Sarah Larnach

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Sarah created all of Ladyhawke's album art work (watercolour paintings) and much of her illustration was animated for two of Ladyhawke's videos, one being "My Delirium" and the other "Magic". Fortunately, she emailed me back over night (she's a New Zealander) with some replies to a few questions I asked her. This is what she had to say:

On her biggest influences:

"Norman Rockwell, for casual realism and 'capturing an era'."
"Drew Struzan, for composition and doing all the images I loved as a kid."
"Derek Riggs, for continuity with album art."

She also mentioned a couple of directors that had an impact on her cinematic approach, them being:

"Tim Burton, for imagination and trail blazing."
"John Waters, for humor, cheeky-ness and trail blazing."
The email's quite short and doesn't give an big insight in to Larnach's career, but she did give me some background on how she got started. She stated that "Working for someone for free is great, because you love them/what they do might be a good place to start. that is what got me the exposure I needed to kick start my career. I make a fine living, mostly for private sales and exhibition work but my collectors have come because of the exposure I've had from Ladyhawke and the snowball effect of that."

That's just about all the information I had from that one email, but it's a good example that contact with a creative can be established quite quickly when you email them with praise. Graham said yesterday that practitioners aren't going to throw away an email that praises them, because they're normally pleasantly surprised by the fact that someone has emailed them in admiration.

I intend to email practitioners of both animation and illustration more and more this weekend and simply get as many emails flying out to relative folk as possible. It's imperative that I gain contact with this people sooner rather than later.