Radio Times Easter Livery

I recently completed a really interesting commission for the Radio Times to design the livery pages for Good Friday, Easter Day and Easter Monday. Also required were three decorative Easter eggs to be used for an Easter Egg hunt within the magazine itself. The format set for these images make it a unique proposition when planning the artwork. The illustration has to work within a landscape strip format which will be tightly cropped when printed, it has to sit in-between the typography present and have a starting point of the RT colour coded background. So before pencil is even applied to paper there are set of constraints to adhere to which add to the challenge.

A theme of 'family' was discussed, possibly the idea of 'returning home' - so I set about combining the idea of a pair of birds (roughly based on green woodpeckers) traveling through the first two images, to arrive at a nest in the third, combined with references for the relative subject of each day. After the overall concept was approved, I set about sketching out rough after rough until the designs took shape.

Good Friday was the first image sketched out - working around a strong sunrise in the centre and gathering storm clouds above the crosses on the lhs, balanced with the birds in silhouette crossing the scene on the rhs.

Easter Day shows the birds closer up, flying to their nest and passing over a bright spring landscape with a selection of spring flowers to their nest.

Easter Monday shows the birds closer still with the chicks in the nest having recently hatched. 

Although the three images look relatively simple in composition, the number of roughs to get to this stage were many - re-draw after re-draw playing with the character scale and placement, and how the negative space envelopes around each item in the composition. Once roughs were approved, the finished images were rendered in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, most of the construction work initially completed in Illustrator, with mood and atmosphere added in PS.

Despite the challenge of the format and the many hours spent refining the designs, this was a cracking commission from start to finish - love the challenge of the tight format! If you want to check out the printed images, the Radio Times Easter edition is out today.

Shown are close ups of the three original images as rendered with the full bleed. At least 8mm off the top and bottom will be lost when cropped for print as can be seen in the two proofs, so a very tight design is required to fit the space.

Radio Times: Terry Pratchett's Eric

A challenging commission came through for the Radio Times last week. Terry Pratchett's "Eric". An interesting story with lots of references to the Classics (from Faust to the Odyssey) + ancient civilisations, and a humorous take on the be-careful-what-you-wish-for tale!

Entering into Terry Pratchett's world is always a rich visual challenge, especially with the strong covers designed by Josh Kirby and Paul Kidby. I wanted to be as far removed from their work as possible so I tried to keep my design graphically simple but still retain a strong brooding atmosphere, with key references to the main elements of the book. Great fun depicting the Trojan Horse, pyramid and the talking parrot! Again as in the last RT piece, for speed and efficiency the image was almost entirely created in Adobe Illustrator with a tiny bit of tweaking in Photoshop. Out on newsstands today.

From the BBC synopsis:

"BBC Radio 4 returns to Discworld, where Mark Heap stars as Junior Wizard Rincewind, who is attempting to escape the Dungeon Dimensions. And the Demon King of Hell. Oh, and a parrot. 

Terry Pratchett's many Discworld novels combine a technicolour imagination with a razor sharp wit. Also featuring Will Howard as Eric, Geoffrey Whitehead as Death, Robert Blythe as Archchancellor and Rick Warden as the Narrator. 

Director/Jonquil Panting for the BBC"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01r0zb9

Radio Times Christmas Edition: Barber of Seville

A lovely job came through for the Radio Times last week. Stimulating subject matter in the name of the opera The Barber of Seville. I concentrated on the theme of the barber (Figaro) guiding Rosini and The Count to eventual happiness, having fun playing with the glasses and scissors to represent the barbers profession and the divide between the two leads. As the deadline was quite tight, for speed and efficiency the image was almost entirely created in Adobe Illustrator, with final tweaking completed in Photoshop. This seems to be my increasingly employed working practice where APS simply becomes a finishing tool and AI is used to build the skeleton of the image. A really enjoyable project from start to finish.

"Tony Award-Winning Broadway Director Bartlett Sher scored a hit with his first opera-this Met production of Rossini's Barber of Seville. His Looney Tunes-inspired staging was to prove as sharp as barber Figaro's razor. Russian baritone Rodion Pogossov is the wily Mr Fix-it here and the hilarious pre-marital upheavals of Count Almaviva and his bride to be Rossina are explored with vocal freshness by tenor Alek Shrader and contralto Isabel Leonard."

"Images 36: The Best of British Illustration 2012"

The latest copy of Images 36 has been sat on my drawing board for a few weeks now and I've just not got around to posting a photo of the image in this years annual. This illustration completed for the Radio Times was selected to go to print out of

three other pieces

and here it is on the page. The full write up and a little background info on the commission can be seen

here

in an older post.

Finishing Report Cover

Here's an interesting job I did a couple of months ago and have been meaning post on here and I've only just got around to it. A commission for a printing magazine where they wanted to show the key different finishing processes used in print binding. As a theme the client requested the following anthropomorphic figures: Stitch, Glue, Cut and Fold Figures to be depicted simply, but ascending a staircase. A really interesting challenge in having to design the figures and how they fit in with each on the staircase. A couple of different colourways and the printed image shown.