COMMARTS INTERVIEW

A little interview with me over at Communication Arts Magazine

Nice n' Slow

Chillax, put your boots up and have a nice SLOW holiday season.
You've worked hard this year and so have I. Here's a Christmas card commissioned by SLOW magazine plus a bunch recent pieces to see out 2011. Cheers!

Slow run rate at the cricket for Inside Sport

Winners and losers for The Law Journal.

Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde for Gardening Australia.

And finally one for Money Magazine which asked the question

"Could Australia become another Greece?"

Yesterday in the Herald

Here's an illustration I did for yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald about a new literary prize aiming to improve the lives of animals. "If anyone can give animals a voice, it is surely creative writers- The Voiceless Writing Prize is a natural vehicle to promote understanding of the relationship between humans and animals, ethical treatment of animals and animal sentience." I had one day to turn it around. 

SOCIETY OF ILLUSTRATORS 54TH ANNUAL

Hey I got a call at 4am this morning from New York. It was the Society of Illustrators telling me that my page from the Design Files Calender had just gotten into the annual. Wake me up any time you like for that.

DESIGN FILES CALENDER

In what's been touted as the must-have calender of 2012 by design connoisseurs (that's me), The 2012 Design Files Calender has just been released! 12 artists from The Jacky Winter Group were asked by Lucy at The Design Files to illustrate an area of clutter in their lives, mine being "My Bookshelf" filled with objects and publications dear to my heart. Last years art blew me  away and I was over the moon to be asked to participate in this year's. So get on over to The Design Files and order one now. Here's a shot of my page.

Also I have a signed print of this available at the super cool Open House which is a pop-up home filled with hand picked awesome stuff by tastemeister Lucy Feagins from The Design Files. An A2 signed print of my image for the calender is available alongside some great artists from Lamington Drive. Dates and location up on the website. Wish I could get down there to check it out!

Coupla things from last month

Hey! Whatcha doin? Here's some stuff from last month. Later.

Successful small business second time round for BRW.

Succeeding against the odds for BRW

Skip planting in summer for Gardening Australia

Leaves which have evolved to attract bats for Gardening Australia

Outback flying psychiatrist for Reader's Digest

IA Illustration Awards Call For Entries

I was honoured to have one of my illos (originally commissioned by SooJin Buzelli at PlanSponsor) chosen as the Call For Entries image for Illustrators Australia Awards 2012. If you're an Australian or NZ illustrator out there this is your chance to shine. If you're an art director, art buyer or agent who has commissioned some great work over the last year, shout it out loud and enter it. Entries are cheap and get published in a special 20 page lift-out in Australian Creative that goes out to a list of 1000 art buyers in the region as well. Plus the list of judges is pretty amazing:

Annette Harcus (Designer, Harcus Design, Aust)

Tony Palmer (Executive Designer Penguin Group, Aust)
Chris Buzelli (Illustrator, NY)
Yuko Shimizu (Illustrator, NY)
Stefano Imbert (Illustrator and board member SOI, NY)
Charles Hively (Publisher & Design Director , 3×3 magazine)

DEADLINE IS NOV 15TH. ENTER HERE!

2011 Illustrators Australia 9x5 Exhibition

Each year around about November a little plank of ply arrives in the post with a theme and says "paint me".  This year's Illustrators Australia 9x5 Exhibition theme is "Rapture". Deeply moved by the subject and being a spiritual romanticist at heart, I raced to put aside my crochet, put on a camomile tea and set to working on the piece below. You can vote for it or make a bid on the piece here. If you're in Melbourne on Friday the 14th of October git along to the Auction.

Gonna take you down to Chinatown!

It's Moon Festival time so I thought I'd show you a few pics from a job I just did for Market City Sydney commissioned by Freeform Advertising. The Chinese Moon Festival is celebrated by eating mooncakes and worshipping all things lunar including Chang E the Moon Goddess who features in the artwork throwing cakes down from the moon. If you're in town from the 5-12th of September get yerself on down to Chinatown for a mooncake filled with salted duck egg or yam paste!

Here's Cheers

On the back of my Waterhouse series getting published in the Advertising section of Communication Arts I got an email from an agency in Boston called MMB asking me if I could help them out with a series in a similar style. "Sure" I said. When I enter stuff in CA I kinda hope and dream that it will work like this but never expect it will or assume that it markets in a more general diffused kind of way. The next day I got another offer for something similar from another agency that had seen my work in the CA Annual. I had to knock it back as the deadline was too tight and I had too much on but jeepers... So here's cheers to Communication Arts. You really do work.
Here are some spreads from the work I did for MMB celebrating their recent success with a Subway campaign.

KEEF

I'm not super keen on doing portraits, likenesses etc. Early on in my career I was burnt by a corporate client who commissioned me to do someone in the office. They not only possessed a huge nose but a slightly distorted personal image and became irate about the reasonably accurate results. I decided then and there that perhaps this particular pathway was not for me and I've been portrait gun-shy ever since. 
Every now and then however I'm asked do someone and if I'm familiar enough with them I give it a shot. Inside Sport had a column for me about how footballers are fined for bad behaviour but Keith Richards is heralded for it. I've been studying his craggy mug for probably over 20 years so I went with the portrait angle.
I've been a lifelong Stones fan. All the albums, biographies, live recordings, studio bootlegs, I have them. Keef the guitarist I love deeply. Keef the man, not so much. Probably something to do with his knife brandishing bravado or his nodding off on smack with his son in the car and crashing or abandoning wives and babies or his faux-rasta mysticism etc. Gifted musician, flawed individual. But that's ok, I'm a flawed portrait artist. It's only rock and roll (not football) and we like it.

THIS BATTERED OL' HEART O' MINE

Every year I send off a canvas to the Lighthouse Art Auction which is a great cause that raises some money for homeless kids. This year Fenton Stephens Advertising who kindly donate their services annually, asked me to whip up a nice ol' battered heart for the poster. If you've got some art laying about and you're feeling generous here are the details. 

AUSTRALIAN CREATIVE

A BIG THANKS to Australian Creative for this shout out in the latest Design Issue. Art with Attitude. Badass! Sort of...not really.

Recently across the drawing table.

Hi there, here are some recent pieces that have made their way across my drawing table. At least the ones I can show you at the moment. Looking back, blue and yellow seem to have been popular this month.

 

Unions picketing for The Law Institute Journal

Inappropriate footballer tweets for Inside Sport

 

 Good times for recruitment in Asia for In The Black Mag

Best Insurer Award from a series of 7 spots for Money Magazine Awards Issue.

Black thumb for Gardening Australia.

PLANSPONSOR Process Diary

Here's a quick look at some of the process behind this illo for a.d. SooJin Buzelli at Plansponsor Mag.
Her brief for this story on hedge funds was as always short and sweet leaving me lotsa elbow room for ideas: 
Flexibility, Liquidity, Being able to move in and out of investments easily. 
I came up with 3 ideas to send through for approval. The first idea was based on old tent show canvases which I really love. Flexi-Bill, geddit?

My second idea was a bit more conceptual and involved a liquid dude who is so flexible that he's able to carry himself around in a bucket. 

And finally the winner, an octopus who's able to easily move in and out of a his treasure chest/investments. I suspect this one got the go-ahead because it represented the "investment" aspect of the brief clearly, something the other two ideas maybe lacked. 

So idea settled upon, it was time to move to the final. I copied over the back of the rough on tracing paper so I could transfer the image onto each layer of paint throughout the process. The colours seemed to lend themselves to the subject matter. The water was either going to be green or blue I figured so I had to pick another colour to match with that (maroon) and the rest would sort itself out along the way.

I built up the layers using acrylics and scratched and scraped in the textures along the way. Finishing up in photoshop allows me to be pretty fearless about this because I can always tidy up later on. 

Because deadlines are often tight I've developed a hi-tech speed drying process ie placing my lamps over the work...

Here's the piece about 3/4 of the way through. Just needs some of the sea critter details added and we're almost ready to scan it in and tweak it in photoshop.

I didn't want to another shade of maroon to finish off the treasure chest so I decided to add some halftone to create a nice vintage feel in photoshop. I have some great old scanned letratone that has a nice ragged look to it. Then it was just cleaning up some of the places where I'd gone in too hard with texture and it was ready to send off. 

Thanks again to SooJin. Her succinct art direction and smart choices along the way always bring out the best in her contributors. 

GET YO' SWEET TWEETS HERE PEEPS

Hey if you wanna get updates via twitter just click here. You won't regret it. OK maybe you will but you can always unfollow me...

I VOTE FOR ART interview

An intimate chat with Christpher Nielson over at I Vote For Art...

Whoa!

Whoa! It's been crazy busy around here. I thought I'd look up for a sec and post a few things that I'm allowed to show you.
New identity for Slow Magazine "for those who think life is too fast".

A couple for Gardening Australia. First one was for an article about how Monarch butterflies lay their young on certain plants to prevent disease and the second one was about pruning.

Regular spot for Inside Sport about rampant 4 year old football fan.

And another one for IN THE BLACK mag about Small to Medium Enterprises producing substantial environmental reports.

Often licked- Never Beaten

This guy is part of a series for the Steggles stand at the Royal Easter Show which opened this week. Thanks to Lucy Walker Design, my cohort in all things chook-related. Lucy wanted a simplistic approach using linework and mentioned the Tom Waterhouse illustrations as reference. I also looked at a lot of vintage Ad characters while I was developing "Steggles Boy". I gotta keep reminding myself however, that while Frosty Boy can often be licked - he can never be beaten...

THE HOTSHOP AWARDS

I've managed to rustle up a "Highly Commended" in this year's CREATIVE Hotshop Awards. Congrats to the Watermark Ltd agency who pipped me at the post as the other finalist in the Illustration category. 
The Hotshop awards encourage entrants to Show Us Something Different and reward agencies, designers and production and photography studios that are producing clever, unique and effective solutions for their clients, so the blurb goes.
You can pick up a copy of the awards in CREATIVE mag on the newsstands.