‘BALLOON ANIMAL’ CONDOMS
• ‘BALLOON ANIMAL’ CONDOMS
I know I’ve been absent for a while, and this is purely down to pressure of commissioned work coming in.
This, of course, is a good thing, so long as it doesn’t interfere with the mountain biking!
It also means I will have loads of new work to post up here as soon as it is complete.
I am currently illustrating 52 small picture books, yes, that is 52 books!
Now each book has just four pages but that is still a heck of a lot of pixels to create.
As soon as these are ready you will see the best of them here.
And as soon as the previously mentioned work is free from embargo I will also be able to show you that too.
Waiting in the sidelines are a mobile phone character for a leading supermarket. A set of newly designed chocolates for a major confectionary brand, and some science book covers for the U.S. market.
Meanwhile, here are a couple of fun illustrations for a recent job to illustrate condom packs.
Featherweight being depicted by a butterfly and I forget what the elephant represented!!
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OZZIE BEER FESTIVAL
•OZZIE BEER FESTIVAL
Again, been busy for the brewery. This time two fun beer clips for an Australian Beer Festival in York.
These were two from a set of four that I particularly enjoyed producing, especially the ROO.
This took around six hours to conceive, then carefully montage and illustrate the image from various photo reference sources.
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WINTER WARMERS
• WINTER WARMERS
I don’t think I’ve ever told you about a very special client of mine.
In addition to illustrating yummy chocolate and ice creams I also have the privelege to work for a brewery!
As designer I handle the corporate image for Wentworth Brewery and I also design, illustrate and produce the pump clips and bottle labels for all the brews.
Yes, what a wonderful job though I don’t get to sample ALL the brews!
Since my last three illustration jobs are embargoed until much later this year (and one science book cover until 2008!!) I thought I would whet your thirst with a couple of recent pump clips for Wentworth.
These are just two of over one hundred clips, shown here on one of the seasonal promotion posters.
I have been intendiong to create a new blog purely for some of these award winning clips and labels but thought you might like to take a sneak preview right away.
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SCHOOL BOOKS USA
• SCHOOL BOOKS USA
Whilst still waiting to show you the ‘perfect job’ I completed just before the year end … here are a couple of spreads from educational books for the US market.
These two spreads are from six commissioned by various design companies for use in educational publications.
Although I’m not allowed to reveal the titles and the curriculae that they will be serving I can tell you that they ranged from mathematic books to science and technology.
Rather than being stuffy and boring the art directors’ had a field day and asked for a whole variety of weird and fun things to illustrate.
These are less demanding than the ‘super realistic’ product illustrations that I’m asked to do and they allow some exploration and experimentation in Photoshop.
The two spreads illustrated here were commissioned for Harcourt Publishers who own the copyright.
MORE FRUIT
*MORE FRUIT
Well, believe it or not, there was more fruit illustrations coming my way.
These are very recent pieces as the job I started at the beginning of December, and which I’d really like to show you, is still being completed. More of that in a future blog, suffice to say it is a perfect job for me, so no prizes for guessing the subject matter!
I’ve also been working on various books for publishers in America and Canada but I’ve a feeling that they will be embargoed for a while, so I cannot post them up just yet.
So back to the fruit, they are drinks labels yet again and were followed by another set but I think I’ll make these the last fruit I dispalay for a while – I think you can appreciate that Hot Frog can ‘do’ fruit without more evidence.
After all, blogs get accused of being boring so I don’t want to lose my viewers interest.
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PREDATOR SAW
•PREDATOR SAW
Der de!
Der de!
de de de de de de de
hope I’ve summoned up the jaws music as this is what the image is supposed to convey.
Commissioned by Dig for Fire in sheffield – (they do seem to get some very interesting accounts and always conceive some arresting images).
The saw was photographed and Photoshopped to enhance the look and then ‘all’ I needed was some convincing woodgrain, in the correct pattern of course!
I must have looked around half a dozen likely places – diy superstores, timber yards, furniture shops etc but in the end I created the texture from scratch in Photoshop and then judiciously blended one or two reference shots over the background.
Typically about a week later I found the perfect woodgrain on a cafe table at Chatsworth but the job was already done.
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MAKING A SPLASH
MAKING A SPLASH
This was another drinks label for an empire expanding supermarket.
It required the fizz, splash and tinkle of ice cubes dropping into fizzy pop, not Roller Cola, mind you!
As ever it took Photoshop and Form Z to help out with the artwork.
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FRUIT SQUASH
•FRUIT SQUASH
If you see the two earlier posts you’ll read about the cornucopia of fruit jobs that arrived throughout Autumn.
This set is probably my favourite. Here are five of eight fruit squash illustrations for Somerfield.
Created by peeling, pipping, photography, pixel pushing and Photoshop.
MORE FRUIT
•MORE FRUIT
The pumpkin job was a nice one to illustrate. I didn’t have reference of pumpkins in stock so had to make do with the very small ones that were only just appearing in the supermarkets (this was early September) but with a bit of jiggery pokery in Photoshop it was soon ‘blended’ with a full size one from Flickr. Form z provided the yoghurt coating around the seeds!
Incidentally just after I completed this my Mac decided that it would show me just how infallible OS X really was and the finder freaked out on me. Having tried a repair using TechTools I ended up with a totally dead Mac that had to be rushed to the genius’s or is it genii, at the Apple store in Meadowhall.
I hadn’t backed up for a week!!!! but the good news was that I didn’t lose any files, the bad news (other than lugging the G5 around Meadowhell, sic) was that I was left with over 35,000 files listed by number and file type only. It has taken me three weeks to sort through them.
I have now returned to a very stringent backup regime!
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FRUIT FRUIT FRUIT
•Autumn certainly brought fruitfullness to Hot Frog Graphics! I couldn’t posssibly eat my way out of all the piles of reference as there was so much. I’ve often thought that I could probably make a living out of just illustrating fruit alone, and when you think about it fruit does play a significant role in our daily lives.
It started with these flavoured waters for Somerfield, commssioned by Watt Gilchrist. Then there followed yoghurt coated seeds for Stream foods – a strange combination of sunflower and pumpkin seeds.
Then I was so busy throughout September and October on fruit crush drinks and then fruit squash drinks that I didn’t even get time to post the work on this blog.
So there follows about five weeks of work in the next few images.
One day I’ll have to list all the jobs ‘that got away’ too.
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WIGGLE GIGGLE
•WIGGLE GIGGLE
This was a pure pleasure to work on, even the extra amends that took a while to get done.
Since I’m so interested in children’s picture books, to then be asked to re-design the cover of a favourite game was just a great job.
It’s good that clients are still using illustration for these kind of products rather than going for manipulated photography.
Wiggle was created in Form Z and then brought into Photoshop for texturing and further ‘refining’.
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UNCLE BEN’S CAMPAIGN
>> UNCLE BEN’S CAMPAIGN
A large format poster illustration in the style of ‘Madagascar’ the movie.
It required dense, rich jungle foliage with multi coloured exotic plants and flowers.
It was a pleasure to work on despite it running way over budget with the hours spent creating 3D foliage in Form Z and then re-illustrating it in Photoshop. I managed to squeeze two frogs in there!
Please click on an image to supersize it and remember that they are all strictly copyright ©.