, June 8th 2009) and although it was for a split second, it was one of the best split seconds ever. There aren't many other feelings better than when you meet your idol. If I went to the pub with Mika, it would mean time being spent with my Mika friends plus personal time with Mika himself. Precious.

Mika announced that the pub party would start at about 7pm and I found out two hours earlier that very day. I was free that day. I could go. I got dressed as quick as I could and hopped on that train to Fenchurch Street, and then onwards to the Underground.

I met my friend Danika outside Ladbroke Grove station (as it's near Portobello Road, where the pub was) and Danika had told me that Mika had already arrived. (I got there at about 8ish). I was excited yet calm, and as I arrived at the destination I saw a small crowd of people outside. I walked in and clocked Mika's mother and his younger sister. Danika led me to the MFC table which consisted of a small bunch, but with people from Essex (like me) London, Hertfordshire and Wiltshire. Apparently Mika had already gone up to the table and spoke to them before I arrived, and unfortunately he had already left by the time I got to London. Still, whilst sipping on my free alcoholic drink (thank you, Mika!) and mingling with the MFC, I was on the lookout for Mika in case he came back.

And of course he did!

He mingled around the pub for a little while, chatting to a few people, but then he strolled to the DJ booth area and started to choose a few songs and play them. I ofcourse took plenty of pictures.



I've never actually had a picture *with* Mika, and that night didn't seem like the right time to get one in my opinion. I don't really know why, I just didn't want to pester him plus it was a personal moment too. My time will come, but for now I had to make do with a picture of me with Mika in the background. LOL! I look pretty shocking with the random strands of hair on my forehead (it's meant to be a side fringe)...hmm, the left hand side is not my good side. Oh well!



Feeling brave, I approached Mika and asked him if he was going to play "We Are Golden". He leaned in near my face and explained that he didn't have the song with him, but if someone had it he'll play it. He was so close I could feel his breath my face. It was slightly surreal. I replied, saying that I knew someone who had it and went to fetch them. A few problems occured, but eventually the song was played and the whole pub got up and started to dance and sing the lyrics.



Thank God Mika started to DJ because the songs got a whole lot better, and the "pub turned into a club" -- Mika's words. I managed to wiggle myself down to the front of the booth and rave with the rest of the crowd, including an old man. Mika found this quite funny and ended up taking pictures on his phone, which I am actually in, but only by a fraction!

In this one you can see my eye next to the old man's ear on the right.



And the same place here.



Mika had Jemma's iPod and started to play songs from it. Jemma had his song "Rain" on there (which is to be his new single in Europe) and he played it! Everyone sang to it and raved to it, and as you can see from my video Mika's face is beaming!



Here are just a few random pictures that I took plus one last video.











Last but not least, I managed to get Mika to pose for my camera. That's a very proud moment of mine. Here it is!



It was not long after this that it started to get late and it was my time to leave. I spoke to Mika again to say thank you for an amazing night, to which he said "No problem" (I think. My brain had turned to mush by this point) and he placed his hand on my shoulder.

I turned to leave, when I heard another new song of his fill the pub. It was "Blame It On The Girls", so I decided to party to one last song and then I left...for good.

I was in a state of euphoria and bliss and couldn't stop thinking about what happened. I didn't just celebrate with friends and an idol, I celebrated with someone famous but the atmosphere was so casual. And it felt so normal, as well. Luckily the party came to end not long after I left so I don't have much to be jealous about!

I feel very privileged to have had such personal time with him and is definitely an experience I won't be forgetting.

Portraits For Pleasure - Blue Eyes

For this project we are doing for Mika, I didn't intend on drawing for his song "Blue Eyes", but found myself increasingly thinking about it and wondering what to do for it. My mind wandered to the images I saw in his EP book and tried to draw inspiration from them, but found nothing.

I was at work one day, when I decided to grab a bit of till paper, a ballpoint pen, and doodle (I tend to do this quite often). This is what I ended up drawing.



This piece became my blueprint and started to work on the actual piece a couple of days later. The pictures in Mika's EP show pictures of a girl with an intricate jungle-like background (and other various pictures, too) but I couldn't come up with any full length pictures of my own, so I just decided to focus on the eyes instead. They are the windows to your soul, after all, and can speak much more than words sometimes.

As suggested by another artist I know, I tried to use "The Grid". This is where you get the drawing you want and place a grid over it, and then draw a grid on the paper. You then use the guidelines to create your picture. I wanted to use my own eyes in this picture:



However, the printed picture was in A4 and the paper that I wanted to draw on was A3. It was difficult, an absolute mess and a total nightmare so I scrapped it. I won't even show you the picture of it. That's when I decided I should do freehand all the way! I don't use A4 paper anymore.

However, instead of doing realistic eyes, I chose to do Animé eyes. I figured that an upset toon is easier to look at than an upset real person, but still decided to use greyscale with a splash of colour. This is the first draft.



I like the realistic shading mixed with the cartoon-like features. One thing I didn't like was that I shaded the nostril too prominently, and it made her face seem chubby (or is that just me?) and mixed too much realism with the cartoon-like effects. I used watercolours for the eyes and the hair, and even for the big black outlines, but sometimes I also used a black Manga Pen.

I decided to give this woman red hair because I see the character "Blue Eyes" as someone who used to be strong but became broken, as suggested by the lyrics "Your heart is broken to your surprise". The red hair represents her strong and unique character, but the blue, watery eyes suggest a damaged soul.

This is the final piece.



I decided to do the background completely black and hide a lot of her face because then it's like she's drowning/being swallowed into her own despair. Plus it also concentrates on the eyes, which is what I wanted. I wrote the lyrics on the side because it's like there's a tiny voice - whether it be hers or someone else - trying to get through to her.

I quite like this piece. It's deep. In my opinion anyway :-)

Portraits For Pleasure - Toy Boy

Similarly with "Lady Jane" (see post below) the lyrics in this Mika song provoke a lot of imagery. The song - on a first listen - does sound rather amusing but once you read the lyrics you see how dark and sad they actually are. The 1940's inspired Disney music also gives it an uplifting feel with the odd little chimes here and there and the up and down piano notes.

This is Mika singing Toy Boy live for the first time. You can hear the audience laughing at the playful lyrics and Mika putting expression into the song as he's singing it. The song is about a toy who loves his owner - who happens to be a boy - but his mother becoming worried about the two getting attached, so she throws the toy away and destroys it. When you watch the video and listen to the song you could think that the lyrics are silly, but see them written down and you'll begin to understand how depressing the song actually is.



(Thank you to FmBm2 / Nono for the video)

I drew my interpretation of Toy Boy with certain lyrics as the inspiration. These lyrics are:
"She's the meanest hag that there's ever been; pulled out my insides with an old safety pin. I'm the sorest sight, now I feel like trash: Clothes are made of rags and they don't even match. So she dressed me up as the man she loved, then threw me in a box when she had had enough. Now the light of day I no longer see - she stuck her voodoo pins where my eyes used to be. Accidentally tragic...victim of her black magic."

I haven't been able to draw my own drawings without copying something for several years, so I decided to give it a go again as I had the image in my head and knew exactly what I wanted.

This was the first draft.



One thing that irritated me was that, in my head, the gothic handwriting seemed like such a good idea but on paper it was quite difficult to read. It says "Accidentally tragic" and thought the gothic writing suited well with the song's emotion and also a nice contrast against the Disney sounding soundtrack (although, come to think of it, a lot of Disney's earlier films were actually quite sad).



I used watercolours for the hair to make it blend nicely and used normal colouring pencils for the face (though this was mainly because I only have so many watercolours). The blue wavy lines are actually exaggerated Animé tears to give a comical feel to it even though the message portrayed by the rest of image shows otherwise. I made the mouth stitched up because it is reminiscent of Shruken Heads (see here: http://oddrodney.com/images/shrunken_head.jpg). It gives a sense of torture and pain in my opinion.

I decided to give him colourful clothes to give a sense of flamboyancy and a (once) happy character.



This is the final piece. I do quite like this piece, but it's not my favourite.

Portraits For Pleasure - Lady Jane

Okay so basically I'm a big fan of Mika and he released an EP earlier this year. It consisted of 4 songs and the EP was titled "Songs For Sorrow". Mika contacted several artists and asked them to draw interpretations of his lyrics, and on the MFC (Mika Fan Club) we are doing the same thing and giving it to him.

I have been drawing since I could probably hold a pencil, and it is because of MIKA that my artistic skills have progressed greatly. I still can't make a masterpiece, but they're not exactly shabby either, in my opinion. I put a lot of hardwork and dedication into my drawings and you always know you've done a good job on something if you can't stop staring at it, or listening to it, whatever it may be.

I wanted to showcase my drawings because I am really proud of them and hope you like them too!

His song "Lady Jane" provokes a lot of imagery, as it's a tale that could easily be a replica of those tales people used to talk to each other about years ago. That's how Disney got their stories you know, and it wasn't always pleasant!
It's basically a story about a woman who had everything apart from love, and when she finally met the man she wanted he followed her to the sea and, while Lady Jane was able to walk on water, the man drowned. In order to save her lover, Lady Jane cut off her feet and turned into a fish to search for him, but she never found him. Eventually she was caught and eaten, while her lover below was still looking for her.

I imagined Lady Jane to be quite young and have striking features. Like an English Rose, if you will. I visualised her looking over her shoulders with her eyes looking right at you, as if she's enticing you in, with her long wavy locks embracing her face. The more I thought about this picture the more I realised I actually had a picture like it. This is a picture of me in April 2009.



This picture became my blueprint, if you will. I started to copy the hair and the face shape in pencil on an A3 sheet of paper.




Some artists get the picture they want to copy, put a grid over the top, then draw a grid on paper and then draw the picture by using these guidelines.
I don't. My work is completely freehand. That's by choice and also because I don't draw on A4. I like to make my pictures big.

One of the many things that I cannot do is paint. It's pretty much impossible for me. Whenever I do a face I shade with pencils which I do rather like, as it gives a sort of elegance and classic feel to the drawing. However, I believe that colour can give a lot of body and life in a drawing so I tend to colour in the main features. These usually consist of just the eyes, but with Lady Jane I also coloured in the hair and her lips.




I coloured in the eyes to make them more striking and piercing. I coloured in the lips to make them more sensual and enticing, and I also coloured in her hair to give a bit more life and to make it her main feature, something that you would imagine Lady Jane would take pride in. I gave her purple hair because it gave an unrealistic/characterisation effect next to the humanistic face. I quite like how they combine. Plus whenever I hear the song, I always imagine the colours purple or a deep blue. I think purple hair suits her (Or me! O.O) quite nicely. Plus I think the colour goes well with her despair and hopelessness, it represents her emotions.


I used watercolour pencils to colour in and it was my very first time using them. There are various ways you can use them - for this I decided to colour in what needed colouring in, and then wetted a paint brush and brushed water over it (but only a little bit). It made the colours blend a bit more which looks a lot nicer than the rough lines normal colouring pencils can give.

After that, I added charcoal to the background to make her stand out more against the paper.




I then used white chalk to doodle mystical shapes in the background to give a more mysterious effect and blended it in with the charcoal so it didn't look too bold and draw the attention away from Lady Jane.

This is actually the finished picture.




Here it is also in black and white, and a close up.






It's one of my favourite pieces and I won't lie; I adore it. Sure it's not perfect, and people probably could have done better, but this drawing was a turning point for me. It was the first time I used something different and I'm less afraid of trying something new.

Thank you very much for reading and for the comments if anyone chooses to leave any. I will read them all and will try to respond if I can. If you are going to criticise, please do it constructively rather than in an attacking manner. Feel free to write your name in case I actually know you. :-)