Sofie Birkin

0:03for our second speaker everyone so we first wrote about uh sophie burkin earlier this year when we included the illustrator based in denver colorado in our wants to watch 2020 lineup diversity and queer visibility have always been paramount themes in sophie's work she told us there's historical convention of feminizing illustrations of women and i want to push back against that tonight we're delighted to say that sophie joins us to speak about her newly illustrated book sex ed a new kind of sex manual written by educator and body positivity advocate ruby rare uh sophie if you could turn your audio

0:35and video on that'd be great i have them on can you see me and hear me i can definitely hear you yeah um i can't see you just yet but i'm sure you'll you'll pop up at some point are you are you joining us from denver colorado i am yeah um sorry i'm just trying to make sure my camera is working i can see myself it says that it's there i can see you now yeah okay awesome i have to excuse my blanket because my apartment is absolutely freezing all right i will start sharing my screen with you that would be great yeah thanks um as before everyone if you have any questions for sophie while she's speaking um yeah do drop them in the chat and we'll get around to them afterwards over to you sophie okay um so

1:22my name's sophie um i'm an illustrator and i thought i would start out by giving you a bit of a background about me and my work um i'm from the uk originally um excuse me but i have lived in the u.s in colorado for about six years because i married an american and i've been working full-time as an illustrator for four of those years um i started working out as the in-house illustrator for a local graphic design agency um and i had to work in a massive variety of different styles depending on different clients um but i started to develop my own more sort of distinctive visual style and pick up more freelance work um so i've been freelancing for about four years as well but i went freelance full-time

2:12earlier this year um and i really crave a lot of variety in my work so i take on all different kinds of projects so like editorial fine art commissions packaging design murals animations all different kinds of things and so as i'm going through these slides you might notice a kind of a theme um i didn't even really notice a theme in my work until people started pointing it out to me um like my boss at work would give me a brief and be like make sure they're wearing clothes uh and so i sort of gradually almost by accident come to focus quite heavily on like body and sex positive illustration which is really exciting for me um and where it actually really started was about three years ago

3:01i reached out to cosmopolitan magazine and i asked if they might have any work for me um and i was actually hoping to get into fashion illustration because that's what my background's in uh but they gave me something the complete opposite because they asked me to start illustrating their sex position guides um you know the ones that you read and are terrified of when you're a teenager that are like uh 10 gravity defying sex positions for her pleasure and you're like i'm gonna end up in the hospital if i attempt any of these um but it actually was a really really cool gig because they wanted it to be really really inclusive and so from the get-go they said you know we

3:40want people of all different races ethnicities genders sexualities body types and that's something that's really important to me and really consistent in my personal work um and so i did that on and off for about a year um and it's led to a lot of similar work i've worked for playboy magazine i've worked with independent sex shops and sex toy companies and then earlier this year around march bloomsbury the publishers reached out to me and they offered me one of my biggest projects yet which was to illustrate a book by a sex educator called ruby rare um excuse me and so the book was released a couple of weeks ago it's

4:26called sex ed a guide for adults and when my editor whose name is lauren wybrow reached out to me back in march um about the project i was really really busy and i had promised myself that i wouldn't take on anything new but she completely won me over with the way that she pitched it to me um and so the way it was pitched was uh so obviously a sex ed guide for adults um but they wanted it to be really like warm and real and funny and engaging uh but also like genuinely really sexy and like a beautiful book and not just these sort of uh like clinical diagrams that or cartoons that you might find in the kind

5:07of sex ed guides that you read when you're in school um and so what was like really central to the project um and the way that i approached it was this idea that really anyone should be able to pick this book up and sort of find themselves in it i think that in illustration and fine art and film and pornography even we're sort of fed this very restrictive idea of what sex should look like um and also what a sexual person should look like um and that can really affect someone's whole relationship to sex and their own body and their self-esteem sorry um and so we really wanted the illustrations to be just as inclusive as possible

5:56um of just as many different types of people and relationships and bodies um and so we were going with this sorry very sort of like modern playful design um but we still wanted the illustrations to be like genuinely erotic and not all of them like the ones that you can see on this slide obviously some of them are meant to be more funny some of them are more technical and some of them are more powerful but a lot of them were meant to be genuinely arousing um and that was like like a really big part of the book and so like i think the key to creating um an erotic illustration is is really more about intimacy

6:45and connection and the connection between two people but or more than two people but also between like one person and themselves and that's really um all in the face it's really in like the eyes and the eyebrows and the mouth and the angle of the head um uh you want to create this real sort of feeling of abandon um like people are really lost in the moment um and that was probably the main challenge i'm so sorry my notes have just gone away one second but that was probably the main challenge with the book um but it was also what was like really really enjoyable about working on these and these illustrations um and so yeah i thought i'd just talk a bit about the process

7:29um because people seemed quite interested in that um so the book has just under 70 illustrations so it's a lot um they're varying degrees of complexity and so to manage them my editor and i created this like gigantic spreadsheet and we would use it to keep track of everything but also to communicate with each other the whole way through on like ideas and art direction um which was a great way to organize it and the art sorry the graphic designer uh whose name is uh puja desai and she lives in australia and she came up with this really beautiful sort of dreamy retro pastel color scheme um and i added some sort of darker bolder colors just to sort of help contrast with

8:14the illustrations also create contrast in the illustrations um and one of the first things that lauren and i talked about was this idea of creating a sort of world for the book and sort of um alien landscape and she referenced the janelle monae pink video and so we sort of like immediately clicked on the same page which was really helpful and so yeah if you go through the book and with the sort of fine tooth comb and you look at all the chapter openers you can see that they're all sort of different locations um different geographies in the same world um and the world building aspect was actually probably my favorite

8:55part of the project um i felt like it was like a really unique approach i don't think anyone's done that before for like a sex ed book specifically um and so there's also like repeat characters which was a lot of fun um and so the slide that i'm showing you now is the chapter opener for the solo sex chapter um and you can see this tiny red-headed woman right at the back surfing which was a sort of nod to the comparison that you hear a lot of orgasm being like a wave um excuse me and so later on there's another page where there's a testimonial where a woman describes an orgasm as being like plunging underwater uh so the red-headed

9:37woman sort of makes her come back and she's like all blissed out underwater and her ponytail's falling out she's got a lot of bobby pins and her surfboards long gone um and i just like really had a lot of fun adding like little details like that in um i felt like it really sort of helped bring everything to life make it a lot more engaging um i really enjoy adding easter eggs into illustrations in general um so like these really sort of tongue-in-cheek like cowboy and balance uh tattoos on the pegging character and just everything that's going on with this buffet a sex party over here um and actually my editor for the book

10:16commissioned me after we finished to redraw the sex party one but like put her boyfriend in it as a gift for his birthday which i thought was quite fun um so sorry it's so dry here i'm so thirsty so um one question that i get asked a lot is if i use reference photos i do um i'm completely self-taught as an illustrator um my degree is actually in footwear production um and so the anatomy in some of these can get like quite complicated so i do use references i watched an absolute shitload of porn when i was making this book my browser history is absolutely shocking um one of the biggest challenges with that um is a lot of actors in porn are you know extremely slim um and so i've really had to teach

11:05myself a lot about uh drawing fat distribution when i'm adding weight to someone's frame which i do a lot just to like increase the representation of different bodies um and so that's been sort of a really useful learning curve for me um and yeah working on and off the project probably took just over four months from start to finish which was actually a really nice distraction from quarantining all summer i was just sort of huddled over my ipad for a few months the reception has been really really great we've been getting really lovely reviews the best thing about it is the messages that ruby and i get from people about the book are from just all over the place i mean it's being

11:48read by people's grandmas in the north of england and people's teenage sons in like the rocky mountains um we've also had really lovely feedback from a lot of like queer and trans people which was really important to me especially um yeah so i'm really proud of how it turned out um and i think that's that's pretty much all i got thanks very much sophie um yeah that's amazing you can stop sharing your screen now if you uh if you can find that that button great um a couple of questions for you um i guess you kind of mentioned that you had a lot of reference imagery from all sorts of places um what's the actual process of creating

12:27your work is it all done digitally or are there kind of bits of it that are hand-drawn i'm just keen to know yeah what the creative process looks like the question that completely slipped my mind to even talk about that well yeah everything i do is digital completely um so what i'll usually do is i will find a few different reference images and a lot of times i'll kind of collage them together i don't only work from references but for like you know main bodies and things like that um i sketch on my ipad in procreate and then i bring everything into adobe fresco also on my ipad and i uh do all my outlining there um

13:09it's still got a ways to go as an app it's great i love it but my it's takes a long time to sort of add color so i just usually do the line work in that because i like the kind of more natural sketching you get with the apple pencil and then i'll bring it onto my big computer with my wacom tablet and finish it out just in photoshop great thanks that's yeah really thorough and there's kind of two questions that come in at once from someone so i guess firstly it's what was the main challenge of the book and then what did you learn about sex from illustrating this book two questions in one room um i think the main challenge was honestly just the

13:47sheer scale of the work like it is overwhelmingly the biggest project i've done the last book i did i had sort of 20 illustrations and this was and that was a big project and this was more like 17 so it was really getting organized and making sure that everything was really consistent having a really consistent style and so i put that a style sheet in my presentation earlier and i had to kind of refer back to that a lot make sure that i was using the same line weight um and that was probably the biggest technical challenge um i think what i was talking about with the erotic illustration and that that really is the thing that i enjoy

14:24the most but you know you really have to work at the faces because it's really really easy if an eyebrow is off by like a fraction to have someone look like they're in pain or they're upset or distressed in some way and obviously that's the last thing that you want so there's definitely a couple of redraws where it was like oh like they look like they're really not having a good time um i'm sorry i'm like shivering it's like freezing cold it's glowing there's like a blizzard outside right now oh my god and i'm sorry what was the second question it was what did you learn about sex from uh illustrating this book if anything you know

15:03i feel like just the sheer amount of uh things that i have seen like i feel like i'm fairly knowledgeable about like this world to begin with not trying to be like i know everything about sex obviously no one does but um yeah i've really i've really seen everything that's out there i've become completely desensitized to it i mean i mean truly like i would sit there like next to my partner sort of watching netflix and watching you know like tentacle porn for like references and things so really if anything you really learn is that people are into absolutely [ __ ] everything that you can conceive of yeah i hope that answers your question uh whoever put that in the chat thanks

15:45very much for that um sophie we're gonna have to leave it there but thank you for joining us for talking us through that project um yeah absolutely