First Acts: Creatives share their (very) early work

The earliest works Kyle has access to on his harddrive are, he estimates, from around the age of 11 or his early teenage years. “It was always influenced by bands, movies and video games,” he says. “You can see I’m drawing my favourite skate company logos in my maths book or drawing scenes from The Matrix in history books, trying to crowbar these violent scenes into projects about Oliver Cromwell.” There is, it must be said, a fair amount of violence on display. Kyle laughs, remembering how teachers would glance anxiously over his shoulder and ask him if everything was… OK? Maybe they hadn’t seen The Matrix.

Looking at these early drawings, Kyle feels a definite sense of loss. “I’m just remembering how much I enjoyed getting completely lost in it, and almost lamenting that feeling of being able to get fully in there,” he says. “It was really just drawing one thing after the other, because it was fun to draw. I can totally imagine myself drawing the Gatling gun and making sound effects at the same time.” That level of focus is hard to recreate these days. “I have to put my phone downstairs in another room, turn the computer off, and I’m still twitching, whereas I used to be able to get into that flow, content in my own little world.”

Fashion was a huge influence on her mind, particularly as a teenager, Anu tells us. You can see this in her absent-minded sketches and collages. “I always thought I was going to be a fashion illustrator,” she says. “That was what I was working towards, what I wanted.” Her brother used to work in the Tate Modern’s bookshop and would often bring home unsold magazines for his younger sister, who would then copy and rework the fashion designs of high-fashion advertisements and photo shoots. Looking at these images today, Anu notes the precision she was trying to employ. “Because I was wanting to get into fashion illustration, I was really trying to practise drawing things in proportion, which is something I’ve always struggled with,” she says. “As soon as I realised I didn’t want to be a fashion illustrator, I decided that proportions are going to be just how they look to me.”

Towards her later teen years, we begin to see something that resembles the origins of Anu’s current, more developed illustration style. Particularly, it’s clear to see a fascination with faces emerging. “You can see that I’m trying to start developing my style,” she says. “I would just draw faces obsessively, just pages and pages of faces.” Today, one of the easiest ways to recognise Anu’s work is to look at her distinctive approach to faces (she says she still always starts with the nose and works outwards from there).

It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that Ruby found herself returning to drawing, when she was going through another really tough time as a young adult. She had to drop out of school during her A-Levels, because she was really unwell. “I wasn’t leaving the house, I wasn’t able to work. Drawing was pretty much one of the only things I could do,” she says. “So it was kind of out of necessity, it was a communication tool for me.” So, she picked up a pen and began writing and drawing quick comics that took a wry, dry and humorous look at her mental health and what she was going through. When she posted the comics online, they immediately and organically garnered fans and followers.

The process felt like finding a path back to a feeling she hadn’t fully experienced since childhood: “When I reconnected with drawing again as a young adult, I had that feeling of, ‘Oh I love it! I love drawing and being funny.’ There is some sort of innate joy in it.”

Since then, illustration has become Ruby’s full-time job and that complicates matters somewhat. As she puts it: “Once it’s a job, other factors pour into it.” Yet she has still tried to hold onto that childlike sense of joy in creation. Partly, she has done this by cultivating a sketchy, carefree style. “I think a lot of what is appealing about my work is that it looks imperfect and non-caring in many ways, there’s a determination to not make it look ‘good’,” she says. To her, this mirrors the way that children create. “When a child draws something, they sort of narrate it – they will tell you what it is,” Ruby explains. “If they say it’s a truck, it’s a truck, no matter what they’ve drawn. It’s just their thoughts coming out visually.”

These days, Ruby runs drawing workshops for adults. It’s made her hyper-aware of the inhibitions that tend to creep in as we grow up, although there is always a satisfying moment when one of her pupils realises they can still create like they did as a kid, without worrying that they’re “not good enough” or “aren’t artistic”.

Most of these original Mason designs are sadly lost to the annals of history, but one has survived – the one he created for Original Pirate Material by The Streets, which the designer reckons was made when he was around 17. The processes involved were more complex and analogue than you might expect – plus, they’re a real signifier of the era we’re dealing with here. “In terms of pictures, I was limited by what was in NME or The Guide in my parents’ copy of The Guardian,” says Mason, who remembers cutting out the images and Pritt Stick-ing them in place.

The typography was by far the most complicated aspect of the designs. “I wanted the text to be really crisp and look like it was professionally done,” he recalls. So, when it came to printing the track listing onto the back cover, for instance, he went to meticulous lengths. Because his parents’ printer could only handle A4 paper, he would precisely measure and line up his artwork on a sheet of A4 before running it through the printer. He remembers doing test prints to check that the positioning was spot on. “I’ve always been a total perfectionist,” says Mason. “This was like a very rudimentary version of graphic design, basically.”