Portfolio Visit 2

I've just come back from a portfolio visit at Elygra Marketing Services in Chester. It’s worth mentioning that these were my employers before choosing to start my degree and it was the work I did whilst working there that put me on the path of illustration and in particular character design.

Since recently moving back to the Wrexham area I was keen to show my face again and show them how my work had progressed and also to see if they could throw some work my way. Whilst working for them I was heavily involved in marketing campaigns for many local authorities up and down the country helping to make children aware of the importance of healthy eating. This involved designing characters, game packs, comics, canteen branding, themed events and any other promotional material the schools required to market their healthy school dinner menus.

I met with company director Andy Argyle and head designer Dan Parsons. I talked them through some of the projects I’d been involved with at Uni and some of the software I’d been using and they were interested to hear about the animations I had done. Overall they were really impressed with the professionalism of my portfolio and the quality of work inside. I knew they already had an illustrator on their books, which they used occasionally and I didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes, but they said they thought my work looked more current so I thought it wouldn’t hurt to leave my card with them.

As they’re a marketing company they offered me some great tips on marketing myself and said business cards were great, but I should make some flyers and postcards with my work on that people can pick up and take at shows or events. They were also big fans of email flyers as a means of sending samples of work.

It was great to start networking in my local area once again and I look forward to the possibility of working with them in the near future.

Portfolio Visit 1

Today I visited Thoughtful, which is a design studio situated in the college. I met with graphic designer Stuart Price who was a really nice guy and I found out later also haled from my hometown of Wrexham (small world). Stuart was really easy to chat to and his first comment on opening my portfolio was how professional he thought the illustrators from our college were, which was nice to hear. I changed the order of my work this time to start with my pen and ink stuff and end with my more recent vector work to see what reaction I would get. Stuart immediately asked if I worked in pen and ink and I explained I'd been experimenting with it until recently and now preferred to work in illustrator. He said the one thing that stands out in my work is my love for character design and how he could imagine my Disney character coming to life. He also liked how I had included different poses and expressions to show how the character would translate into animation. He also liked my LWL Super8 cover and said the concept behind the image was really clever and also commented on how effective the cross-hatching looked. One piece that really grabbed his attention was the ice-cream illustration I did as part of my MP, Stuart thought this was my strongest piece and said he thought it would definitely win me editorial work. I asked his opinion on the colours as I wasn’t sure if they were really working and was surprised to hear he really liked them. He explained that as a designer he is naturally drawn to really bright colours and thought it would look great in a children’s book. Towards the end of the visit I chatted about the end of year show and told him about an idea I had to have my work printed onto Perspex with a colour wash on the wall behind it. Stuart thought this was a cool idea that would make my images look more 3D and at the same time look a little like an animation cell.

Transformation Animation Research

The Japanese Popstars Feat. Green Velvet - Let Go from David Wilson on Vimeo.

Love & Theft from Studio FILM BILDER on Vimeo.

Face Melting from 2D Animation CMU on Vimeo.

Ink To Vector

Before starting my final major project I decided to go back to producing my work in vector form as I felt this was an area I was more confident in and I wanted to produce work at a much higher degree of professionalism. I guess there was a big fear that I would finish my 3rd year with work I was really unhappy with because I still had a lot to learn with pen and ink. Don't get me wrong I love pen and ink, but I’m such a perfectionist and despite my best efforts I could never achieve the perfect line work I was striving for. I would spend long periods of time trying to get everything just right and then scan it in only to find it just didn’t look the same as it did on paper. Creating artwork in ink is most definitely a skill that takes years of practise and a high degree of experimentation to perfect and is not for someone with sausage fingers like me. However working in black and white has taught me a lot about getting the right balance and tone in my work, which was previously lacking. I also became fascinated with cross hatching techniques, and studied the work of illustrators like Tom Gauld, Matthieu Bessudo (McBess) and Sir John Tenniel (Alice in Wonderland). The styles of these three illustrators are very different in their approach but they all have an affinity with the cross hatch and are masters of their craft. I too fell in love with this way of working but decided to simplify my cross hatching down to enable me to produce my work a little quicker. I first started to experiment in this way last year on the Wellspring project, but it wasn’t until I did the illustration for Little White Lies that I really started to see some improvement in my work and found a new way to use cross hatching with my vector drawn illustrations. Since then I feel much more confident in my style and am actually really happy with the work I am now producing.

Tom Gauld - Beast

McBess - Title Unknown

John Tenniel - The Jabberwocky

Little White Lies - Super 8

For the last couple of months I've been working on a cover illustration for the D&AD Student Awards.
The brief was set by Little White Lies magazine, which gave the option to illustrate the main character from 1 of 5 films. I decided to work with Super 8 for this one and wanted to make a portrait based on the characters personality or some kind of attribute that defines him. Through research into the film I decided to design a piece based on the characters passion of model making and worked on various ideas to turn him into a model kit of himself.

Through various stages of the design process I experimented with producing the work in ink, but after careful consideration I decided to attempt it in illustrator and go for a cleaner vector look. I am really happy with the end result and this has given me the confidence boost I needed. Throughout this brief I have developed new methods of working to incorporate my cross hatching style that I will build upon in the final months of my degree.

Below are some of the concept ideas that formed the basis of my final cover.

Hopes, Fears and Opportunities

This post in itself I a scary proposition, It’s amazing how quickly the final year of my degree has crept up on me and in less than seven months time I’ll be ready to leave the safe haven of the university in pursuit of a career. 

Hopes

One of the things I was hoping at the beginning of the term was that I would start to veer towards a style. This has thankfully started to happen in the sense that I now know which media I’m best suited for and this has helped me to acquaint myself with a love for traditional inking. Now that I have a way of working that I feel truly comfortable with I can start to work towards refining my methods and look at the style in which I draw particular things. Thankfully the tutors at Stockport college have been really patient with my indecisiveness in the past two years and helped to direct me onto the right path. So now I know exactly how I want to work my hope is I stick to this path and see some major improvement with a lot of hard work and experimentation. I also hope to have some time free to explore animation as this was a dream I had from an early age. It’s a subject I have dabbled with briefly in my first and second year and I think the way in which I work especially with the character style sheets would lend itself well to moving into animation. It would definitely be a good string to add to my bow.

Another hope I had at the beginning of term was that I would get a website up and running before the end of my 3^rd year. I held off setting up a web hosted site for ages as I wanted to put my own stamp on it and didn’t want it looking like just another boring templated website. However, I decided last month to bite the bullet and set one up through Cargo as I thought it was better to have a website than none at all. I still need to take a proper look at the design of it as I’m not overly confident it’s really selling my talents very well, so my new hope is I’ll be able to get a swish looking site that I’m really proud of by the time I finish uni. I also hope that I can discover exactly what market place my work fits into before I leave so I can start to make the right connections with that industry.

Fears

One of my biggest fears (apart from heights) is not being able to find illustrative work at the end of my degree. I do have a design background that I can always fall back on and connections within that industry. I don’t have the luxury of becoming an illustrator straight off the bat because I have a responsibility as a parent to provide for my children. I spoke to the nice people at Taylor O’Brien about this fear recently and they said it would be a great shame for me if I were not to carry on as an illustrator when I finish. I guess the problem is if I take a job in the mean time will I be one of the many illustration graduates that fall by the wayside because I had to do it to pay the bills. I took a big gamble leaving a full time job as a designer to pursue the dream of being an illustrator and I have never been afraid of hard work, I hope I can still keep that dream in my sights when I leave and make freelancing a reality. One fear I had at the beginning of the term was that my works not good enough, but the recent portfolio visits have given my confidence the boost it needed to realise my work is good, but I also know I can make it so much better and the forthcoming major project will be the opportunity to focus on my strengths and work on the weaknesses.

Opportunities


"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty". Winston Churchill.

What I really need to work on with my remaining time at uni is my time management; I crumbled under the pressure this term instead of rising above everything and getting things done. Admittedly I need to stop changing my mind last minute, as this is not a productive way of working. I really want to get my head round InDesign before I leave as I think this would be highly beneficial for me in the future. I already know how to use QuarkXpress so there should be some similarities between the two packages that will help me to figure it out. Amongst the many packages I want to learn are Flash and After Effects and I hope to again find some spare time to get some basics under my belt so I can start to animate some of my work. Hopefully the opportunity will arise next term for me to explore these avenues even if I have to ask people in moving image to help me. I would also like the opportunity to do some more networking, but this time with the handy aid of a business card. I could have kicked myself for not having a business card when I was at the Thought Bubble Convention back in November as everyone I spoke to asked I If I had a card! I also secretly enjoy chatting to new people and this is a trait I don’t take enough advantage of.

One opportunity that has come up constantly over the past 3 years is presentations. I don’t think I will ever be comfortable talking in front of big groups of people no matter how many presentations I do, but I have found although I feel like I’m physically shaking on the outside my delivery isn’t as bad as I thought.

Illustrations Digital Future

The future for illustrators is better than ever before with opportunities for us to get our work seen at the click of a button via the Internet and even through the access of a hand held device such as the smart phone or I-pad. This fast paced world has seen the rise of a new digital era in which people can share information and connect with people in a matter of seconds thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. The rate in which we now freely share information is alarming, but for the illustrator it presents the opportunity to promote work on a global scale and connect with like-minded people and even gain much needed advice from professional practitioners.

The publishing industry is undoubtedly suffering in these hard times with printing costs at an all time high and the rising popularity of people accessing news for free via the Internet. This has a knock on effect on the illustrator who relies on editorial work as their bread and butter. However the popularity of devices such as the I-pad and Kindle have challenged traditional printing methods bringing new opportunities for illustrators.

American illustrator Will Terry is a children’s book illustrator who has embraced the e-book market and on his blog he talks about the advantages of illustrating for e-books. In his 20 min video report he describes how an illustrator can self publish an e-book for next to nothing. This is undoubtedly an advantage as it means the illustrator can get a book straight to market without the need to seek a publisher. On the other side of the coin this means that over time as people get to grips with working with this new medium the market place will become over saturated with self-published work. This means the illustrator will need to use every resource possible to make sure their work doesn’t go un-noticed in the sea of e-books. The advantages of producing work for e-books means the illustrator is not confined to any number of pages, there are no overheads to worry about and the work can be turned over as quickly as the illustrator wishes. The other advantage is the opportunity to create books with an exciting interactive element for the reader thus giving the illustrator a chance to explore new ways of working. This doesn’t mean that illustrators working in a traditional sense will be missing out, as their work will translate across this medium just as well as a digital illustrators work would.

Despite these hard times there is still much illustration work available. Illustration can be used to compliment articles in newspapers and magazines. Also advertising, brochures, direct mail, posters, billboards and packaging are all areas that require illustration.

As long as there is a need to sell products there will always be a need for a creative means of communication. People will always have a need for art even if it means viewing it from the confinements of a small screen, so I guess illustration is here to ride the digital wave.