The 23 posters are being published daily from March 1st leading up to Earth Hour (8:30pm GMT) on the 23rd March and are designed to inspire people to take simple green actions at home, school, or at work.
The Green Thing have a unique take on using creativity to commuincate their message, which co-founder Andy Hobsbawn shares here in an inspiring TED lecture. Anyone weary from the onslaught of green diatribe would I’m sure find their take refreshing and fun. There’s no guilt trip, no enforced policy, no B-movie horror scenes. Just some solid creativity and a new way of looking.
The Green Thing focusses on 7 things we can do to make a change -
There are some great interpretations of those themes in the poster campaign whose contributors include Tom Uglow - Creative director at Google, Patrick Cox - designer of the London 2012 logo, Eddie Opara of Pentagram, and Illustrators Pete Fowler, Andrew Rae, & myself.
The posters are being published daily on the Do The Green Thing blog as well as being promoted by the WWF and other bodies. A limited run of 23 of each of the prints are available for £23 each from their online store & all proceeds go to supporting the Green Thing.
Below are some of the posters published so far. My one is published today and is at the bottom of the post along with some sketches.
DO THE GREEN THING!
Joe Stephenson, Pentagram designer & Andrew Rae, Illustrator
Tom Uglow, creative director at Google & illustrator Pete Fowler
Michael Bierut, partner at Pentagram & Dan Norris and Ray Shaughnessy, creative directors at Wieden Kennedy
Sophie Thomas, co-director of design at the RSA and my poster.
My poster for Do The Green Thing
a couple of earlier ideas, one inspired by Lennon's 'Give Peace A Chance' and another taking the route of Saul Bass.
‘Welcome to the jungle punk you’re gonna die’. That memorable Benny Goodman melody. Along with Benny Goodman, portraits of Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Anona Winn were commissioned for a promotioanl print series for boutique printers Francis Anthony.
Francis Anthony was established in 1946 by Leonard Hibbs specifically to print a range of jazz music publications and the companies history was drawn on by design agency Guild Of Sage & Smith as they redeveloped the Francis Anthony brand.
The concept for the series was to offer a sense of the history and tradition of the company whilst contrasting this with an awareness of current print needs, trends, and the machinery to back it up.
Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman & Anona Winn
The portraits of the four jazz musicians from the bygone age were to be printed on a traditional paper stock and overlayed with type as a subtle gloss varnish. The gloss varnish would be tinted in 2 differnt colours, lifting it from the aged sepia tones of the portraits. The copy would quote modern song lyrics contrasting the imagery, flashing to life as the tinted varnish hits a light source.
A3 poster layouts with Lyrics dropped over
Benny in the press.
A3 posters in preparation for the varnish copy
A3 posters with tinted varnish copy coating
Detail of tinted varnish coating
A3 posters folded and ready to mail out
Hand drawn details from each of the portraits
Big thanks to the Guild Of Sage & Smith for the use of the images in this post.
Yesterday saw the publication of the second part of a three part election series i'm illustrating for the covers of the KidsPost section of the Washington Post. The series covers three areas of the elections - the presidential debates, campaign ads, and voting. The pieces are a fun but informative overview of the mechanics behind the making of the next president and draw on some nice references to help the explanations along.
Yesterdays piece covered campaign ads, likening them to toy and cereal commercials with a negative bent. The negative advertising of a product with a generous coating of untruths and a frosted sprinkling of exaggerated facts. Delicious.
Romney & Obama have been taken back to a more playful age for this series, around 13 years old
which allows a little more fantasy. I sketched out a few ideas of talking heads, adding bodies onto the TV sets and having them playfight or mock each other directly. The Romneybot Vs. Obama Flakes idea made the final cut.
Back a couple of weeks to the first piece in the series which covered the presidential debates and shows the two candidates cramming. Quite static, concentrated poses as the two study so the sketches fill out with various study aids and references to their aspiration of playing an important role in the nations future. Windows/chalkboards and shelves of books forming the stars & stripes as a backdrop in a couple of the sketches.
Working with Susana Sanchez on these has been so much of fun! The final piece in the series is published November 4th and looks at the voting process.
Not exactly the transmutation of a species but somewhere in the fabric of this post must lay an excuse to allude to an ism. I’ve recently been working on a series of natural history prints for children. Before dragging themselves to
land and learning to walk upright the ancestor of this series of images began life as a single character developed for a children’s book pitch.
Albert lion was shelved around 10 years ago and the character was picked up again in 2005 and expanded upon for a children’s clothing line. I created a single image called ‘Animals Of Africa’ which took the form of an educational identification chart with 16 African mammals. It used an antique script font and an aged paper to add a sense of authority to it’s otherwise wonky appearance of wrongly coloured animals that were out of shape.
Three years later another fashion label asked me to expand on the series and I produced ‘Animals Of The Arctic Circle’, this time for a line of accessories. The images have remained out of license for a couple of years and rather than leave them on the shelf again, last month I added ‘Animals Of Amazonia’ to the series.
I then thought about creating an ‘Animalfabet’ with the animals I had and last week made up the missing letters from the animals in stock. I have a great love of natural history, and this series has become a labour of that love. The animal characters are stylized but in no way do i intend on mocking the animals I've drawn. The series is intended to be a celebration of the variety of life and the myriad of innovative specialties evolved in order for each species to carve a niche for itself in it’s environment.
This series of images evolved from one forgotten children’s book pitch character that was dug up again in order to pitch on a second project. My post with a tenuous link to an ism concludes with the thought that sometimes natural selection needs a helping hand now and again. It’s good to pause every year or so and go through the files of abandoned ideas and reevaluate with fresh eyes. The evolution of an idea is not always linear.
Above is a quick illustration of the drawing technique. The animals were researched, referenced, and sketched. Over the years I have built up a very personal natural media brush library in photoshop. All of the brushes I use are built from either hand drawn and scanned natural media such as charcoal, pencil, airbrush or are textures I've created to emulate those natural media.
I like the rendering to have a little soul and echo the natural media I once used to produce my work before I bought my first mac. I want my cake, and I want to eat it too.
More images of these prints can be seen on my editions website. The final prints were finished with a gold emboss stamp.
