I want to add pencilled storyboards to what I can offer, so by way of example I’ve drawn this one for the classic Volkswagen Golf ad from the 80s. Very funny how glamorous it all is and then you finish on the 1987 model of Golf – less glamorous.
The full board is here.
Here’s a page from the First Great Western storyboard I did recently, for their 2014 summer campaign. The action is meant to be viewed as though from a moving train – it’s kind of a guideline storyboard as they didn’t have the actual locations nailed yet. I was quite pleased with how it came out. You can see the rest of the frames here and the ad’s here.
I have so much storyboarding work to put up from the last few months but it’s all in research/post-production so I can’t! This one has been made though – it was a spot for Adidas, kind of a viral if I remember rightly, directed by Niall O’Brien at Academy. I think I did the neats in-house and didn’t get copies of the scans, so here are some of the roughs. You can see the ad here.
One of the illustrations (well they’re plans really) for the book Japanese Zen Gardens by Yoko Kawaguchi which has just come out. It was a lovely book to research, spending my time looking at photos of these beautiful and ancient creations. I would love to see them for myself one day; some aren’t even open to the public. She was a lucky lady getting to go inside.
This is one is Daisen-In in Kyoto.
I’m doing a comics project with my very talented friend Yen Ooi; she’s doing the writing and I’m doing the drawing. It’s called 05:11 and features two sinister fellows called The Grey Gentlemen, inspired by two characters of the same name in the novel Momo by Michael Ende. Kind of like Frasier spinning off from Cheers. Anyway here are the first two pages – this is my first foray into drawing a comic, it’s a fascinating challenge. You have endless choices of how to frame everything?! Also I’m trying to keep my storyboarding hat on, ie drawing quite quickly to keep away any labouring perfectionism – I want to keep it fun and a little sketchy.
There are some handy life drawing sites out there, one of which is https://artists.pixelovely.com/. You can set it to give you gesture exercises (where you get 30-60 seconds per drawing) which is great for improving your focus and getting down the main shapes. In the absence of having somebody naked to hand, I’m doing about half an hour every morning to keep my practice up. Another blog I follow is https://www.johnmuirlaws.com/blog. He’s a wildlife artist and there are some excellent tutorials on there. One of his suggestions is to draw a box around the main body of the animal – it’s kind of an alternative to measuring out the scale. I’ve been using it with life drawing and it not only helps but is so much more enjoyable than holding your pencil out, which takes me back to school art classes and not in a good way. You can then follow that with the points system (where you map out the points on the body). Here’s a pic from this morning using that method.
I made some spoons! I took Barn Carder’s one day spoon carving workshop (see his website here and a bbc film about him here) in Stepney. My bus used to go past his shop on Hackney Road; all I could see was a man on a stool surrounded by a sea of wood shavings, so naturally it being Hackney I assumed he was an art installation. The whole thing was so inspiring – taking a chunk of a tree and learning to axe it down to make a spoon ‘blank’ (a wedge you can whittle), and then carving it into shape with two small knives. I felt like Michaelangelo releasing the spoon from the wood.
A page from the TalkTalk ‘Winter Wonderland’ ad that went out at Christmas (2013), featuring the same princess and astronaut who started their affair earlier in the year. The rest of the frames are here and you can watch the ad here.
It was directed by Us at Academy, who also did this for Foals – I just love it: https://www.academyfilms.com/projects/us#foals-my-number-cutdown
