I was recently asked to jump in on a shoot my bf, Richard Ayres had arranged with Beverly Ann photography.

If you haven’t seen a lot of Beverly’s work around yet, I’m sure you will do in the near future. She is a promising young photographer with a clear vision, who also creates props to enhance her concept. I always admire photographers who like to be involved in more than just taking pictures, they are usually edgier with bigger ideas (which in turn means they might like to work with me on some of my big ideas).

For this shoot she had made these oversised demon hands which looked great combined with some black paint that she also applied herself. I love how the image below turned out and the black eyes were such a nice touch.

I was also given permission to edit some of the images from our shoot. I did one set with light pastel colours which I’m holding back until after its publication next month and an other which I can show you now.

I started off by just doing a beauty retouch and cleaning up a few things.

I did actually consider cropping this last one but decided I liked the large white space.

Models: Myself (Biomechanina) and the beautiful Jess Sevensin who you will most likely see featured here again soon!

After editing the photos as you see them above, I wanted to add something extra. I experimented a few times by making the background darker or adding some clouds but neither of these worked for me. I then remembered that I had wanted to produce a set of images with my own illustrations over the top of them for a while and these would be perfect.I did a bit of online research to find some examples that might inspire me. I have posted some on tumblr.

I have been working on some illustrations for an upcoming t-shirt line recently and most of my illustrations feature faces and insects. There were already faces in these images so I decided to draw insects, mainly moths, butterflies and dragonflies. I also added a couple of other natural and dark themes I felt were relevant.

The outcome:

What I really liked about this is that the drawings didn’t have to be great to look effective. Most of them were just quick doodles but they really transformed the feel of the images. I tried quite a lot of different things as it was my first attempt at something like this but I will definitely be doing more in the future and may produce some more concise sets with a preset theme. In these images the illustrations were drawn separately and applied onto the pictures using photoshop but I would also like to try printing the pictures out and painting on them as well as drawing electronically.

If anyone else tries something similar (or does any sort of work combining photography and illustration) I’d love to see!